Ah, the contrast between the U.S. and Chinese space programs. The Space Shuttle is due to be retired next year, even as budget pressures intensify for its Constellation/Ares successor.  Meanwhile, China continues to forge ahead with plans for a lunar rover by 2012, a manned space station by 2020, and a taikonaut on the Moon shortly after that.  It’s tempting to read this as a tale of two empires—one rising and the other in decline.  But I’ve got a funny feeling that should the Chinese actually get hardware onto the lunar surface, the U.S. space program might receive the kick in the ass that’s been so long overdue. After all, the only reason we got to the Moon in the first place was because Sputnik scared us shitless.  It’s a little sad that when you get down to it, the best reason for getting into space we’ve ever managed to find is that the other guy is doing it. . . . but the coming space race is likely to be a lot more intense than the one that occurred during the Cold War, because this time each side has the capability to field maturing space weaponry. China’s antisat test from two years back still reverberates, while the U.S. directed energy weaponry program continues to make strides.

But the next few years are likely to be all China’s, and the contrast between the two publics couldn’t be more stark.  Space launches over there are big news, whereas here they’re pretty much a non-event, unless something blows up or astronauts die.  And China has the added advantage of not having to worry about civilian vs. military coordination—the Chinese space program integrates the two (an advantage of dictatorships).  Ironically, right now the U.S. is in a similar position to pre-modern Ming China back in the 14th century, when they scrapped their vast exploration fleets to focus on internal considerations.  Indeed, there’s (disputed) evidence that China reached America first . . . just as centuries from now, it might seem like a curiosity of history that Americans walked on the Moon decades before China set up shop there permanently.

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

I don’t know what’s cooler, a story about black box guns, or the fact that the title namechecks Judge Dredd.

But what I do know is this.  Eventually there will be three types of guns:

1.  Legacy guns dating back to the age when guns didn’t contain tracking/override electronics.

2.  Federal-controlled guns whereby Uncle Sam gets to decide if you can have another shot.

3.  Hacked guns

2. and 3. of course will be tough to tell apart.  This is going to be fun.

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

From today’s news.

From THE MIRRORED HEAVENS:

So at the end of Moon there’s a labyrinth. At the end of that labyrinth’s a chamber. That chamber wasn’t built by man. It’s been there since this rock cooled. It contains the most valuable thing in this world.

“Water,” says Sarmax.

He steps into the light. His armor looks pretty beat-up. It’s been burned almost black. He walks toward the ramp’s edge.

“Come again?” says the Operative.

“Water,” repeats Sarmax.  “Or should I say:  ice.”

“My latest fortune,” replies Sarmax.

He stops just short of the edge—gestures at the sloped walls. He looks back at the Operative. He smiles. He’s so close the Operative can see teeth through visor.

“You’re a resourceful man,” he says quietly.

“It’s just too bad that such resourcefulness has to compensate for such lack of planning,” continues Sarmax. “Such a goddamn shame it’s forced to rely so heavily on pure luck. You almost brought the roof down on your stupid head, Carson. It’s a wonder you didn’t get buried in those tunnels.”

“Would that have been such a terrible outcome?” says the Operative.

“Now that,” says Sarmax, “depends on your point of view.” He gestures at the ramps and ladders stacked about him. “You see before you the industry of a new era, Carson. We live in the dawn times, old friend. Humanity is poised to boil out beyond the Earth-Moon system. The red planet will be colonized en masse within the next two decades. The prospectors are even now testing the tug of the gas giants. The Oort is surrendering her secrets to the probes. It’s all there for the taking. And it all makes me say I don’t give a fuck if you take me down. I don’t give a damn about the Rain or anybody else. Let them squabble. Let them plot. What does it matter when history itself is coming into focus?”

Congratulations, NASA.  May we make it back to that rock yet.

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

It takes an event like the Brazilian blackouts to bring home the banality of Twitter, where the event barely registered amidst the maelstrom of posts on New Moon and Captain Zeep. But the incidents can be seen as good evidence of just how rickety a lot of the developing world’s infrastructure is getting under the pressure of growth.  With its regional power status—and hosting of both the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016—Brazil will be more in the limelight than most, at least until the developed world starts sharing a similar problem.  At which point we’ll be too deep in our own energy/infrastructure mess to worry about those of others, especially since it turns out that peak oil is coming even faster than we thought, with reports that world oil estimates have been drastically inflated.  In the meantime, we’re grabbing all the kilowattage we can lay our hands on. . . .for example, did you realize that 10% of the U.S. power supply right now comes from dismantled Russian nukes?  The spoils of empire indeed.

UPDATE:  killer blackout pix.

