January 2020

Wood, Fenton. The City of Illusions. Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2019. ASIN B082692JTX.

This is the fourth short novel/novella (148 pages) in the author's Yankee Republic series. I described the first, Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves (May 2019), as “utterly charming”, and the second, Five Million Watts (June 2019), “enchanting”. The third, The Tower of the Bear (October 2019), takes Philo from the depths of the ocean to the Great Tree in the exotic West.

Here, the story continues as Philo reaches the Tree, meets its Guardian, “the largest, ugliest, and smelliest bear” he has ever seen, not to mention the most voluble and endowed with the wit of eternity, and explores the Tree, which holds gateways to other times and places, where Philo must confront a test which has defeated many heroes who have come this way before. Exploring the Tree, he learns of the distant past and future, of the Ancient Marauder and Viridios before the dawn of history, and of the War that changed the course of time.

Continuing his hero's quest, he ventures further westward along the Tyrant's Road into the desert of the Valley of Death. There he will learn the fate of the Tyrant and his enthralled followers and, if you haven't figured it out already, you will probably now understand where Philo's timeline diverged from our own. A hero must have a companion, and it is in the desert, after doing a good deed, that he meets his: a teddy bear, Made in Japan—but a very special teddy bear, as he will learn as the journey progresses.

Finally, he arrives at the Valley of the Angels, with pavement stretching to the horizon and cloaked in an acrid yellow mist that obscures visibility and irritates the eyes and throat. There he finds the legendary City of Illusions, where he is confronted by a series of diabolical abusement park attractions where his wit, courage, and Teddy's formidable powers will be tested to the utmost with death the price of failure. Victory can lead to the storied Bullet Train, the prize he needs to save radio station 2XG and possibly the world, and the next step in his quest.

As the fourth installment in what is projected to be one long story spanning five volumes, if you pick this up cold it will probably strike you as a bunch of disconnected adventures and puzzles each of which might as well be a stand-alone short-short story. As they unfold, only occasionally do you see a connection with the origins of the story or Philo's quest, although when they do appear (as in the linkage between the Library of Infinity and the Library of Ouroboros in The Tower of the Bear) they are a delight. It is only toward the end that you begin to see the threads converging toward what promises to be a stirring conclusion to a young adult classic enjoyable by all ages. I haven't read a work of science fiction so closely patterned on the hero's journey as described in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces since Rudy Rucker's 2004 novel Frek and the Elixir; this is not a criticism but a compliment—the eternal hero myth has always made for tales which not only entertain but endure.

This book is currently available only in a Kindle edition. The fifth and final volume of the Yankee Republic saga is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2020.

 

Virk, Rizwan. The Simulation Hypothesis. Cambridge, MA: Bayview Books, 2019. ISBN 978-0-9830569-0-4.

Before electronic computers had actually been built, Alan Turing mathematically proved a fundamental and profound property of them which has been exploited in innumerable ways as they developed and became central to many of our technologies and social interactions. A computer of sufficient complexity, which is, in fact, not very complex at all, can simulate any other computer or, in fact, any deterministic physical process whatsoever, as long as it is understood sufficiently to model in computer code and the system being modelled does not exceed the capacity of the computer—or the patience of the person running the simulation. Indeed, some of the first applications of computers were in modelling physical processes such as the flight of ballistic projectiles and the hydrodynamics of explosions. Today, computer modelling and simulation have become integral to the design process for everything from high-performance aircraft to toys, and many commonplace objects in the modern world could not have been designed without the aid of computer modelling. It certainly changed my life.

Almost as soon as there were computers, programmers realised that their ability to simulate, well…anything made them formidable engines for playing games. Computer gaming was originally mostly a furtive and disreputable activity, perpetrated by gnome-like programmers on the graveyard shift while the computer was idle, having finished the “serious” work paid for by unimaginative customers (who actually rose before the crack of noon!). But as the microelectronics revolution slashed the size and price of computers to something individuals could afford for their own use (or, according to the computer Puritans of the previous generations, abuse), computer gaming came into its own. Some modern computer games have production and promotion budgets larger than Hollywood movies, and their characters and story lines have entered the popular culture. As computer power has grown exponentially, games have progressed from tic-tac-toe, through text-based adventures, simple icon character video games, to realistic three dimensional simulated worlds in which the players explore a huge world, interact with other human players and non-player characters (endowed with their own rudimentary artificial intelligence) within the game, and in some games and simulated worlds, have the ability to extend the simulation by building their own objects with which others can interact. If your last experience with computer games was the Colossal Cave Adventure or Pac-Man, try a modern game or virtual world—you may be amazed.

Computer simulations on affordable hardware are already beginning to approach the limits of human visual resolution, perception of smooth motion, and audio bandwidth and localisation, and some procedurally-generated game worlds are larger than a human can explore in a million lifetimes. Computer power is forecast to continue to grow exponentially for the foreseeable future and, in the Roaring Twenties, permit solving a number of problems through “brute force”—simply throwing computing power and massive data storage capacity at them without any deeper fundamental understanding of the problem. Progress in the last decade in areas such as speech recognition, autonomous vehicles, and games such as Go are precursors to what will be possible in the next.

This raises the question of how far it can go—can computer simulations actually approach the complexity of the real world, with characters within the simulation experiencing lives as rich and complex as our own and, perhaps, not even suspect they're living in a simulation? And then, we must inevitably speculate whether we are living in a simulation, created by beings at an outer level (perhaps themselves many levels deep in a tree of simulations which may not even have a top level). There are many reasons to suspect that we are living in a simulation; for many years I have said it's “more likely than not”, and others, ranging from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk and Scott Adams, have shared my suspicion. The argument is very simple.

First of all, will we eventually build computers sufficiently powerful to provide an authentic simulated world to conscious beings living within it? There is no reason to doubt that we will: no law of physics prevents us from increasing the power of our computers by at least a factor of a trillion from those of today, and the lesson of technological progress has been that technologies usually converge upon their physical limits and new markets emerge as they do, using their capabilities and funding further development. Continued growth in computing power at the rate of the last fifty years should begin to make such simulations possible some time between 2030 and the end of this century.

So, when we have the computing power, will we use it to build these simulations? Of course we will! We have been building simulations to observe their behaviour and interact with them, for ludic and other purposes, ever since the first primitive computers were built. The market for games has only grown as they have become more complex and realistic. Imagine what if will be like when anybody can create a whole society—a whole universe—then let it run to see what happens, or enter it and experience it first-hand. History will become an experimental science. What would have happened if the Roman empire had discovered the electromagnetic telegraph? Let's see!—and while we're at it, run a thousand simulations with slightly different initial conditions and compare them.

