"Reviewing" and "nitpicking" are almost orthogonal, at least at 75 degree angles. So, this will be almost useless to any reviewer. But I'm really enjoying the nitpicking, so I will get back to page 65.
I've commissioned James Davis Nicol Reviews to tackle "Fallen Angels", a
novel written mostly in fun, to raise charity money, by selling "roles"
in the story to SF fans at conventions. Or something like that. The Wikipedia links on it go back to "larryniven.net", run by Larry, now 85; most of them have gone 404, as Larry presumably loses interest. (I never had much.)
Understand, I enjoyed the novel, and didn't throw it out, when I halved my library to move to Vancouver. I posted an obituary for Jerry Pournelle at Slashdot when he died, where I noted he'd given me much adventurous reading pleasure, and his propagation of libertarianism did not work. I also read "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" without believing libertarianism would work where I lived.
So, I don't view the novel as some political dispute, that the authors need to be clapped-back at. They were not really predicting"we think the libs would to this", they were creating cartoon villains to torment their heroes. Certainly, Larry 'n Jerry were not cartoon villains, just authors with some opinions. As Charlie Stross just noted on Mastodon the other day:
Nov 12
cstross@wandering.shop
Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop
@ReverendMoose I met Pournelle once: despite playing up his "old man shouts at clouds" act he had a sharp mind. I suspect he'd have seen through Trump instantly (and hated what he did to the republican party).
I was driven to notice "Fallen Angels" again, recently, as it sank in just how much projection there is in the characterization of the liberals as would-be tyrants who suppress scientists, and close scientific establishments. (Their patron, Newt Gingrich, closed the congressional science-evaluation office a few years later)
Fair enough. I'd reached the point, of finding on page 289, that the "Last Shuttle" up to the somehow self-supporing space station, was 29 years earlier. So I picked 2030 as "now" because the real ISS only took on crew #1 in 2000, but it couldn't be much later than 2030, because real names in the novel, still at work, hit age 80 then. I'm counselled to think of even earlier.
So all this happens "Now-ish" over the mid-to-late 2020s. I guess.
| Paperback pages | Notes |
|---|---|
| 25 | Character has kept track of fandom via "bulletin boards" since 2015 or so. It must have been painful for Jerry Pournelle, of all people, so totally wired-in to every development in small computing through the 1980s, to miss the whole Internet. I mean, Jerry not-predicting the next five years' revolution in marine biology, OK ... but the next few years of small computer communications networks? He already knew about the Internet, USENET - and in SF, "Neuromancer" was six years old. We're actually starting off with the biggest miss, save for the Ice Age. (The pre-Internet "ARPAnet" gets a mention.)
How did they blow that one? | 26 | "Rumour Cordwainer Bird was in town" RIP, Harlan Ellison, 1934-2018, they hoped he'd make it to 89 (today) or older. Another reason to concede this is the 2020s. |
| 30 | Every vehicle is powered by alcohol, and so the gas station is a "General Mills" gas station. That's funny. |
| 39 | Cops believe that the space station is responsible for the Ice Age by stealing "hundreds of tons" of air, the "protective blanket". I thought that way over-the-top dumb in 1991, but now that I've heard people argue it was the vaccines that caused the excess deaths, I'm forced to admit... |
| 45 | "He hadn't been aware the space dwellers had any friends on Earth." Odd that the wily SF fans don't include even one ham radio nut? Even under heavy surveillance, a directional antenna pointed straight up, when it's overhead, would be brief but private. They never do get back in contact until the end. |
| 52 | Slight headscratch that nobody wants to use the RCA long-distance phone satellites any more? The devolution of interest in technology was world-wide, and included loss of interest in long-distance phone calls? (We'll get back to "world-wide"...) |
| 53 | Unexplained how the SUNSAT-benefitting Winnipeggers are "The Last Canadians" when the "Alaska Corridor", that kind of has to include coastal BC, including Vancouver, is still open. Cool, though, that the Last Canadians are fan-heroes. |
| 57 | "Alex knew that rivers were free-flowing streams of water propelled by gravity rather than pressure. He had seen pictures." They're really banging on how these guys don't "get" gravity, or Earth, it's all so unnatural and foreign to them. Did they have fiction in school? Movies? They didn't read Huck Finn going down a river? Watch fight scenes that all involve gravity? Next it's "...vast beyond belief - hundreds of litres of water"... because they've never seen an ocean story, or looked down at one? The Earth-naivete is a *bit* thick; the planet is their whole viewscape. |
| 65 | Using the "old Hubble" to pick out routes won't actually work. Pick, pick, pick... |
| 72 | Woman who figures that you can't freeze on a glacier because crystals give life-energy is your first clue these are cartoons, not actual criticisms of real environmentalists. Come on. |
| 75 | Talk of a 1937 feud mentions "Pohl and Sykora" both alive - Pohl would be 111 if it were 2030. (Actually died in 2013 at 93.) Wisely, was I cautioned to not to try to figure out a coherent timeline. |
| 77-84 | I'm not touching the whole "Eskimo" passage for fact-checking. Not my field. But I really suspect somebody up on those cultures and their history would write at length. Also, not touching how these particular 21st century Inuit have sharply changed their culture and customs, in ugly ways.