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
    For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
    But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the guns begin to shoot;
    An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
    An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!
--Rudyard Kipling

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

I’ll be speaking at the Library of Congress tomorrow morning. From the press release:

Author David J. Williams (www.autumnrain2110.com) will speak on the future of war and U.S. national security at the Library of Congress this Thursday, October 29th, at 11:30 a.m.  His presentation follows the talk he gave at the National Academy of Sciences in August, and will provide a comprehensive framework within which to chart out the next generation of weaponry and strategy.

Williams‘ presentation will be at the Madison Building, LM 139, located on Independence Ave SE, between 1st and 2nd Streets.  Mr. Williams will give a 30-minute presentation, followed by a book signing.

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

I’ve been AWOL doing the pre-copy edit round of revisions on Book Three, but now all normal programming resumes. And what better way to get back into the swing of things then by revealing the cover for the final book of the Autumn Rain trilogy, THE MACHINERY OF LIGHT? Release date:  May 2010.  Stay tuned! 

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

It’s been ten years since Homeworld was released, and Uberjumper over at Relic News has a great thread to commemorate it. It’s tough for me to express how honored I am to have story concept and co-writing credits on the game; the comment thread is a moving testament to the game’s emotional impact.  It certainly had an impact on me—my involvement in the game was all moonlighting while I was in Vancouver trying to escape the banal reality of my corporate job back in D.C., and in the wake of Homeworld, I had to wonder why I was stuck doing P&L spreadsheets while friends of mine were inking space-fleets for a living.  In many ways, that was the motivation for what ultimately became Autumn Rain . .  . and it seems like only yesterday me and Rob Cunningham were poring over spaceship drawings in his warehouse-loft over Hastings Street trying to figure out what the thread was that tied it all together while junkies howled and gibbered in the alley beneath us and we contemplated endless galactic suns.

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

Gail and I met at the LA WorldCon in 2006—in a Starbucks line, as I recall, and jesus were those lattes overpriced. We were both Outsiders Looking In at that point: manuscripts in hand that we were desperate to peddle to the powers that be. Three years later, we’ve both succeeded; Gail’s SOULLESS was just released by oh-so-cool Orbit to great critical fanfare—and how could it not be, given that it’s a comedy of manners set amidst vampires in Victorian London?  In addition, she maintains a great blog where she offers readers fashion tips as well as thoughts on how to fight off vampires. I think she’s the next big thing; at least I hope so, as I could use some friends in high places.  SOULLESS is available at Amazon and other fine bookstores (and presumably one or two cruddy ones as well).

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce the two new members of the Williams household, shown here while studying the habits of fake mice in bathtubs. They are:

CAPTAIN ZOOM (aka “the White Lion”):  When Zoom purrs, it sounds like a lawnmower starting up.  And he is always purring:  possibly the most extroverted cat I’ve ever met.  This is good news, because his friend is a little shyer, and needs someone to set an example.

AJAX (aka “L’Orange”):   For the first few days, Ajax was convinced the entire thing was a trap, and that any moment now he and Zoom would be consumed with gusto.  However, discovering the pleasures of the Belly Rub made him forget any such theories, and now he rivals Zoom in his quest for attention.

THEIR MISSION:  should they choose to accept it . . .  to consume fish at prodigious rates, chase each other at 3 in the morning, and sleep all afternoon.  We’ll see if they can handle it.

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

An oldie-but-goodie from the vault . . turns out that on Earth 744, Captain Britain was actually Captain Airstrip One, presiding over Oceania’s most exposed province in an ingenious depiction of what life was like for all of Winston Smith’s pals in Orwell’s 1984.   There’s PDFs of the resultant short strip in various places on the net, but it’s been scanned here.  Doubleplusgood!

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

In Hollywood, nothing is ever truly over. Talk about a fourth Mad Max has been on and off again for so long one wonders if George Miller has taken a leaf or two from the Axl Rose playbook . . . but there have been recent reports that the success of 2006’s HAPPY FEET (!) has given Miller the leverage he needed to put Mad Max 4 into pre-production.  Particularly intriguing to me is that longtime  2000 A.D. artist Brendan McCarthy is supposedly penning the script. . .  McCarthy came up with many of my favorite Judge Dredd storylines, including one in which Ayers Rock gets blown up, which may or may not be a coincidence. Word is that Mel won’t be starring in the movie, perhaps because he’s too old to be an action-hero box office draw, but presumably also because he failed to outrun the cops the one time it counted most and then proceeded to settle some Authorial Intent questions in a far more explicit way than Derrida would ever have bargained for.