Finally, if we can create these simulations which are so realistic the characters within them perceive them as their real world, why should we dare such non-Copernican arrogance as to assume we're at the top level and not ourselves within a simulation? I believe we shouldn't, and to me the argument that clinches it is what I call the “branching factor”. Just as we will eventually, indeed, I'd say, inevitably, create simulations as rich as our own world, so will the beings within them create their own. Certainly, once we can, we'll create many, many simulations: as many or more as there are running copies of present-day video games, and the beings in those simulations will as well. But if each simulation creates its own simulations in a number (the branching factor) even a tiny bit larger than one, there will be exponentially more observers in these layers on layers of simulations than at the top level. And, consequently, as non-privileged observers according to the Copernican Principle, it is not just more likely than not, but overwhelmingly probable that we are living in a simulation.

The author of this book, founder of Play Labs @ MIT, a start-up accelerator which works in conjunction with the MIT Game Lab, and producer of a number of video games, has come to the same conclusion, and presents the case for the simulation hypothesis from three perspectives: computer science, physics, and the unexplained (mysticism, esoteric traditions, and those enduring phenomena and little details which don't make any sense when viewed from the conventional perspective but may seem perfectly reasonable once we accept we're characters in somebody else's simulation).

Computer Science. The development of computer games is sketched from their origins to today's three-dimensional photorealistic multiplayer environments into the future, where virtual reality mediated by goggles, gloves, and crude haptic interfaces will give way to direct neural interfaces to the brain. This may seem icky and implausible, but so were pierced lips, eyebrows, and tongues when I was growing up, and now I see them everywhere, without the benefit of directly jacking in to a world larger, more flexible, and more interesting than the dingy one we inhabit. This is sketched in eleven steps, the last of which is the Simulation Point, where we achieve the ability to create simulations which “are virtually indistinguishable from a base physical reality.” He describes, “The Great Simulation is a video game that is so real because it is based upon incredibly sophisticated models and rendering techniques that are beamed directly into the mind of the players, and the actions of artificially generated consciousness are indistinguishable from real players.” He identifies nine technical hurdles which must be overcome in order to arrive at the Simulation Point. Some, such as simulating a sufficiently large world and number of players, are challenging but straightforward scaling up of things we're already doing, which will become possible as computer power increases. Others, such as rendering completely realistic objects and incorporating physical sensations, exist in crude form today but will require major improvements we don't yet know how to build, while technologies such as interacting directly with the human brain and mind and endowing non-player characters within the simulation with consciousness and human-level intelligence have yet to be invented.

Physics. There are a number of aspects of the physical universe, most revealed as we have observed at very small and very large scales, and at speeds and time intervals far removed from those with which we and our ancestors evolved, that appear counterintuitive if not bizarre to our expectations from everyday life. We can express them precisely in our equations of quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, electrodynamics, and the standard models of particle physics and cosmology, and make predictions which accurately describe our observations, but when we try to understand what is really going on or why it works that way, it often seems puzzling and sometimes downright weird.

But as the author points out, when you view these aspects of the physical universe through the eyes of a computer game designer or builder of computer models of complex physical systems, they look oddly familiar. Here is how I expressed it thirteen years ago in my 2006 review of Leonard Susskind's The Cosmic Landscape:

What would we expect to see if we inhabited a simulation? Well, there would probably be a discrete time step and granularity in position fixed by the time and position resolution of the simulation—check, and check: the Planck time and distance appear to behave this way in our universe. There would probably be an absolute speed limit to constrain the extent we could directly explore and impose a locality constraint on propagating updates throughout the simulation—check: speed of light. There would be a limit on the extent of the universe we could observe—check: the Hubble radius is an absolute horizon we cannot penetrate, and the last scattering surface of the cosmic background radiation limits electromagnetic observation to a still smaller radius. There would be a limit on the accuracy of physical measurements due to the finite precision of the computation in the simulation—check: Heisenberg uncertainty principle—and, as in games, randomness would be used as a fudge when precision limits were hit—check: quantum mechanics.

Indeed, these curious physical phenomena begin to look precisely like the kinds of optimisations game and simulation designers employ to cope with the limited computer power at their disposal. The author notes, “Quantum Indeterminacy, a fundamental principle of the material world, sounds remarkably similar to optimizations made in the world of computer graphics and video games, which are rendered on individual machines (computers or mobile phones) but which have conscious players controlling and observing the action.”

One of the key tricks in complex video games is “conditional rendering”: you don't generate the images or worry about the physics of objects which the player can't see from their current location. This is remarkably like quantum mechanics, where the act of observation reduces the state vector to a discrete measurement and collapses its complex extent in space and time into a known value. In video games, you only need to evaluate when somebody's looking. Quantum mechanics is largely encapsulated in the tweet by Aatish Bhatia, “Don't look: waves. Look: particles.” It seems our universe works the same way. Curious, isn't it?

Similarly, games and simulations exploit discreteness and locality to reduce the amount of computation they must perform. The world is approximated by a grid, and actions in one place can only affect neighbours and propagate at a limited speed. This is precisely what we see in field theories and relativity, where actions are local and no influence can propagate faster than the speed of light.

The unexplained. Many esoteric and mystic traditions, especially those of the East such as Hinduism and Buddhism, describe the world as something like a dream, in which we act and our actions affect our permanent identity in subsequent lives. Western traditions, including the Abrahamic religions, see life in this world as a temporary thing, where our acts will be judged by a God who is outside the world. These beliefs come naturally to humans, and while there is little or no evidence for them in conventional science, it is safe to say that far more people believe and have believed these things and have structured their lives accordingly than those who have adopted the strictly rationalistic viewpoint one might deduce from deterministic, reductionist science.

And yet, once again, in video games we see the emergence of a model which is entirely compatible with these ancient traditions. Characters live multiple lives, and their actions in the game cause changes in a state (“karma”) which is recorded outside the game and affects what they can do. They complete quests, which affect their karma and capabilities, and upon completing a quest, they may graduate (be reincarnated) into a new life (level), in which they retain their karma from previous lives. Just as players who exist outside the game can affect events and characters within it, various traditions describe actors outside the natural universe (hence “supernatural”) such as gods, angels, demons, and spirits of the departed, interacting with people within the universe and occasionally causing physical manifestations (miracles, apparitions, hauntings, UFOs, etc.). And perhaps the simulation hypothesis can even explain absence of evidence: the sky in a video game may contain a multitude of stars and galaxies, but that doesn't mean each is populated by its own video game universe filled with characters playing the same game. No, it's just scenery, there to be admired but with which you can't interact. Maybe that's why we've never detected signals from an alien civilisation: the stars are just procedurally generated scenery to make our telescopic views more interesting.