I'm pretty sure that Canadian conservatives Jonathan Kay and Rex Murphy got their views of Indigenous history from the same informants as our authors, though. |
| 90 | The reference to "Noreascon III" is to the 1989 (50th Anniversary) convention; clearly things in the timeline went straight downhill as of publication date. |
| 103 | "illegal to own an unlicensed computer" - just realized that this dark age story would be much less funny if it mentioned any of the technophiles or libertarians having gone for their guns. |
| 104 | "Crazy Eddie nodded vigorously...Stage a coup! Install the Angels as symbolic governors and devote the state's resources to a shuttle"...is clearly meant as humour, but does not sound crazier than the MOU of the Canadian Convoy. |
| 110-111 | The "Solar Neutrino Problem" was solved in 2002 by an "observatory" in a mine in Sudbury. There is no impending Ice Age from solar inactivity. Whew. But then, since the Ice Age in the novel does not obtain, you guessed. |
| 112 | Scientists pushed Global Warming Theory in the face of descending Ice Age because of "grant money". I read that more than once, in serious op-eds. Weird, how the climatology papers were so compromised, and yet the science papers saying that Jerry and Newt's "Star Wars" technology just might work, were, I guess, the uninfluenced work of totally neutral scholars. |
| 115-116 | They really seem to be saying that Europeans endured the Little Ice Age, not just by using coal and wood to heat homes, but by putting out CO2 to warm the climate, however unknowningly. Smoke particles are cooling, and the CO2 wouldn't have done anything, immediately spread around the world. Claims that when British homes electrified and put out less smog, it got colder - and less rain, because rain needs smoke particles. Can only say ?!@?!?
Yup - doubling down that environmentalists not allowing burning leaves was partly to blame for the Ice Age. I just can't tell whether this is self-parody, but I suspect they're just funning us with Air Pollution Was Good. |
| 129 | I'll randomly pick this point, a page where one character thinks the Angels have no real choice but to get back to Spaaace, to note that this story is one of many that just assumes America is Earth, that is, there are no other countries, where technology is still beloved, and space is popular. Nobody else phones the space station, on five continents. To mention one country, they have a whole plot point around the friends in sovereign Winnipeg, which is utterly dependent upon the space station for power and heat, for continued existence of Canada. (Except that Vancouver issue I spotted on p.53). Why can't the Angels go live in Winnipeg?
Well, we need a plot driver, and they don't have to have an orgasmic rocket-launch ending unless there's nowhere else to go. So we'll just quit nitpicking after noting this nit the size of a grapefruit. |
| 138 | Actually a lovely passage after a yoga session about 'pranha' being nonsense about bodily energy fields, but really does work psychologically, because the mind/body interface is mysterious. Steven Barnes was the best thing that happened to the writing of Lar and Jer. |
| 140 | Prolonged discussion of how poor the space colony is, poor as the Inuit on the ice, abandoning the elderly, how the elderly in space would also kill themselves to save resources. This is the other grapefruit-sized nit we'll just pick and be done: the space colony is impossible. They're in a vacuum, with no possible new molecules save the air. No new carbon. No new fuel! Endless recycling of organics with hydroponics. (A few pages later, mention that the dehydrated milk powder will "eventually" run out. They are good at rationing!) I guess they can recycle and re-manufacture all consumables, like the 30-year-old solar cells and the 1000X-reused air and water filters. And pressure gaskets in suits and ships.
Daniel Suarez wrote a whole great book, "Critical Mass" about the critical molecules you have to get somewhere - asteroid Ryugu, Moon - to be Earth-independent. Later on, we learn that there was a moonbase they got a lot of matter from, but unclear if it is still running. |
| 146 | Quite the contrast between their 1990s "Greens" shutting down solar power satellites, with our oil industry today, paying for astroturf NIMBYs to shut down solar on Earth. |
| 148 | They finally think of sending up supplies, when it should have been a fan obsession for ages, Angels to rescue, or no. Alex asks for "meat". Don't be silly. Everybody in space would be lifelong vegans. After all that talk about poverty, don't pretend they can spare the calories to raise rabbits or chickens up there. Alex and Gordon would might well vomit at the smell of meat. |
| 150 | "Corn plastic" still being mentioned in 2006 articles, but it doesn't seem to be catching on as a big industrial thing. |
| 152 | OK, now vegan readers are crying as they plan how to send up rabbits and chickens and raise them in space with all their spare calories; presumably, even those raised vegan just cry out for meat. And they're going to send up a library on a disc. Jerry really didn't think computers would go to e-reading on a space station by 2000? |
| 191-192 | The flinty-eyed, suffering, Midwest small-towners, ignored by the cities (the Trump complaint goes back a long way) who are dying every winter in snap super-cold blizzards, no heating oil, huddling in shivering groups, and grit "drill for oil" at the horrified cops. Huh. I don't know why the things that worked in already-cold parts of the world like the Steppes and Lapland and Northern Manitoba, like heavy clothes and insulated buildings, don't work there. They even worked in Antartica, before oil.
