The Permanent Floating Riot Club.

Well, it seems that there are people who like riots. 

Larry Niven, Flash Crowd

One of the most difficult things for a science fiction author to do is to extrapolate all the possible end results of an innovation in technology.  As an example, a good science fiction writer in 1930 might have successfully anticipated the eventual mass acceptance of the motorcar, and probably seen the inevitable need for freeways and gas stations that would result. An extra-ordinary 30s SF author would have also projected traffic jams, parking tickets, gas wars, road rage, and six-dollar-an-hour parking meters.

Science fiction and fantasy author Larry Niven has always been very good at exactly that sort of if-this-goes-on extrapolation.  Niven's semi-organized Known Space future includes, among other things, the invention of the teleportation booth, and Niven beautifully explores the various effects that such an invention would have on our culture. This exploration includes the disturbing phenomenon of the "flash crowd", which in his stories is portrayed as something far too close to what Vancouver experienced last Wednesday after the Canucks lost Game 7 of the playoffs.

Niven's stories have the advantage of instantaneous travel - people are able to be on the scene of a disturbance literally within seconds, ergo the title Flash Crowd for his first story dealing with this problem.  In Flash Crowd, a roving wireless cameraman reports a disturbance, which instantly makes its way to network distribution, leading to a instantaneous influx of viewers who happen to be curious, angry, or just plain bored enough to jump into the centre of a riot.

What Niven doesn't anticipate in his flash crowd scenario is the Internet - in other words, social media.*  When you think about it, between cell phones, texting, Facebook, blogs, and YouTube, how hard would it be to assemble a group of, say, five hundred people in relatively short order?  We don't have the advantages and disadvantages of teleportation booths, but the added ease with which news of an event can be disseminated makes up for the lack of being able to get there in fractions of a second.  (And apparently this is exactly what happened after the trouble started here:  people invited their friends to head downtown and join in the fun.)

More interestingly, Niven also anticipates a more disturbing aspect of riots:  the fact that some people like them.  In The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club, a followup to the original 1983 story, Niven described a group of criminals who specialize in taking advantage of flash crowds and the opportunities offered therein for theft and looting.  Disturbingly, Vancouver seems to have played host twice now to the Canadian equivalent:  black-masked anarchists, last seen causing trouble at an Olympics protest parade last February**.

However, if Niven fails to anticipate the Internet, he also fails to anticipate the other side of human nature.  The Facebook-organized volunteers who spent Thursday morning cleaning up Granville Street never make an appearance in any of his flash crowd scenarios, but let's be fair, "The Permanent Floating Kindness Club" doesn't have the same impact as a title for a story.

- Sid

* As with the Spanish Inquisition, no one expected the Internet, although I'm willing to perjure myself on that after a little research.  Maybe Arthur C. Clarke - there's a bit in 2001 which is pretty close.

** I have to be fair here.  Reports vary as to whether the instigators of the post-playoff rioting were part of the same group that caused the problems at the Olympic protest.  I suspect that the great majority of the rioters last week were just drunken idiots - but I also suspect that they may have been joiners rather than initiators.

The Who Brothers?

 "The Doctor is a legend woven throughout history, when disaster comes, he's there.  He brings a storm in his wake.  And he has one, constant companion..."
"Who's that?"
"Death."

"Rose", Doctor Who

"The Campbell Brothers are lushes weaving throughout history, when disaster comes, they're responsible.  They bring the steins to a wake. And they have one, constant companion..."
"What's that?"
"Booze. Okay, two companions - alcohol, and there's this funny smell..."

The Campbell Brothers Adventures

This is the 200th posting on The Infinite Revolution, and I thought it only appropriate to pay tribute to the gentlemen (and I use the term loosely) who inspired me:  Colin and Ralph, the Campbell Brothers.