The author concludes with a summary of the evidence we may be living in a simulation and the objection of sceptics (such that a computer as large and complicated as the universe would be required to simulate a universe). He suggests experiments which might detect the granularity of the simulation and provide concrete evidence the universe is not the continuum most of science has assumed it to be. A final chapter presents speculations as to who might be running the simulation, what their motives might be for doing so, and the nature of beings within the simulation. I'm cautious of delusions of grandeur in making such guesses. I'll bet we're a science fair project, and I'll further bet that within a century we'll be creating a multitude of simulated universes for our own science fair projects.

 

February 2020

Ryan, Craig. Sonic Wind. New York: Livewright Publishing, 2018. ISBN 978-0-631-49191-0.

Prior to the 1920s, most aircraft pilots had no means of escape in case of mechanical failure or accident. During World War I, one out of every eight combat pilots was shot down or killed in a crash. Germany experimented with cumbersome parachutes stored in bags in a compartment behind the pilot, but these often failed to deploy properly if the plane was in a spin or became tangled in the aircraft structure after deployment. Still, they did save the lives of a number of German pilots. (On the other hand, one of them was Hermann Göring.) Allied pilots were not issued parachutes because their commanders feared the loss of planes more than pilots, and worried pilots would jump rather than try to save a damaged plane.

From the start of World War II, military aircrews were routinely issued parachutes, and backpack or seat pack parachutes with ripcord deployment had become highly reliable. As the war progressed and aircraft performance rapidly increased, it became clear that although parachutes could save air crew, physically escaping from a damaged plane at high velocities and altitudes was a formidable problem. The U.S. P-51 Mustang, of which more than 15,000 were built, cruised at 580 km/hour and had a maximum speed of 700 km/hour. It was physically impossible for a pilot to escape from the cockpit into such a wind blast, and even if they managed to do so, they would likely be torn apart by collision with the fuselage or tail an instant later. A pilot's only hope was that the plane would slow to a speed at which escape was possible before crashing into the ground, bursting into flames, or disintegrating.

In 1944, when the Nazi Luftwaffe introduced the first operational jet fighter, the Messerschmitt Me 262, capable of 900 km/hour flight, they experimented with explosive-powered ejection seats, but never installed them in this front-line fighter. After the war, with each generation of jet fighters flying faster and higher than the previous, and supersonic performance becoming routine, ejection seats became standard equipment in fighter and high performance bomber aircraft, and saved many lives. Still, by the mid-1950s, one in four pilots who tried to eject was killed in the attempt. It was widely believed that the forces of blasting a pilot out of the cockpit, rapid deceleration by atmospheric friction, and wind blast at transonic and supersonic speeds were simply too much for the human body to endure. Some aircraft designers envisioned “escape capsules” in which the entire crew cabin would be ejected and recovered, but these systems were seen to be (and proved when tried) heavy and potentially unreliable.

John Paul Stapp's family came from the Hill Country of south central Texas, but he was born in Brazil in 1910 while his parents were Baptist missionaries there. After high school in Texas, he enrolled in Baylor University in Waco, initially studying music but then switching his major to pre-med. Upon graduation in 1931 with a major in zoology and minor in chemistry, he found that in the depths of the Depression there was no hope of affording medical school, so he enrolled in an M.A. program in biophysics, occasionally dining on pigeons he trapped on the roof of the biology building and grilled over Bunsen burners in the laboratory. He then entered a Ph.D. program in biophysics at the University of Texas, Austin, receiving his doctorate in 1940. Before leaving Austin, he was accepted by the medical school at the University of Minnesota, which promised him employment as a research assistant and instructor to fund his tuition.

In October 1940, with the possibility that war in Europe and the Pacific might entangle the country, the U.S. began military conscription. When the numbers were drawn from the fishbowl, Stapp's was 15th from the top. As a medical student, he received an initial deferment, but when it expired he joined the regular Army under a special program for medical students. While completing medical school, he would receive private's pay of US$ 32 a month (around US$7000 a year in today's money), which would help enormously with tuition and expenses. In December 1943 Stapp received his M.D. degree and passed the Minnesota medical board examination. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps and placed on suspended active duty for his internship in a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, where he delivered 200 babies and assisted in 225 surgeries. He found he delighted in emergency and hands-on medicine. In the fall of 1944 he went on full active duty and began training in field medicine. After training, he was assigned as a medical officer at Lincoln Army Air Field in Nebraska, where he would combine graduate training with hospital work.

Stapp had been fascinated by aviation and the exploits of pioneers such as Charles Lindbergh and the stratospheric balloon explorers of the 1930s, and found working at an air base fascinating, sometimes arranging to ride along in training missions with crews he'd treated in the hospital. In April 1945 he was accepted by the Army School of Aviation Medicine in San Antonio, where he and his class of 150 received intense instruction in all aspects of human physiology relating to flight. After graduation and a variety of assignments as a medical officer, he was promoted to captain and invited to apply to the Aero Medical Laboratory at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio for a research position in the Biophysics Branch. On the one hand, this was an ideal position for the intellectually curious Stapp, as it would combine his Ph.D. work and M.D. career. On the other, he had only eight months remaining in his service commitment, and he had long planned to leave the Army to pursue a career as a private physician. Stapp opted for the challenge and took the post at Wright.

Starting work, he was assigned to the pilot escape technology program as a “project engineer”. He protested, “I'm a doctor, not an engineer!”, but settled into the work and, being fluent in German, was assigned to review 1200 pages of captured German documents relating to crew ejection systems and their effects upon human subjects. Stapp was appalled by the Nazis' callous human experimentation, but, when informed that the Army intended to destroy the documents after his study was complete, took the initiative to preserve them, both for their scientific content and as evidence of the crimes of those whose research produced it.