There’s also talk that Mad Max 4 will be animated, a la Happy Feet.    This makes me more than a little nervous.  But like I said yesterday, you have to respect this franchise for resisting the urge to make each movie a carbon copy of the one that came before it.  If Miller thinks he can push the envelope with an animated format, then it’ll be interesting to watch what he comes up with.  At the very least, it Fury Road ever DOES come to pass, we’ll get to see the next stage in the history of that world that Miller and Kennedy created back in the 1970s, when oil was drying up and the world seemed on the brink in more ways than one.  Times sure have changed, haven’t they?

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

Easily the most problematic of the Mad Max movies, and as I noted in yesterday’s post, we’ll never know just how this movie would have turned out had producer Byron Kennedy lived. The conventional wisdom for BEYOND THUNDERDOME is that the first half rocks, and the second half wimps out on us. At least, that’s what I thought when I saw it the first time, but now I find it makes the movie all the more interesting: the Big Fight between Max and Blaster occurs scarcely half an hour in, after which Miller and Ogilvie take the film in a very different direction. In many ways, Thunderdome is a contrast between two radically different approaches to post-apocalyptic realities; both the inhabitants of Bartertown and the kids at Crack in the Earth are trying to eke order out of the chaos, each utilizing a different kind of myth (wild west vs. awaiting-of-god-from-the-sky). There’s a great series of essays on this dynamic here; I don’t agree with all of it, but I do think that this is a movie that works on many different levels—easily the most layered of the three films. The fight at the end, for example, comes in for a lot of grief because of its slapstick quality, but it seems pretty clear this was entirely deliberate: the chase is, in essence, a conscious parody of the Giant Chase at the end of the previous movie (though the device of the old railroad was sheer genius). And the final flight through a shattered Sydney is frankly one of the most powerful things I’ve seen in cinema—not to mention one of the most underrated.

One of the most brilliant things about the Mad Max movies is the way we chart the course of civilization’s collapse:  in the first movie, it’s a society in which the rot has set in deep, in the second movie, we’re post-apocalyptic, and mechanized gangs now fight for the gasoline that will keep them competitive, and in the third, there’s virtually no gas left and everything is going low-tech/steampunk.  BEYOND THUNDERDOME thus opens with Max-as-camel-jockey (and what an opening as we swoop in upon him), and—while we do see an awful lot of pig shit—we don’t see much in the way of cars or engines, except of course during that last chase . . . love the way Auntie Tina signals green-light:

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

The Mad Max franchise was the brainchild of George Miller and Byron Kennedy: Kennedy produced and Miller directed, and that combination got them out of film school and into the big time. In the wake of the success of MAD MAX, the pressure was on, and they rose to it with one of the best sequels ever made. Now that they had the budget to go deep into the outback to destroy a LOT of cars and blow up a LOT of shit, they let the world they’d created descend past the apocalypse, and delivered a pared-down tale of epic archetype and savage action.   This time the American market didn’t dub out the Australian voices and Miller/Kennedy took it all the way.   Suddenly Mel Gibson was famous worldwide, and no one in my elementary school had ever seen anything like it.

Tragically, that was the high point.  While scouting out locations for the next movie, Byron Kennedy was killed in a helicopter crash at the age of 33.  A distraught Miller abandoned work on BEYOND THUNDERDOME; though he eventually allowed himself to be talked into shooting the fight scenes, the visionary partnership that had fueled one of the great sci-fi franchises was over.  But what they accomplished lives on:

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

So in the wake of mulling over Mad Max, I dug out the NYT’s initial review of the movie in 1979; reviewer Tom Buckley wrote that the movie “is ugly and incoherent, and aimed, probably accurately, at the most uncritical of moviegoers.” But then 25 years later, a NEW review of Buckley’s appeared on a DVD: “With this stunning, post apocalyptic action thriller…Mad Max is tremendously exciting…one of the most tense scenes of the decade.”

Hmm.

In Buckley’s defense, the first version was the one with the lame dubbed American voices, and a reasonable person could certainly claim that this ruined the movie completely. And maybe after a quarter century, Buckley had finally figured out what the word cool means. But I think there’s something more going on here. The Big News Rags—Time, NYT, the Wash. Post, etc.—used to pull this kind of shit all the time: crap on something, and then once they saw how completely they’d misjudged the popular mood, revamp their opinion and hail it as a classic. But now with the World Wide Web as 24-7 street theater/reaction, that’s impossible. So there was a time that Rolling Stone could get away with dissing Led Zeppelin’s first albums in the 1970s (to say nothing of Black Sabbath’s), only to subsequently decide that these were, in fact, Legendary Rock Albums. But now the gulf between Traditional Media’s dinner parties and the zeitgeist is there for all to see. And it ain’t a pretty sight.*

*Sure, I know:  I’m probably reading way too much into this one reviewer’s change of heart. But I think my overall assessment is accurate.  And how Buckley failed to dig that initial chase scene is beyond me.