But their appearance here is not only because of that initial blogging impetus.  In some awful fashion (in many awful fashions, actually, as you can see from the pictures) the Campbell Brothers are Canada's answer to Doctor Who.  (Yes, Doctor Who is a question - the character calls himself the Doctor, but never offers a name, so the question is: "Doctor who?"*)

Like the Doctor, the Campbell Brothers have explored the distant depths of time, and the far reaches of space.  (Admittedly, it's a bit odd that their time/space vehicle looks like a tree spade, but we have no tradition of police boxes here. It's probably far more odd that Ralph has a squirrel on his head.)  They have been seen in ancient Greece, in medieval England, in 1920s Chicago, London's psychedelic Sixties, and several times in Port Perry during the winter of 2006.  They have solved crimes in the Victorian era, committed them in the modern era, performed acts of piracy in the Caribbean, and acts of lunacy in Toronto.

They are masters of disguise - a necessity of survival forced on them by the various explosive catastrophes which seem to follow them everywhere like a bad smell.  (Just for the record, an actual bad smell also follows them everywhere.)

So, once again, thanks to the Campbell Brothers for their inspiration. Long may they continue their mad dash (or inebriated wobble, more accurately) through past, present, and future.  We leave you with one final image of the Brothers, seen here suddenly realizing why that nice fellow in the uniform offered them blindfolds along with the free cigarettes.

- Sid

Sidebar:  the first time I met Ralph Campbell, seen screaming like a little girl to the right in the above photo, Colin was working on the Death of Socrates image, and I was asked to photograph the two brothers.  As a result, Ralph was clad in an attractive floral bedsheet for the entirety of our initial encounter - my relief at discovering that this was not his standard weekend garb can only be imagined.

*Sorry, Doctor Smith is NOT the correct answer, Laurie, but you're very close - the Doctor does sometime use John Smith as a nom de guerre.

All right, let's.

One of the more entertaining parts of writing these postings is coming up with the titles.* Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's a struggle.  Sometimes I don't know what the title will be until the end, and sometimes I start with a title and then change my mind after writing the content.  Some of them are just obvious statements on the content, such as last month's "And a bottle of rum." for the posting about piracy, and on other occasions I've drawn upon the titles of famous science fiction novels, lines from favourite songs, bad puns, and quotations from a plethora of sources.

The science fiction and fantasy market is probably more famous for changed titles than the general rank and file of book headings.  Offhand I can think of several novels that were the victims of editorial alterations, either for better or worse, and ended up being published under titles other than the ones that the author had picked.  The Stars My Destination?  Original title Tiger! Tiger!.  Daybreak - 2250 A.D., later renamed to Star Man's Son.  Or The Space Merchants, whose original title of Gravy Planet suggests a far more intriguing novel, at least to my ear.

Some titles are a mystery until a moment of revelation.  When I originally read Terry Pratchett's The Monstrous Regiment, about a group of army recruits who are all eventually revealed to be women masquerading as men, I didn't give the title much thought.  After all, one of the soldiers is a vampire, another a troll, it didn't seem that noteworthy.

However, earlier this year I was reading a blog posting by an unhappy female teacher who was complaining about the conduct of some of her male students.  In her posting, she made reference to a 1558 treatise by reformer John Knox, in which he rails against the possibility of women ordering men around.  The title of this extended rant regarding the Bible and its position on the position of females?  The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.  Full points to Mr. Pratchett for a title which is both appropriate and obscure.  (Well, obscure to me, for all I know it's a common reading in British public schools.) 

And then there are the titles that speak for themselves.  I just finished watching the mid-season finale of Doctor Who - yes, mid-season, they're taking a break for some unknown reason.  Normally at the end of the episodes they show a little preview of the next program, but in this case they just gave us the title:

Kudos to whoever came up with that clever little three-word teaser, which manages to be mysterious yet undeniably informative at the same time - and really, isn't that what a good title should do?

- Sid

* The most difficult part is coming up with the final paragraph.  More than one posting has languished as a draft file until I could come up with a punchline.