The German research and the work of the branch in which Stapp worked had begun to persuade him that the human body was far more robust than had been assumed by aircraft designers and those exploring escape systems. It was well established by experiments in centrifuges at Wright and other laboratories that the maximum long-term human tolerance for acceleration (g-force) without special equipment or training was around six times that of Earth's gravity, or 6 g. Beyond that, subjects would lose consciousness, experience tissue damage due to lack of blood flow, or structural damage to the skeleton and/or internal organs. However, a pilot ejecting from a high performance aircraft experienced something entirely different from a subject riding in a centrifuge. Instead of a steady crush by, say, 6 g, the pilot would be subjected to much higher accelerations, perhaps on the order of 20—40 g, with an onset of acceleration (“jerk”) of 500 g per second. The initial blast of the mortar or rockets firing the seat out of the cockpit would be followed by a sharp pulse of deceleration as the pilot was braked from flight speed by air friction, during which he would be subjected to wind blast potentially ten times as strong as any hurricane. Was this survivable at all, and if so, what techniques and protective equipment might increase a pilot's chances of enduring the ordeal?

While pondering these problems and thinking about ways to research possible solutions under controlled conditions, Stapp undertook another challenge: providing supplemental oxygen to crews at very high altitudes. Stapp volunteered as a test subject as well as medical supervisor and began flight tests with a liquid oxygen breathing system on high altitude B-17 flights. Crews flying at these altitudes in unpressurised aircraft during World War II and afterward had frequently experienced symptoms similar to “the bends” (decompression sickness) which struck divers who ascended too quickly from deep waters. Stapp diagnosed the cause as identical: nitrogen dissolved in the blood coming out of solution as bubbles and pooling in joints and other bodily tissues. He devised a procedure of oxygen pre-breathing, where crews would breathe pure oxygen for half an hour before taking off on a high altitude mission, which completely eliminated the decompression symptoms. The identical procedure is used today by astronauts before they begin extravehicular activities in space suits using pure oxygen at low pressure.

From the German documents he studied, Stapp had become convinced that the tool he needed to study crew escape was a rocket propelled sled, running on rails, with a brake mechanism that could be adjusted to provide a precisely calibrated deceleration profile. When he learned that the Army was planning to build such a device at Muroc Army Air Base in California, he arranged to be put in charge of Project MX-981 with a charter to study the “effects of deceleration forces of high magnitude on man”. He arrived at Muroc in March 1947, along with eight crash test dummies to be used in the experiments. If Muroc (now Edwards Air Force Base) of the era was legendary for its Wild West accommodations (Chuck Yeager would not make his first supersonic flight there until October of that year), the North Base, where Stapp's project was located, was something out of Death Valley Days. When Stapp arrived to meet his team of contractors from Northrop Corporation they struck the always buttoned-down Stapp like a “band of pirates”. He also discovered the site had no electricity, no running water, no telephone, and no usable buildings. The Army, preoccupied with its glamourous high speed aviation projects, had neither interest in what amounted to a rocket powered train with a very short track, nor much inclination to provide it the necessary resources. Stapp commenced what he came to call the Battle of Muroc, mastering the ancient military art of scrounging and exchanging favours to get the material he needed and the work done.

As he settled in at Muroc and became acquainted with his fellow denizens of the desert, he was appalled to learn that the Army provided medical care only for active duty personnel, and that civilian contractors and families of servicemen, even the exalted test pilots, had to drive 45 miles to the nearest clinic. He began to provide informal medical care to all comers, often making house calls in the evening hours on his wheezing scooter, in return for home cooked dinners. This built up a network of people who owed him favours, which he was ready to call in when he needed something. He called this the “Curbstone Clinic”, and would continue the practice throughout his career. After some shaky starts and spectacular failures due to unreliable surplus JATO rockets, the equipment was ready to begin experiments with crash test dummies.

Stapp had always intended that the tests with dummies would be simply a qualification phase for later tests with human and animal subjects, and he would ask no volunteer to do something he wouldn't try himself. Starting in December, 1947, Stapp personally made increasingly ambitious runs on the sled, starting at “only” 10 g deceleration and building to 35 g with an onset jerk of 1000 g/second. The runs left him dizzy and aching, but very much alive and quick to recover. Although far from approximating the conditions of ejection from a supersonic fighter, he had already demonstrated that the Air Force's requirements for cockpit seats and crew restraints, often designed around a 6 g maximum shock, were inadequate and deadly. Stapp was about to start making waves, and some of the push-back would be daunting. He was ordered to cease all human experimentation for at least three months.

Many Air Force officers (for the Air Force had been founded in September 1947 and taken charge of the base) would have saluted and returned to testing with instrumented dummies. Stapp, instead, figured out how to obtain thirty adult chimpanzees, along with the facilities needed to house and feed them, and resumed his testing, with anæsthetised animals, up to the limits of survival. Stapp was, and remained throughout his career, a strong advocate for the value of animal experimentation. It was a grim business, but at the time Muroc was frequently losing test pilots at the rate of one a week, and Stapp believed that many of these fatalities were unnecessary and could be avoided with proper escape and survival equipment, which could only be qualified through animal and cautious human experimentation.

By September 1949, approval to resume human testing was given, and Stapp prepared for new, more ambitious runs, with the subject facing forward on the sled instead of backward as before, which would more accurately simulate the forces in an ejection or crash and expose him directly to air blast. He rapidly ramped up the runs, reaching 32 g without permanent injury. To avoid alarm on the part of his superiors in Dayton, a “slight error” was introduced in the reports he sent: all g loads from the runs were accidentally divided by two.

Meanwhile, Stapp was ramping up his lobbying for safer seats in Air Force transport planes, arguing that the existing 6 g forward facing seats and belts were next to useless in many survivable crashes. Finally, with the support of twenty Air Force generals, in 1950 the Air Force adopted a new rear-facing standard seat and belt rated for 16 g which weighed only two pounds more than those it replaced. The 16 g requirement (although not the rearward-facing orientation, which proved unacceptable to paying customers) remains the standard for airliner seats today, seven decades later.

In June, 1951, Stapp made his final run on the MX-981 sled at what was now Edwards Air Force Base, decelerating from 180 miles per hour (290 km/h) to zero in 31 feet (9.45 metres), at 45.4 g, a force comparable to many aircraft and automobile accidents. The limits of the 2000 foot track (and the human body) had been reached. But Stapp was not done: the frontier of higher speeds remained. Shortly thereafter, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and given command of what was called the Special Projects Section of the Biophysics Branch of the Aero Medical Laboratory. He was reassigned to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, where the Air Force was expanding its existing 3500 foot rocket sled track to 15,000 feet (4.6 km), allowing testing at supersonic speeds. (The Holloman High Speed Test Track remains in service today, having been extended in a series of upgrades over the years to a total of 50,917 feet (15.5 km) and a maximum speed of Mach 8.6, or 2.9 km/sec [6453 miles per hour].)

