On October 25, Torontonians will go to the polls to elect the sixty-fourth mayor of the City of Toronto. Andrew Barton is one of many candidates running for that office. Over the course of the campaign, What I'm Standing On will reflect his platform, and provide an insight into his opinions of what course the city should chart to 2014, and beyond.As I understand it, one of the more powerful insults in the Russian language is nekulturny - which, despite its connotations, essentially means "uncultured." It's appropriate, I think, that such a term became a pejorative. Culture is a powerful force in human existence, the product of all our art, literature, entertainment, music, architecture, and all the other wellsprings of creativity. It's one of the basic bedrocks of any group's identity.Toronto's no slouch when it comes to culture. In 2008, it was ranked by Foreign Policy magazine as the fourth-best city in the world for cultural experiences - the second-best in North America, behind only New York. Though the Big Apple wouldn't be knocked easily from its tree, that's no reason we shouldn't strive to make Toronto an even greater center of culture in the years ahead. On the face of it, I think it's absolutely appropriate - this is the most cosmopolitan city in the world. If any city should be a cultural center, a crossroads of ideas from across the world, it should be this one.There are plenty of directions in which Toronto could go in pursuit of the cultural ideal - one possibility is inspired by Chicago's experience. Six years ago that city opened Millennium Park, a sprawling outdoor civic center and public park, in the heart of its downtown on former railway land. I was there in October and found it one of the highlights of my visit to Chicago. It includes a Frank Gehry-designed bandshell, two outdoor art galleries, and sculptures such as Cloud Gate - something which may, in the near future, become just as recognizable a Chicago symbol as Willis (formerly Sears) Tower.
Cloud Gate, on a cloudy October day
Millennium Park was financed both by the City of Chicago and numerous private sponsors and investors, and though it ultimately cost more than triple the initial estimates, it's difficult to put a price tag on the value Chicago has drawn and will continue to draw from the park. Building culture in a city is an inherently iterative process - one cannot simply speak Broadway, say, or the British Museum into existence. Toronto would do well with a project like Millennium Park, a project with no grander reason than to help bring the city together. Moreover, it would be another tourist draw for a city that's always looking to attract tourists - and if only the city was allowed to charge hotel taxes, it would help close our current and future budget gaps.Granted, you can't just take sand from the beach and produce a Millennium Park, either. I know that the present budget situation means that at least the next four years will have to be ones of moderation and careful spending. It may be that Toronto won't be able to do anything on this scale for a long while - but just because it's not feasible to start laying down bricks, there's no reason we shouldn't at least plan out the foundations. Building for culture is, in its own way, building for the future - and a city cannot be successful, I think, without keeping one foot in the future.In my opinion, a city without a real cultural foundation is missing something vital. For me, Toronto has always had that sense of vitality. It's something that needs to be preserved and made stronger if we want the Toronto of 2020 or 2060 or 2110 to be a city worthy of all our aspirations.
While Los Angeles does in fact have a subway, the majority of its rail-transit kilometers are served by light rail lines that are, essentially, beefier and grade-separated streetcar lines using beefier vehicles. That's the case with the Blue Line, which at twenty years of age is the oldest of LA's transit lines, which I've photographed here looking north toward downtown Los Angeles from Firestone station. Much of the Blue Line is surface-running, but on occasion it's elevated to pass above cross streets. On the other side of that metal barrier, Firestone Avenue is about forty feet below.