These folks do make quite the comparison to the towns burned down recently, the 800-some lost in the BC heat wave of 2021, just before the huge floods that cut the highway. But at least we climate-clouted Real Life people have a hook to sympathize with the climate resisters of the book. |
| 210 | Funny that they are "burning cities" in the novel for heat, and Canada has had two small towns burn down, on their own. The real "climate abandonment areas" are already here, and so much less dramatic, that they haven't been noticed, save this article today: They're being abandoned because of flood risks, which insurance companies won't bear any more. |
| 215 | Finally clear here that they accept that CO2 causes atmospheric insulation and warming, though, confusingly, think that "smoke and soot" also do, when they're as-likely to cool. The Ice Age already started decades back, but was, (amazing timing) held back by greenhouse gases shooting up in production just then. So, when the Greens turned the GHG output off (like a switch), the Ice Age came roaring in.
Actually, that is just an SF assumption they can ask for. Accept global warming; just assume that if an Ice Age started in 1950, then global warming was a Good thing, until the Greens screwed everything up. Got it. |
| 242 | The cops embarrassment at wanting to burn Fahrenheit 451 and learning what it was about is funnier today, now that the MAGA folks are ready to actually burn books. |
| 245 | The Greens make hydrogen with the failing electricity, and pipe it through old natural gas pipes to heat houses. If only in 1990, the authors had been able to know about heat pumps. No, wait - heat pumps were used to heat and cool homes since the 1970s, and the Dept. of Energy was pushing them by 1990. If only the authors had thought that technology could advance, too, the way rockets did. |
| 246 | The description of the shabby, grey, graffitti-ridden buildings of Chicago is pure "Atlas Shrugged". I notice my nitpicks are thinning out; the backstory-and-world-building is about done, and we're just in an adventure novel in an improbable world. And it's not a bad adventure! |
| 270-280 | I caught one reference from my own SF magazine reading: "The Ghost" is surely Dick Geist, who bantered with "alter", his own alter-ego, as he did reviews and commentary. The description of "cyberbooks" in 1990 is charming, pretty much right-on, they spotted the fun of "skipping" through an encyclopedia with hypertext, back when it was only known to Mac Hypercard fans. Dead wrong on how e-readers would "seduce a video generation into reading", though. They're more used by oldsters who love being able to increase the font size. |
| 285 | Alex explains how you take a shower in free fall to prove he's a spaceman, written 15 years after Skylab when most could. Neither Angel is courteous enough to admit that gravity makes showering, and defecating in particular, way easier and less unpleasant. Just read today (2023.12.18) that at least one lunar traveler confirmed that he was able to move his bowels in 1/6 g, but not in zero-g, going either way. | 289 | This is where we can add up that 29 years have passed since "The Last Shuttle", from Alex's family history. The hand-to-hand heroism of the NASA launch crew against the Green Mob echoes the heroism of those who kept the nuclear power plant running in "Lucifer's Hammer". (No joke: the guys who ran Titanic's generator room, a watertight metal box, sealed themselves in, and the power didn't fail until the ship broke in half. They're all still down there.) |
| 336 | Oh, FYI, Gary Hudson's Phoenix, says the Net, remained a design proposal, was never built. But, hey, the billionaires eventually got their private spaceships. They just need 100,000 employees to work for minimum wage for a year to buy them each flight. Jeff Bezos did thank them. |
Just accept the upside-down sociological world here, the way you accept FTL and telepathy, if you're any SF fan at all. Then it's a fun fight against fascists, with loveable Good People on Our Side.
Then it hit me: that, unbelievably to nearly all science-aware newsreaders, is what just happened at COP28. I really thought, after 2021, after Australia's second giant fire and California's fourth, after Ft. Mac mostly burned down and all of little Lytton, Hottest Place on Earth the day before, after the floods cutting the Coquihalla, megaflood in Germany ... that's all two years ago when COP28 started, and, globally, there was only two more years of the same.
And yet, we have the flat-out denial in the face of the heat-equivalent of those glaciers in the novel. It's not ideology, of course, it's staggering profits and control of nations making them love fossil that blindly.
You just simply imagine that Larry, Jerry, and Mike have actually been closet climatologists all this time, were trying to warn about smug denial and bullheadedness, with a metaphor for Global Warming, turned around into an Ice Age, and a warning about conservatism sliding, via Newt Gingrich (whom they knew well), into fascism.
Then this becomes a very clever metaphorical story about the climate change and climate denial, flipped over. It's just hard to decode, because the authors were so completely straightfaced with the joke.
If only we had listened in 1990!