Northrop was also contractor for the Holloman sled, and devised a water brake system which would be more reliable and permit any desired deceleration profile to be configured for a test. An upgraded instrumentation system would record photographic and acceleration measurements with much better precision than anything at Edwards. The new sled was believed to be easily capable of supersonic speeds and was named Sonic Wind. By March 1954, the preliminary testing was complete and Stapp boarded the sled. He experienced a 12 g acceleration to the peak speed of 421 miles per hour, then 22 g deceleration to a full stop, all in less than eight seconds. He walked away, albeit a little wobbly. He had easily broken the previous land speed record of 402 miles per hour and become “the fastest man on Earth.” But he was not done.

On December 10th, 1954, Stapp rode Sonic Wind, powered by nine solid rocket motors. Five seconds later, he was travelling at 639 miles per hour, faster than the .45 ACP round fired by the M1911A1 service pistol he was issued as an officer, around Mach 0.85 at the elevation of Holloman. The water brakes brought him to a stop in 1.37 seconds, a deceleration of 46.2 g. He survived, walked away (albeit just few steps to the ambulance), and although suffering from vision problems for some time afterward, experienced no lasting consequences. It was estimated that the forces he survived were equivalent to those from ejecting at an altitude of 36,000 feet from an airplane travelling at 1800 miles per hour (Mach 2.7). As this was faster than any plane the Air Force had in service or on the drawing board, he proved that, given a suitable ejection seat, restraints, and survival equipment, pilots could escape and survive even under these extreme circumstances. The Big Run, as it came to be called, would be Stapp's last ride on a rocket sled and the last human experiment on the Holloman track. He had achieved the goal he set for himself in 1947: to demonstrate that crew survival in high performance aircraft accidents was a matter of creative and careful engineering, not the limits of the human body. The manned land speed record set on the Big Run would stand until October 1983, when Richard Noble's jet powered Thrust2 car set a new record of 650.88 miles per hour in the Nevada desert. Stapp remarked at the time that Noble had gone faster but had not, however, stopped from that speed in less than a second and a half.

From the early days of Stapp's work on human tolerance to deceleration, he was acutely aware that the forces experienced by air crew in crashes were essentially identical to those in automobile accidents. As a physician interested in public health issues, he had noted that the Air Force was losing more personnel killed in car crashes than in airplane accidents. When the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) adopted his recommendation and installed 16 g aft-facing seats in its planes, deaths and injuries from crashes had fallen by two-thirds. By the mid 1950s, the U.S. was suffering around 35,000 fatalities per year in automobile accidents—comparable to a medium-sized war—year in and year out, yet next to nothing had been done to make automobiles crash resistant and protect their occupants in case of an accident. Even the simplest precaution of providing lap belts, standard in aviation for decades, had not been taken; seats were prone to come loose and fly forward even in mild impacts; steering columns and dashboards seemed almost designed to impale drivers and passengers; and “safety” glass often shredded the flesh of those projected through it in a collision.

In 1954, Stapp turned some of his celebrity as the fastest man on Earth toward the issue of automobile safety and organised, in conjunction with the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), the first Automobile Crash Research Field Demonstration and Conference, which was attended by representatives of all of the major auto manufacturers, medical professional societies, and public health researchers. Stapp and the SAE insisted that the press be excluded: he wanted engineers from the automakers free to speak without fear their candid statements about the safety of their employers' products would be reported sensationally. Stapp conducted a demonstration in which a car was towed into a fixed barrier at 40 miles an hour with two dummies wearing restraints and two others just sitting in the seats. The belted dummies would have walked away, while the others flew into the barrier and would have almost certainly been killed. It was at this conference that many of the attendees first heard the term “second collision”. In car crashes, it was often not the crash of the car into another car or a barrier that killed the occupants: it was their colliding with dangerous items within the vehicle after flying loose following the initial impact.

Despite keeping the conference out of the press, word of Stapp's vocal advocacy of automobile safety quickly reached the auto manufacturers, who were concerned both about the marketing impact of the public becoming aware not only of the high level of deaths on the highways but also the inherent (and unnecessary) danger of their products to those who bought them, and also the bottom-line impact of potential government-imposed safety mandates. Auto state congressmen got the message, and the Air Force heard it from them: the Air Force threatened to zero out aeromedical research funding unless car crash testing was terminated. It was.

Still, the conferences continued (they would eventually be renamed “Stapp Car Crash Conferences”), and Stapp became a regular witness before congressional committees investigating automobile safety. Testifying about whether it was appropriate for Air Force funds to be used in studying car crashes, in 1957 he said, “I have done autopsies on aircrew members who died in airplane crashes. I have also performed autopsies on aircrew members who died in car crashes. The only conclusion I could come to is that they were just as dead after a car crash as they were after an airplane crash.” He went on to note that simply mandating seatbelts in Air Force ground vehicles would save around 125 lives a year, and if they were installed and used by the occupants of all cars in the U.S., around 20,000 lives—more than half the death toll—could be saved. When he appeared before congress, he bore not only the credentials of a medical doctor, Ph.D. in biophysics, Air Force colonel, but the man who had survived more violent decelerations equivalent to a car crash than any other human.

It was not until the 1960s that a series of mandates were adopted in the U.S. which required seat belts, first in the front seat and eventually for all passengers. Testifying in 1963 at a hearing to establish a National Accident Prevention Center, Stapp noted that the Air Force, which had already adopted and required the use of seat belts, had reduced fatalities in ground vehicle accidents by 50% with savings estimated at US$ 12 million per year. In September 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed two bills, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act, creating federal agencies to research vehicle safety and mandate standards. Standing behind the president was Colonel John Paul Stapp: the long battle was, if not won, at least joined.

Stapp had hoped for a final promotion to flag rank before retirement, but concluded he had stepped on too many toes and ignored too many Pentagon directives during his career to ever wear that star. In 1967, he was loaned by the Air Force to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to continue his auto safety research. He retired from the Air Force in 1970 with the rank of full colonel and in 1973 left what he had come to call the “District of Corruption” to return to New Mexico. He continued to attend and participate in the Stapp Car Crash Conferences, his last being the Forty-Third in 1999. He died at his home in Alamogordo, New Mexico in November that year at the age of 89.