Sometimes I wonder if the Scarborough RT, and the old proposed-but-unrealized Etobicoke RT, might ever have ended up like the Blue Line, one of the busiest light-rail lines in the United States. The extension of intermediate-capacity transit into those cities twenty or thirty years ago, beyond the Scarborough RT's current five-stop form, could have done a lot to make Toronto a true transit city well before the 21st century. I find that the most galling of all - the constant willingness to leave worthwhile projects to some undefined future, because obviously the future will be all candies and roses and those future people will have no problem paying for it at all.I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
Yesterday marked the first anniversary of Acts of Minor Treason. I'm not sure if anyone read it back in January and February, when updates were infrequent and frequently uninspired, but the people that do read and comment on what I write here helps me go on. In an earlier age, I'd have been doing most of my commentary and complaining at an empty room or inanimate object; today, at least there's the possibility that other people will hear, and care, about things I say. So thank you for that.Yesterday was another significant day in its own right for me - because as of yesterday, I'm officially a candidate for Mayor in the 2010 Toronto municipal election. When I filed my papers I was the fifteenth candidate - if previous elections are a guide, there'll be many more before nominations close in September, particularly given the lack of an incumbent this year. That's the mark, I think, of a healthy system.What do I believe? I believe a lot of things. I believe I'd like to see the Downtown Relief Line stressed in future transit planning, I believe I'd like to see crowdsourcing and popular involvement factored into the way the city is run, I believe the city needs more leeway in the manners in which it's allowed to raise money with which to fund municipal operations - I believe I'd like Toronto to become, in whatever ways possible, a city of the future. That's what I'd like.Still, what I'd like and what everyone else would like is meaningless if Toronto can't afford it. That, I think, will be one of the key issues of this election. Toronto needs to find new ways of paying for its operations in order to prosper, and it's one of those questions that doesn't have easy answers. Should we go the easy route, increasing property tax rates and motivating more and more people and businesses to pull up stakes for the 905? Should we look at building a casino, like candidate Giorgio Mammoliti suggests, weighing a positive cashflow against potential social negatives? Should we go to the province and try to get some leeway in the City of Toronto Act? Cities like Chicago and Los Angeles are allowed to levy hotel taxes, for example - why shouldn't Toronto be able to do the same? These are some the questions that need to be asked.I know that this is all pretty indistinct, but I think unveiling a full platform in January is pretty premature - ten months is a long time, and in October the city may be dealing with issues that aren't even on the radar right now. If you wonder what I think about $PRESSING_ISSUE, then ask. No matter what my full platform includes, there's no way everyone's questions would be answered by it. If you want to get an idea of how I think and where I lean, there's a year's worth of me pouring out my opinions on this weblog to give some indication.Ultimately, though, the most pressing question of all may well be why some 27-year-old science fiction writer and weblogger no one's ever heard of would go to the trouble of throwing his hat into a ring that's already the province of ex-provincial Cabinet ministers and councillors looking to snazz up their job description.There are a bunch of reasons - because I love my city, because I'd like to bring ideas into the public spectrum. The one I think is most important, though, is civic involvement. A democratic society can only be made healthier by people taking a direct role in the democratic process, and through that involvement gaining a greater understanding and appreciation for it. Democracy's an easy thing to take for granted. We need to look to the future.
EDIT: Contrary to what certain pages may claim, this is not the only thing I have written on the subject of my mayoral campaign. Click the "Toronto 2010" button at the bottom of this post for many more!
You know you've got a towering building on your hands when it's effectively impossible to fit it within a single photo while you're within walking distance. That's how it is with the Sears Willis Tower in Chicago, photographed here during one of the only instances of actual decent weather I experienced in the three days I was there. To me, it seems like one of those buildings that, like Toronto City Hall, will always look vaguely futuristic. At the top, the radio masts are just barely visible against a cloud - they might make pretty good zeppelin mooring masts, no?Though it must get hot sometimes. After all, black's not the color you want to use if you want to decrease the planetary albedo.
