Comfort Food.

I've been working on a large and somewhat stressful deadline-intensive project for the last month or so, and as such I've found myself gravitating toward lighter reading selections - the literary equivalent of comfort food, if you will.   

Right now I'm just finishing up S. M. Stirling's General series from the early 1990s, which perfectly suits my definition of science fiction comfort reading.  This five-book military SF series is a collaboration between Stirling and fellow SF author David Drake, who created detailed story outlines for the books which Stirling then completed.

The series takes place a thousand years after the collapse of intergalactic civilization, commonly referred to as the Fall.  In the wake of this apocalyptic event, civilization on the planet Bellevue has fallen to a steam-driven level of technology, as per Europe circa the mid to late 1800s, and any remnants of the old world are worshipped as religious objects.

Raj Whitehall, an officer in the Civil Government army, is chosen by Center, a sophisticated pre-Fall quantum AI, to act as its agent in unifying the planet and beginning humanity's climb back to the stars.

Center forges a telepathic link with Whitehall and, with its guidance, he ascends through the military until he is the grand general of the Civil Government forces, which he commands as they conquer Bellevue's various splinter colonies, descended from a variety of Terran cultural backgrounds.

Outside of their well-written military trappings*, the books are just fun little reads. Set on an alien planet where the imported Terran ecology and the more primitive Cretaceous-era native biosphere have intermingled, and cavalry rides gigantic dogs rather than horses**, the dialogue is full of topical references, like talking about the sheep at the carnosauroid's congress, or referring to cavalry as dogboys, rather than cowboys. 

The various polities come from a wide range of Terran antecedents:  the Civil Government culture and language is Hispanic, its Military Government opponents, the Brigade and the Squadron, are North American (Namerique), the first-landing Colony is Islamic, and the barbarian Bekwa Skinners obviously owe a debt to Stirling's French-Canadian Québécois background, up to and including a character named Pai-har Tradaw, fils d'Duhplesi.

The overall storyline is simple but dramatic, and painted with an epic brush - heroes and villains, battles and escapades, feats of daring, court intrigues, honourable enemies, evil allies, and a cast of thousands, as they used to say in Hollywood. And there are dinosaurs - how can you not love a science fiction series with dinosaurs?

- Sid

* David Drake's knowledge of military history and service background combined to provide a solid foundation for the battles that form the backbone of the books, as well as the weapons used in those battles.  As an example, the Civil Government arms its soldiers with something very close to the Martini Henry breechloader rifle used by the British army in the colonial wars of the late 19th century. whereas the opposing army of the Colony uses repeating lever action rifles similar to any number of examples from the late 1800s. 

** Oddly, dogs are the only Terran animals that seem to have grown in stature, which strikes me as a missed opportunity.  Imagine if, say, the chickens had evolved to a similar scale...

Ephemera.

The door swung inward and she led him into the smell of dust. They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn’t look back.

William Gibson, Neuromancer

My lovely wife is away in Victoria this weekend with her sister, and I'm taking advantage of her absence to do a low pass reconnaissance of the Vancouver Flea Market, located on the evocatively named Terminal Avenue at the south edge of the city's infamous Downtown East Side.  I'm hoping that it will prove to be a suitable venue for used book sales, giving me a starting place for liquidating most* of my book collection in preparation for retirement downsizing. 

The web site for the Flea Market claims that it offers almost 40,000 square feet of shopping with 360 tables for your shopping pleasure.  Frankly, it doesn't seem that large - although, to be honest, it never occurs to me to count the tables once I'm there.

For the most part, the sales stock is the standard flea-market selection of worn clothing, mismatched antique china cups, obsolete media - battered vinyl record albums, VHS tapes, and so on - musical instruments, porcelain figurines, wooden carvings, and one table with a corner featuring an attractive selection of reasonably-priced rocks: it's exactly the kind of place you visit if you're desperate for an affordable copy of Kenny Rogers' Greatest Hits. A surprising number of tables feature tools of varying vintage - there must be a substantial community of budget-minded tradespeople in the lower mainland to create this kind of demand.