In his later years, John Paul Stapp referred to the survivors of car crashes who would have died without the equipment designed and eventually mandated because of his research as “the ghosts that never happened”. In 1947, when Stapp began his research on deceleration and crash survival, motor vehicle deaths in the U.S. were 8.41 per 100 million vehicle miles travelled (VMT). When he retired from the Air Force in 1970, after adoption of the first round of seat belt and auto design standards, they had fallen to 4.74 (which covers the entire fleet, many of which were made before the adoption of the new standards). At the time of his death in 1999, fatalities per 100 million VMT were 1.55, an improvement in safety of more than a factor of five. Now, Stapp was not solely responsible for this, but it was his putting his own life on the line which showed that crashes many considered “unsurvivable” were nothing of the sort with proper engineering and knowledge of human physiology. There are thousands of aircrew and tens or hundreds of thousands of “ghosts that never happened” who owe their lives to John Paul Stapp. Maybe you know one; maybe you are one. It's worth a moment remembering and giving thanks to the largely forgotten man who saved them.

 

March 2020

Schlichter, Kurt. Collapse. El Segundo, CA: Kurt Schlichter, 2019. ISBN 978-1-7341993-0-7.

In his 2016 novel People's Republic (November 2018), the author describes North America in the early 2030s, a decade after the present Cold Civil War turned hot and the United States split into the People's Republic of North America (PRNA) on the coasts and the upper Midwest, with the rest continuing to call itself the United States, its capital now in Dallas, purging itself of the “progressive” corruption which was now unleashed without limits in the PRNA. In that book we met Kelly Turnbull, retired from the military and veteran of the border conflicts at the time of the Split, who made his living performing perilous missions in the PRNA to rescue those trapped inside its borders.

In this, the fourth Kelly Turnbull novel (I have not yet read the second, Indian Country, nor the third, Wildfire), the situation in the PRNA has, as inevitably happens in socialist paradises, continued to deteriorate, and by 2035 its sullen population is growing increasingly restive and willing to go to extremes to escape to Mexico, which has built a big, beautiful wall to keep the starving hordes from El Norte overrunning their country. Cartels smuggle refugees from the PRNA into Mexico where they are exploited in factories where they work for peanuts but where, unlike in the PRNA, you could at least buy peanuts.

With its back increasingly to the wall, the PRNA ruling class has come to believe their only hope is what they view as an alliance with China, and the Chinese see as colonisation, subjugation, and a foothold on the American continent. The PRNA and the People's Republic of China have much in common in overall economic organisation, although the latter is patriotic, proud, competent, and militarily strong, while the PRNA is paralysed by progressive self-hate, grievance group conflict, and compelled obeisance to counterfactual fantasies.

China already has assimilated Hawaii from the PRNA as a formal colony, and runs military bases on the West Coast as effectively sovereign territory. As the story opens, the military balance is about to shift toward great peril to the remaining United States, as the PRNA prepares to turn over a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier they inherited in the Split to China, which will allow it to project power in the Pacific all the way to the West Coast of North America. At the same time, a Chinese force appears to be massing to garrison the PRNA West Coast capital of San Francisco, allowing the PRNA to hang on and escalating any action by the United States against the PRNA into a direct conflict with China.

Kelly Turnbull, having earned enough from his previous missions to retire, is looking forward to a peaceful life when he is “invited” by the U.S. Army back onto active duty for one last high-stakes mission within the PRNA. The aircraft carrier, the former Theodore Roosevelt, now re-christened Mao is about to become operational, and Turnbull is to infiltrate a renegade computer criminal, Quentin Welliver, now locked up in a Supermax prison, to work his software magic to destroy the carrier's power plant. Welliver is anything but cooperative, but then Turnbull can be very persuasive, and the unlikely team undertake the perilous entry to the PRNA and on-site hacking of the carrier.

As is usually the case when Kelly Turnbull is involved, things go sideways and highly kinetic, much to the dismay of Welliver, who is a fearsome warrior behind a keyboard, but less so when the .45 hollow points start to fly. Just when everything seems wrapped up, Turnbull and Welliver are “recruited” by the commando team they thought had been sent to extract them for an even more desperate but essential mission: preventing the Chinese fleet from landing in San Francisco.

If you like your thrillers with lots of action and relatively little reflection about what it all means, this is the book for you. Turnbull considers all of the People's Republic slavers and their willing minions as enemies and a waste of biochemicals better used to fertilise crops, and has no hesitation wasting them. The description of the PRNA is often very funny, although when speaking about California, it is already difficult to parody even the current state of affairs. Some references in the book will probably become quickly dated, such as Maxine Waters Pavilion of Social Justice (formerly SoFi Stadium) and the Junipero Serra statue on Interstate 280, whose Christian colonialist head was removed and replaced by an effigy of pre-Split hero Jerry Nadler. There are some delightful whacks at well-deserving figures such as “Vichy Bill” Kristol, founder of the True Conservative Party, which upholds the tradition of defeat with dignity in the PRNA, winning up to 0.4% of the vote and already planning to rally the stalwart aboard its “Ahoy: Cruising to Victory in 2036!” junket.

The story ends with a suitable bang, leaving the question of “what next?” While People's Republic was a remarkably plausible depiction of the situation after the red-blue divide split the country and “progressive” madness went to its logical conclusion, this is more cartoon-like, but great fun nonetheless.

 

April 2020

Shute, Nevil. No Highway. New York: Vintage Books, [1948] 2020. ISBN 978-0-307-47412-4.

The quintessential aviation boffin story from an author who knows his stuff (Nevil Shute Norway ran an aircraft manufacturer in the 1930s). The novel is more interesting and complicated than the movie made from it, which is also excellent.

When I began this Reading List in January 2001, it was just that: a list of every book I'd read, updated as I finished books, without any commentary other than, perhaps, availability information and sources for out-of-print works or those from publishers not available through Amazon.com. As the 2000s progressed, I began to add remarks about many of the books, originally limited to one paragraph, but eventually as the years wore on, expanding to full-blown reviews, some sprawling to four thousand words or more and using the book as the starting point for an extended discussion on topics related to its content.