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Now that we're a decade removed from the 20th century, it's easier to look back and evaluate it as a whole. It was a century of such tumult that by the time its echoes start to fade away, it won't be long before the 22nd century dawns. It was a time when old ways were upended and societies were rewritten, and technology played an integral role in that. The way I see it, the automobile is probably the single most influential technological shaper of the 20th century - but we can't let it define the 21st century in the same way.Before the age of the automobile, cities were densely-packed because they had to be - horse-drawn or, later, electric streetcars were the only affordable means of mass transit - but the development of streetcar suburbs like my own neighborhood of Parkdale, followed by the arrival and the general accessibility of the automobile, allowed cities to fling themselves out over the landscape. While Los Angeles County is a concrete ramble today, seventy years ago there were still wide parcels of undeveloped land there.It's easy to understand why the automobile was so popular - it imparts an idea of freedom, of being unchained. Without automobiles, the suburban explosion of the late 1940s and 1950s would not have happened in a form resembling the one we know. While the early pattern of streetcar suburbs consisted of bands of residential development fanning out from streetcar lines, the automobile imposed no such order on the landscape. Behind the wheel of an automobile a person could go anywhere, and the new suburbs were built accordingly.Thus, in the second decade of the 21st century, we find ourselves living in a world where many of the basic operating principles seem to have been set down in the care-free, car-filled 1950s, springing from a view of the future that held automobiles as a general good, and saw no negative consequences that the twin fists of Technology and SCIENCE! couldn't overcome. Maybe they'd have been right, environmentally speaking, if we'd transitioned from internal combustion to electric power much, much sooner. But environmental issues aren't the only ones created by the enshrinement of the automobile.The problem, I think, is this - so much of our social infrastructure has been designed around the concept of the automobile that in many, many places owning one is no longer a luxury and has become a necessity. As far as I'm concerned, this is totally the wrong way to do it. I've never seen the "freedom" of the automobile as quite living up to its propaganda, and I don't like the idea of being obligated to own an automobile because people sixty years ago thought that cars were a cultural ideal. Fortunately, since I live in a major city with a large and functional transit system - definitely a rarity in North America - I don't have to own one, and it's that lack to which I credit my current middle-class lifestyle.In the suburbs themselves, though? Forget it. Since they're built so extensively around the assumption that every person, or at least every family, has a car, the car-less are left out in the cold - worsened by the limited nature of public transit in suburban communities, as the density is too low to sustain frequent, reliable service. While I lived in Barrie, if I wanted to strike out on my own my only option was Barrie Transit - a system then built on a handful of routes with buses passing the stops every thirty minutes, so long as they stuck to the schedule, which wasn't necessarily so. During my time at university I relied on Peterborough Transit to get around, which was frequently an interesting proposition in itself - at that time, Peterborough Transit buses didn't depart the downtown bus depot until all the routes had arrived, and so the posted schedule and actual arrival and departure times gradually but surely parted ways as time went by.Automobiles aren't entirely to blame for this, but they do play a significant role. As people shifted from public transit to private automobiles, the transit agencies' ridership and revenue decreased. The abandonment of streetcars in favor of buses in all but a handful of North American cities only hastened this. Steve Munro recently posted a 1952 report to the Toronto Transit Commission which acknowledged that streetcar abandonment policies in larger North American cities had, even by then, seen "results which... leaves open to serious question the wisdom of the decisions made."To avoid an automobile being a necessity in a modern city, a strong public transportation system is absolutely vital. That's my concept of freedom, to be able to go around my city as I choose, and not be forced behind a wheel because of decisions that were made decades ago. The most important freedom is choice, and it's that lack of freedom of choice in transportation that will, I think, tarnish the suburban luster in the 21st century.
I don't have many sunset photographs, if for no other reason that I don't take them so much as I stumble into them. There's a very limited window of time in which they're possible, and if you miss it you've got either an ordinary daylight shot or you're drowned by night.This particular sunset photograph was taken two weeks ago in Barrie, looking from the transit terminal toward a patch of downtown and Fred Grant Square.
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"Hades," by Charles F. Ksanda
Appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1939The thermometer on Thorpe's wrist registered 2500° Centigrade. But much of Hades was tungsten, whose melting point is close to 3,400°. Phil's eyes watched the river of white flame wearily as again and again he dropped the specimen bucket on its thin, strong cable of Insulite into the fluid. And always he would empty it disappointingly.One of the great careers in science fiction writing began in 1939, when Robert A. Heinlein's short story "Life-Line" was printed in Astounding Science Fiction. As he related in Expanded Universe, while it was ultimately bought by Astounding the story was precipitated by an amateur writers' contest in Thrilling Wonder Stories, one of the many pulp science fiction magazines of the day. Alfred Bester won that contest, but his was hardly the only submission Thrilling Wonder's editors received. Whether Charles F. Ksanda's "Hades" was a runner-up in that contest or the winner of a second I can't say. While there may be something vaguely quixotic about reviewing a story that was published only once, seventy-one years ago, I think it provides a fresh window into the state of the science fiction genre when Flash Gordon was still state-of-the-art.