Some of the tables are almost artistic in their disarray, giving parts of the market a surprising sort of Gibsonesque feel, like visiting Akihabara Electric Town in Tokyo, or paying a call to Metro Holographix from the Sprawl Trilogy, but without quite the same degree of otaku sophistication. (There's certainly no suggestion that there might be a sophisticated criminal cyber-fencing operation going on behind the scenes, although, really, it would be more than a little amateur of them if that was evident to the casual shopper.)

It's not all tools and emphemera, I do manage to discover a couple of sellers with objects of interest to the geek shopper. If I had wanted to start a vintage robot collection, I would have had an opportunity to jump start the process from one table, and another booth contains an astonishing jumble of unboxed toys and action figures, but they're solitary glimmers of light in the darkness, at least as far as my shopping interests are concerned. The booth with the toys is almost frustrating in its lack of organization - there might well be some incredible bargains hidden in there, but I can't help but feel that it would require a lot of sifting through the dross to find any gold.

Ultimately, as far as research for a location to sell my books collection goes, the Flea Market didn't ring the bell at all.  It just didn't seem to be the sort of location that would bring in book buyers, I think I need something with more of a collectors vibe - once again, it's a shame that Canada doesn't have a tradition of outdoor book vendors à la Paris.

- Sid 

* Obviously I'll keep a few things, although it will be challenging to triage my little library.

"Time may change me."

More than 90% of the Canadian population lives within 150 miles of our border with the United States.

Imagine if the situation was reversed, with almost the entire population of the United States living within 150 miles of the same border. Viewed from that perspective, it becomes a ridiculous prospect, with 10 percent of the American population scattered thinly through the vast area south of that limit, punctuated only by the isolated state capital of Los Angeles and its token population of only 7,700 people.*

And yet, that's the reality of Canadian geography - and society, that we have millions of square kilometers of wilderness. To be fair, northern Canada is a punishing environment during the winter months, and it would require a massive investment to create the missing infrastructure that the continental US takes for granted:  power grids, roads, dams, airports and so on.

However, we live in a changing world. Unchecked climate change may lead to parts of the world, such as the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, being uninhabitable by 2050, and much of South Asia, Eastern China, and Brazil by 2070.  As such, northern Canada's frigid environment and relative emptiness could well become a silver lining in a world of rising temperatures**.

With that as a starting point, what would the map of a future Canada be, 100 years from now? 

Tuktoyaktuk becomes the gateway to the North for cargo shipments from China and Russia, as the challenges of the Northwest Passage vanish with a diminished Arctic icepack - a timely alternative to the gently steaming waters of the abandoned Panama Canal, slowly being filled by the blowing sands of the scorching. lifeless Central American Desert.  

The Mackenzie River replaces the St. Lawrence River as the trade conduit to central Canada. Great Bear Lake and Great Slave Lake become the new Great Lakes, and home to the waterfront cities of New Phoenix, New Houston and New Miami, as we open our doors to a wave of American climate refugees - along with Nuevo Monterrey, Bago Manila, and Nouvelle Dakar.  The good news is that we have a lot of room for these heat-seared immigrants, along with a long-standing tradition of a tolerant cultural mosaic.***

And we need all those people, as the Canadian North turns into the world's biggest boom town, a bonanza of construction, development and expansion. This will be a challenge for the federal government: strict controls will be necessary to avoid having uncontrolled exploitation destroy the already heat-damaged ecology of the muskeg and the taiga, at a time when much of the world would be in the middle of an environmental disaster.

The Canadian government will also be faced with another challenge: indigenous land rights. It would be far too easy to sweep the existing indigenous population of the northern territories aside under the guise of necessity in the face of climate change.  Hopefully there would be a strengthened commitment to the current policy of indigenous reconciliation, making Canada a stronger country at a time when unity and cooperation would be of the utmost importance.

- Sid

*The approximate population of Iqaluit, capital of the territory of Nunavut.

** Ignoring for a moment the disastrous and unfortunate consequences for the Northern Canadian ecosystem itself.

*** Does everyone still learn about the Canadian Cultural Mosaic versus the American Melting Pot in high school?