This is, sadly, to employ a term I usually despise, no longer sustainable. My time has become so entirely consumed by system administration tasks on two Web sites, especially one in which I made the disastrous blunder of basing upon WordPress, the most incompetently and irresponsible piece of…software I have ever encountered in more than fifty years of programming; shuffling papers, filling out forms, and other largely government-mandated bullshit (Can I say that here? It's my site! You bet I can.); and creating content for and participating in discussions on the premier anti-social network on the Web for intelligent people around the globe with wide-ranging interests, I simply no longer have the time to sit down, compose. edit, and publish lengthy reviews (in three locations: here, on Fourmilog, and at Ratburger.org) of every book I read.

But that hasn't kept me from reading books, which is my major recreation and escape from the grinding banality which occupies most of my time. As a consequence, I have accumulated, as of the present time, a total of no fewer than twenty-four books I've finished which are on the waiting list to be reviewed and posted here, and that doesn't count a few more I've set aside before finishing the last chapter and end material so as not to make the situation even worse and compound the feeling of guilt.

So, starting with this superb book, which despite having loved everything by Nevil Shute I've read, I'd never gotten around to reading, this list will return to its roots: a reading list with, at most, brief comments. I have marked a number of books (nine, as of now) as candidates for posts in my monthly Saturday Night Science column at Ratburger.org and, as I write reviews and remarks about them for that feature, I will integrate them back into this list.

To avoid overwhelming readers, I'll clear out the backlog by posting at most a book a day until I've caught up. Happy page-turning!

 

Mowat, Farley. And No Birds Sang. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, [1975] 2012. ISBN 978-1-77100-030-7.

When Canadians were warriors: a personal account of military training and the brutal reality of infantry combat in Italy during World War II.

 

Schatzker, Mark. Steak. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-14-311938-8.

A food and travel writer searches the globe: from Texas, France, Japan, and Argentina; from feedlots to laboratories to remote farms; from “commodity beef” to the rarest specialities, in his quest for the perfect steak.

 

Leinbach, Michael D. and Jonathan H. Ward. Bringing Columbia Home. New York: Arcade Publishing, [2018] 2020. ISBN 978-1-948924-61-0.

Author Michael Leinbach was Launch Director at the Kennedy Space Center when space shuttle orbiter Columbia was lost during its return to Earth on February 1st, 2003. In this personal account, he tells the story of locating, recovering, and reconstructing the debris from the orbiter, searching for and finding the remains of the crew, and learning the lessons, technical and managerial, from the accident.

 

Chiles, Patrick. Frozen Orbit. New York, Baen Publishing, 2020. ISBN 978-1-9821-2430-4.

A covered-up Soviet space spectacular which ended in tragedy opens the door to a breathtaking discovery about the origin of life on Earth.

 

May 2020

Ackroyd, Peter. London Under. New York: Anchor Books, 2011. ISBN 978-0-307-47378-3.

Unlike New York, London grew from a swamp and its structure was moulded by the rivers that fed it. Over millennia, history has accreted in layer after layer as generations built atop the works of their ancestors. Descending into the caverns, buried rivers, sewers, subways, and infrastructure reveals the deep history, architecture and engineering, and legends of a great city.

 

Ringo, John. The Last Centurion. Riverdale, NY: Baen Publishing, 2008. ISBN 978-1-4391-3291-3.

Three interwoven stories chronicle the consequences of a feckless U.S. withdrawal from the Near East leaving a mass of materiel and only one Army company behind to “protect” it, a global pandemic exploding from China which killed a substantial fraction of the world's population, and the onset of a solar-driven little ice age which, combined with a U.S. administration that went far beyond incompetence into outright wrecking of the nation, brought famine to America. Heroism, integrity, and a relentless capacity to see things as they really are the only resources Army officer “Bandit Six” has to cope with the crises.

 

Hossenfelder, Sabine. Lost in Math. New York: Basic Books, 2019. ISBN 978-0-465-09425-7.

Many of the fundamental theories of physics: general relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics, for example, exhibit great mathematical beauty and elegance once you've mastered the notation in which they are expressed. Some physicists believe that a correct theory must be elegant and beautiful. But what if they're wrong? Many sciences, such as biology and geology, are complicated and messy, with few general principles that don't have exceptions, and in which explanation must take into account a long history of events which might have happened differently. The author, a theoretical physicist, cautions that as her field becomes disconnected from experiment and exploring notions such as string theory and multiple universes, it may be overlooking a reality which, messy though it may be, is the one we actually inhabit and, as scientists, try to understand.

 

Shlaes, Amity. Great Society. New York: Harper, 2019. ISBN 978-0-06-170642-4.

Adam Smith wrote, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”—even though nations and their rulers may adopt ruinous policies for a while, a great nation has deep resources and usually has time to observe the consequences, change course, and restore sound governance. But, as this book shows, the amount of ruin in a nation is not unlimited, and well-intended policies which fundamentally change the character of the citizenry and their relationship to the state can have ruinous consequences that cast a long shadow and may not be reversible. Between 1960 and 1974, under three presidents: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, the United States, starting from peace and prosperity unprecedented in the human experience, reached for greatness and tragically embraced top-down, centrally-planned, deficit-spending funded, and socialist (in all but the forbidden name), policies which, by the mid 1970s, had destroyed prosperity, debased the dollar and unleashed ruinous inflation, wrecked the world's monetary system, incited urban riots and racial strife, created an unemployable underclass, destroyed neighbourhoods and built Soviet-style public housing in their place, and set into motion the destruction of domestic manufacturing and the middle class it supported. It is a tragic tale, an utterly unnecessary destruction of a once-great nation, as this magnificently written and researched but unavoidably depressing history of the era recounts.

 

Sharfman, Peter et al. The Effects of Nuclear War. Washington: Office of Technology Assessment, 1979. LCCN 79-600080.

This book-length (154 page) report by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment was commissioned by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and delivered in May, 1979. It should not be confused with the similarly-titled The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, an entirely different technical treatment of the physical effects of nuclear detonations. The present work undertakes “to describe the effects of a nuclear war on the civilian populations, economies, and societies of the United States and the Soviet Union.”

Four scenarios are explored: an attack on a single city, using Detroit and Leningrad as examples; an attack on oil refineries using ten missiles; a counterforce attack, including one limited to ICBM silos; and a broad-based attack on military and economic targets using a large fraction of the existing arsenal of the attacking power. For each, the immediate, medium-, and long-term effects are assessed, including the utility of civil defense preparations and the prospects for recovery from the damage. The death toll from the best to worst case scenarios ranges from 200,000 to 160 million. Appendix C presents a fictional account of the consequences of a large nuclear exchange on a city, Charlottesville, Virginia, which was not directly hit in the attack.