"Hades" follows Philip Thorpe, who ventured twenty-light years to the titular world in search of valuable Black Gems, "very dense, slightly radioactive... formed under the conditions of extreme heat and pressure of Hades' sunward surface." Tide-locked Hades orbits its white dwarf sun at a distance of five hundred thousand miles (0.005 AU), and certainly lives up to its name - Ksanda built it because Mercury was just too damn cold. Much of the planet is made of tungsten, mainly because its surface temperature exceeds the melting point of all but a handful of the elements. The beginning of the story - "Hades was hot" - is, if not active, at least extremely accurate.The story finds Phil Thorpe and his wife Virginia desperately searching for a Gem to take back to Earth, a month after their arrival and two days before departure. To his credit, Ksanda doesn't drown the reader with expository infospeak - I've seen some of his pulp contemporaries provide individual footnotes that occupy half the page - and plants the seed of a grim future with Thorpe's conviction that, if he doesn't strike it rich, he'll end up in the mines or worse.Driven by desperation, Thorpe sends his wife back to the nightside base camp and makes his way to Hades' dayside, a realm whose description suffers only because English lacks words with sufficient power to impart the sheer intensity of the environment. It's a world where the landscape itself melts and churns like butter. Though he finds his Gems on the boiling dayside, while returning to the safety of night Thorpe loses his fortune and, very nearly, his life. "Hades" is a clear, direct man vs. environment story, exaggerated beyond all earthly experience.From its core, "Hades" was meant to be an aversion of some common tropes in 1930s science fiction. In the issue's "Story Behind the Story" column, Ksanda pointed out that "there haven't been many s-f stories based on inorganic chemistry; mostly they are about other branches of science - physics, biology, biochemistry... But here I saw the germ of a story."It's not a bad story, either - in fact, given its setting as the untamed, albeit molten, frontier and its use of themes that have always resonated with humanity, I believe "Hades" has aged far better than many of its contemporaries. I can't imagine the similarity to the myth of Orpheus is coincidental. "He couldn't resist the temptation to look once more at the precious Gems" - and he drops the bucket that contains them into a molten lake, reducing the Gems to "vague patches of shadow" within white-hot slag. In the end, though, Thorpe is the better for it - if I had to boil this story down to a truism, it would be "all that glitters is not gold." Thorpe's white-hot slag is precipitated into diamonds when he accidentally plunges it into a sub-zero lake on Hades' night side.
Superscience was a hallmark of 1930s science fiction, and while "Hades" treats it with a light brush, it remains in degrees. Survival on Hades is possible only by wearing spacesuits made of Insulite, a barely-described wonder material capable of withstanding ferocious heat - to the extent that at the climax in the story, Thorpe is standing in molten rock up to his knees with absolutely no ill effect whatsoever. The suit's diminishing air reserve is treated as a far more serious threat to Thorpe's well-being than the prospect of being drowned by most of the periodic table.As far as scientific accuracy, "Hades" varies. Hades can't have an atmosphere - otherwise, thermal transfer would make it impossible for a -70° liquid to exist within walking distance of a 2500° environment - but Ksanda's concept of a planet orbiting so close to its star has been vindicated by hot Jupiters such as 51 Pegasi's Bellerophon. While a planet orbiting so close to a white dwarf strikes me as intensely unlikely - given modern astronomical knowledge, the only way I can imagine it happening would be through Hades being perturbed into such a close orbit only after its sun burned through its red giant phase - I'll forgive it, since stellar evolution wasn't nearly so well-understood in 1939 as in 2010.Nevertheless, it's fundamentally based on a scientific concept that seems to have been the cold fusion of inorganic chemistry. Henri Moissan, a 19th century French chemist who claimed to be able to manufacture synthetic diamonds in a high-temperature, high-pressure fashion that eluded scientific reproduction, is name-checked by a character in the story. Hades itself was designed specifically so that Moissan's method of diamond synthesis could take place "in the wild." Still - it wouldn't be the first time a compelling idea was jossed by Science Marching On.One last thing that "Hades" showed me was the degree to which the genre is dominated by the masters. Our modern perception of the Golden Age of Science Fiction is greatly informed by the work of the luminaries of the time, while authors like Ksanda are relegated to the background and almost entirely forgotten. The only online references to this story I can find are a bare-bones entry on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and a handful of websites that list the contents of the October 1939 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. It's sobering - but it's still worth recognizing. "Hades" and stories like it, stories that filled the pages of the pulp magazines back in the day, represent the first phalanx of spear carriers of science fiction.ANDREW'S RATING: 3/5Previous Short SF Reviews:
Back in October, a portion of Queen Street East was being ripped apart to, presumably, replace the infrastructure beneath it. I took this photo at the edge of the construction zone, and I'm not really sure why that pipe is standing and spraying the way it is. Nevertheless, though, I find the moving water a good subject.