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

Ah, the Mad Max movies. Did you know that until Blair Witch Project, the first Mad Max flick had the highest profit-to-cost ratio in cinema history? They shot it for 400K, and it made them over 100 million. The crazy part is that (at least initially) most of this came from non-U.S. markets; this might have had more than a little to do with the fact that the U.S. got a version in which Mel (and everybody else’s) voices had been dubbed over by Yanks.  Something about how the U.S. public wouldn’t have known what to do with a movie in which Australians were yammering on the entire time.  In fact, it was only with the release of the Mad Max DVD a few years back that we watch the movie without it sounding like a bad Hong Kong martial arts flick.

At any rate, we open with has to be one of the greatest auto chases in cinema history—”I am a fuel injected suicide machine!”—in which we see Max go head to head with the Night Rider, in a move that presaged the ending of Road Warrior where he collides full-on with the Humungous’ vehicle.  I love the way throughout most of the chase sequence Max just SITS THERE, listening on the radio as the chaos draws closer and the good guys get run off the road. #$# genius.   Spruce up your Monday by reliving the magic:

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

Fellow SF Novelist Dave Freer is emigrating from South Africa to Australia, but the costs of quarantine and transport for his four pets run to 19K. He’s set up a special storytellers bowl site where you can contribute $ to an ongoing novel he’s working on; please consider doing so, as those pet-owners out there know how hard it would be to leave an animal behind.

And speaking of animals, there will be a Special Pet Announcement on this site shortly.  The search for Spartacus’ successor is over!  Stay tuned for details.

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

REPEAT, MAJOR SPOILERS

SPOILER-PACKED TEXT BEGINS:

I gather Tarantino regards this as his masterpiece, and that he rewrote it about 20 times; it shows.  The script borders on genius, and has to be one of the best things Tarantino’s written in years. . . I found a copy here; it’s so demented that when it was first leaked, people wondered if it was a hoax.  But as we all found out, it turns out that yes, Tarantino really does kill Hitler, and bring the war to an end in 1944.  You have to admire the balls of someone willing to get on the Alternative History Bus and ride it past the very last stop, subverting (and celebrating) every single WWII movie stereotype along the way:  the Elegant Evil Nazi, the Redneck American Soldier, the European Femme Fatale . . . all of it gets whirled up into a giant melting pot brought to a boil just in time for the final insane shootout.  It was a little surreal to watch all this from the balcony of the Uptown Theater (also known as the Rat-town, in celebration of all the actual rats that live there), and the audience was eating it up.

Of course, in real life, Hitler was a damn sight harder to kill than this, which is why he lived as long as he did.  There’s a great book, called (appropriately enough) KILLING HITLER which gets into just how well-guarded he was, and how many assasination plots fell short, not that you’d need to read it to know that Hitler wouldn’t have hung out in the balcony of a Parisian theater with the entire Nazi high command while not a single soldier patrolled the hallways outside.  But whatever.  QT can do what he wants, and I for one can’t wait to get my hands on the DVD so I can learn about all the coy little references that sailed over my head while I was trying to take it all in.

Next up:  District 9!

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

“Think globally, act locally”—last week, I participated in a MeetUp of local D.C. bloggers, all of them worth checking out:

http://jadxia.livejournal.com/ –the legendary Jade Pages
http://thispersonstinks.wordpress.com — the Tao of Tracy T.
http://Durosia.com — “unrestricted thought”
http://jenesaisrein.blogspot.com — musings about DC and everything (politics, food, the environment…)
http://www.freeagentwriter.com — helping companies and writers thrive
http://www.feedbacksecrets.com — strategies and techniques for establishing your online business
http://NotionsCapital.com — ideas and events on culture in DC
http://knightleyemma.wordpress.com — music, movies, and tv
http://www.freeindc.blogspot.com — free and cheap things in DC
www.joelogon.com/blog — dumb things I have done lately
http://swordandthescript.blogspot.com/ — A blog that studies the application of marketing and PR.

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.

One of the highlights for me at ComicCon was meeting Richie Dent, a up-and-coming writer who landed a deal for his graphic novel the hard way, partnering with an artist as hungry as he is, and then putting together more than a hundred pages of graphic novel goodness based on a screenplay that got to the quarterfinal round in the Francis Ford Coppola competition.   The Shepherd’s Eye is a “Minority Report style futuristic Sci-fi thriller meets government conspiracy as a woman and a young boy become the key players in a battle to save the earth from the destructive forces of greed.” He’s got some cool art over on his website, so check it out. This is one to watch.

Originally published at autumnrain2110.com . You can comment here or there.