A City On Mars

I flirted with space opera writing a couple of short stories on this blog. I won't link to them as they are all bad. I made them all Mary Sue (were I am in the story and of course, the hero). The only time you use that device is when you would rather be in a story than in real life.

My stories were safe and bland, havens of normality rather than tense and difficult life I was living.

As bad as the stories were, I still took pleasure in the world building, or rather the constraints. Example from ten years ago:

Short version, humanity has sparsely populated the universe via wormhole conduits, meaning no spaceships, no spaceports, no spacefaring infrastructure, and doing it all with what amounts to late 1970s technology (nothing to sneeze at, pretty ingenious). So, these wormholes are fickle things, and for the longest time passage through one amounted to a one-way trip with no return. It was only, say, twenty years after the first foray that humans learned the trick of return trips to Earth. As a result, there's a lot of lost colonies out there in the cosmos, some of which would never be heard from again. And there's the problem involving colonization.

So, let's say you've got this big hole. It's just a big hole. If you want, it's a hole in the sky. On the other side of this big hole is whole new world, lush and green and filled with fresh air, sunshine and animals and clean water and absolutely no people. The hole is going to stay open for a short time, and while it's open, you can go back and forth. But eventually the hole will close and will never reappear again. You know this. You know if go through and stay, you will be stuck in this new world for good.

What do you take with? Oh, one other restriction is you are confined to, say nothing more advanced than 1979 technology.

Well, here's my thinking. You walk into this new world, you'll want to have an idea of what your base technology will be. In other words, you don't come over expecting to use internal combustion engines, since you don't where the oil is, you don't know when you'll have refineries built, you don't have any of the chemical and electrical infrastructure. Similarly, you probably don't bring coal-fire locomotives over. So, in my view, you start out with a base technology of around, say, 1820 or so. You've got high pressure steam engines that burn wood. You've got a lot of spare parts for that. Oh sure, you bring as many modern amenities and appliances and generators and fuel and airplanes and satellite launching rockets and computers as you can shove through the hole, and use as it long as it all lasts. You may have mini-factories stashed in 40 foot shipping containers. You've got a shitload of books. And skilled people. And food. And seeds. And... what else? In other words, this becomes a prepper problem. The world falls apart. How to rebuild it?

Because, you figure, no matter how much shit you shove through the hole, you just can't support a modern world. You can't support a modern world, not without billions of people. Your best 1979 candidates for interstellar colonization are hunter gatherers, subsistence farmers, herders, citizens of what they called back then The Third World. 

Theproblem with these awkward stories was, enthusiastic as I was, I could not suspend my disbelief.

What is current fantasy? Well, according to this book, A City On Mars, the entire manned space program and space colonization.

Consider my scenario above. The most preposterous element is finding another Earth. Not an Earthlike planet, but another Earth. Another Earth with a small window of time say, the Pleistocene, when we evolved.. Humans can't survive the enivronment much past the last third of a billion years on Mother Earth, and the majority of the time where we can survive, we wouldn't like it. It would be a hostile alien world. Now consider candidates in our Solar system. There are none.   

City on Mars knocks down all the Star Trek/For All Mankind fantasies, as it should. Cory Doctorow has a good review.

Colonization makes no sense even if we could do it, which we can't. The pitch for becoming a multi-planetary species falls apart when you recognize that 99.9% of extinction are extra-solar. You want to hide in the heart of a dead planet? Fine, but not me. I'll take the blast.

Manned space makes less sense especially now when robots are so cheap. Cheaper than slaves. Yes, there are more slaves than ever today. We are in a dark time, and we fantasize a safe and bland haven of normalcy. Space ain't it, honey bunnies

Other things. Speaking of hostile alien environments, this is a lame blizzard so far. Chicago, City of the Future, western citadel of the sweet water seas, pissed off because we are getting Kentucky weather, WTF. Rain and above freezing? I get the El Nino but still, our weather is gonna be wimpy from now on? This sucks. I don't want to live in Tennessee. I'll move to Finland if I have to.

.