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Seventy years ago - and damn, but is it going to take me a while to get used to 1940 being "seventy years ago" now - neither writers nor readers batted an eye at the prospect of canals on Mars, jungles on Venus, or intelligent species scattered across the solar system. It wasn't until the latter half of the 20th century, when more sophisticated Earth-based detection systems were developed and the first interplanetary probes were launched, that Barsoom was transformed from possibility to fantasy.Being proven wrong is an eventuality that every sf writer will face. It's an intrinsic fact of the genre; we're none of us clairvoyants, and though some may forecast more accurately than others, what we put down in our words can't ever match the future that will eventually unfold. It's too complicated for that. What sf writers can do, however, is try to minimize this as much as possible.Right now, the stories I've got in the working or planning stages are relatively near future pieces, set in the Earth-Luna system in the late 2070s. For a while I've had plans to go further afield once I develop the setting, to do 22nd-century stories where distant interplanetary and even interstellar journeys become possible. The stars beyond Sol have been ciphers for all of human history - for almost all of the time that science fiction has been written, Earth's intrepid explorers might find anything under other suns.This decade might see this change a bit. NASA's Kepler telescope, launched last March on a multi-year mission to discover strange new worlds, has been hard at work, and on Monday details were released of the five new exoplanets detected by its efforts. All five of the newfound planets are hot worlds, orbiting extremely close to their parent stars, and only one is smaller than Jupiter. Going back to the discovery of Bellerophon in 1995, many of the exoplanets so far detected have been such "Hot Jupiters." Kepler is poised to change that, with its sensitive instruments said to be capable of detecting Earth-mass planets orbiting other stars. Not only that - in the near future, telescopes may well be able to detect individual moons orbiting these gas giants. Presumably, only the exotic properties of the mass relays will prevent Kepler from detecting them as well.While this is great news to me, as a scientifictionist it poses a problem for the immediate future. Back in 1940, spaceflight itself was widely considered a fool's dream - whether or not Mars had canals and Venus jungles, if the writers of the time were concerned about accuracy, for all they knew it might have been a hundred years until they were proven wrong or right either way. I feel like I'm in a similar place now as to when Larry Niven wrote and sold The Coldest Place in 1964, written when the leading consensus was that Mercury was tidally locked, a consensus that was only broken by radar mapping - and after The Coldest Place had been bought, but before it was published.I ran into a similar problem while writing You Source of Tears, which will be appearing in an upcoming issue of On Spec magazine. Originally it was set around Halley's Comet, though the only artifact of this is the title itself. I changed the setting to the fictional Comet Veale for two reasons - one, because a three hundred-year orbital period was more convenient for me than Halley's seventy-six, and two, because there was the possibility that some future expedition to Halley's Comet would prove me wrong. As an sf writer, I make enough assumptions about the future already - there's no need for me to dump falsifiable predictions into the mix.Kepler, if successful, will revolutionize our understanding of the interstellar neighborhood. In ten years, maybe we'll know that a planet of Tau Ceti or a moon of a gas giant at 55 Cancri has an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and liquid water. We wouldn't be speculating blind anymore, and while we may end up just building new Barsooms, there's a certain magic in that. I'm willing to hold my pen until they make the first maps of those strange new worlds.
Given the cities I'm used to, one of the factors that weirded me out about Los Angeles is how low to the ground it is. I can understand why - seismic issues, and smaller buildings are less vulnerable than taller ones. Nevertheless, in a lot of the city it seemed to me that outside the downtown core and its coterie of skyscrapers, there were only a handful of buildings more than three stories high. Los Angeles sprawls as it is; the seeming lack of mid-sized apartment buildings, compared to places like Toronto or even Barrie, made it seem even more of a sprawl.This photo was taken on December 5, 2009, during descent into Los Angeles International Airport.
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Cloud Gate, on a cloudy October day