A scanned PDF edition of this report has been published by Princeton University.

 

Weinberger, Sharon. The Imagineers of War. New York: Vintage Books, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8041-6972-1.

Since its founding in 1958, as a reaction to the perceived humiliation of the United States by the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which over the years has dropped and restored “Defense” on several occasions, being sometimes known as ARPA, has been the central research organisation for the U.S. military, working independently of the military services, whose rivalry was considered one of the reasons for the slow progress in development of missile and space technology. Originally seen as a “space agency”, it quickly saw that function assumed by NASA. DARPA, largely unconstrained by Pentagon bureaucracy and scientific peer-review, has often been “out there”, pushing speculative technologies on (and sometimes beyond) the cutting edge of the possible.

This book chronicles the world-changing successes of DARPA, including ARPANET, which developed and demonstrated the technologies upon which today's Internet is built, unmanned vehicles, missile defense, and smart weapons. DARPA has also had its share of failures, the inevitable result of trying to push technologies beyond the state of the art. On occasion, DARPA has veered into territory usually associated with mad scientists and Bond villains, such as a scheme to power a particle beam ballistic missile defense system by draining the Great Lakes in fifteen minutes into caverns excavated by nuclear bombs to power generators. This is a fascinating look behind the curtain of what seems almost impossible: a government agency which has, for more than six decades, remained agile in pioneering speculative technologies on a modest budget.

 

Brunner, John. Stand on Zanzibar. New York, Orb Books, [1968] 2011. ISBN 978-0-7653-2678-2.

In 1968, veteran British science fiction writer John Brunner (his first novel was published in 1951) decided to show those upstart “New Wave” authors how it's done. The result, Stand on Zanzibar, won the Hugo award for best novel in 1969 and became the quintessential 1960s science fiction novel. Set in 2010, it explores The Happening World through parallel interwoven plots and a huge cast of characters, using a chaotic narrative with sections titled “Context”, “Continuity”, “Tracking with Closeups”, and, of course, “The Happening World”.

How does it hold up more than half a century later, with 2010 already receding in the rear view mirror? Astonishingly well: the novel is not at all dated and in many ways prophetic. Brunner foresaw the ability of giant technology companies to manipulate public opinion and make government increasingly irrelevant; the mainstreaming of homosexuality and recreational drugs; the influence of pop philosophers on culture; the hook-up culture; chaos in Africa; the authoritarian governance model in Asia; the collapse of printed newspapers and all media moving down-market; stagnation in technological innovation compared to the first half of the 20th century; the end of the Cold War and its replacement by economic competition; the risk of a genetically-engineered plague originating in China, which remains nominally communist but is becoming a powerhouse that rivals the West. A prominent political figure on the world stage is a West African named Obomi.

Stand on Zanzibar forever changed my own writing style and influenced the way I look at the future and this increasingly crazy world we inhabit. It is a landmark of science fiction and a masterpiece worth revisiting today.

 

Schlichter, Kurt. Indian Country. El Segundo, CA: Kurt Schlichter, 2017. ISBN 978-0-9884029-6-6.

In his 2016 novel People's Republic (November 2018), the author describes North America in the early 2030s, a decade after the present Cold Civil War turned hot and the United States split into the People's Republic of North America (PRNA) on the coasts and the upper Midwest, with the rest continuing to call itself the United States. This book, the second to feature Turnbull, is a “prequel” set shortly after the split, which was along the borders of the existing states. This left regions whose natural allegiance would have been to the other side trapped within states governed by those they detested.

This situation was acute in southern Indiana, where the population had little in common with the cities of the north who increasingly oppressed them. Turnbull, whose military experience included extensive operations in counter-insurgency, is recruited to go to the area and assist the population in mounting an insurgency, with the goal of making the region such a thorn in the side of the state government that it will be willing to cede the area to the U.S. as part of a general territorial settlement along the borders. Turnbull is told to foment a nonviolent insurgency, but then he is not really the guy you send when that's your goal. Turnbull himself has no illusions about the human cost of resisting tyranny and tells those seeking his aid what they are getting into.

This is a worthy addition to the People's Republic saga, and along with the action Schlichter has his usual fun mocking the pretentions and insanity of the dysfunctional progressive ideology of the PRNA.

 

June 2020

Munroe, Randall. How To. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019. ISBN 978-1-4736-8033-3.

The author of the Web comic xkcd.com answers questions about how to accomplish a variety of tasks we've all faced: building a lava moat around out supervillain redoubt, digging a hole, jumping really high, or skiing almost forever. It's fun, and you may learn some actual science along the way.

 

Dartnell, Lewis. The Knowledge. New York: Penguin Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-14-312704-8.

In one of his first lectures to freshman physics students at Caltech, Richard Feynman posed the question that if everything we had learned was forgotten, and you could only transmit a single sentence to the survivors, what would it be? This book expands upon that idea and attempts to distil the essentials of technological civilisation which might allow rebuilding after an apocalyptic collapse. That doesn't imply re-tracing the course humans followed to get where we are today: for one thing, many of the easily-exploited sources of raw material and energy have been depleted, and for some time survivors will probably be exploiting the ruins of the collapsed civilisation instead of re-starting its primary industries. The author explores the core technologies required to meet basic human needs such as food, shelter, transportation, communication, and storing information, and how they might best be restored. At the centre is the fundamental meta-technology upon which all others are based: the scientific method as a way to empirically discover how things work and apply that knowledge to get things done.

 

Coppley, Jackson. The Ocean Raiders. Chevy Chase, MD: Contour Press, 2020. ISBN 979-8-6443-4371-3.

Nicholas Foxe is back! After the rip-roaring adventure and world-changing revelations of The Code Hunters (April 2019), the wealthy adventurer with degrees in archaeology and cryptography arrives in Venice to visit an ambitious project by billionaire Nevin Dowd to save the city from inundation by the sea, but mostly to visit Christine Blake, who he hadn't seen for years since an affair in Paris and who is now handling public relations for Dowd's project. What he anticipates to be a pleasant interlude becomes deadly serious when an attempt on his life is made immediately upon his arrival in Venice. Narrowly escaping, and trying to discover the motive, he learns that Dowd's team has discovered an underwater structure that appears to have been built by the same mysterious ancients who left the Tablet and the Omni, from which Nick's associates are trying to extract its knowledge. As Nick investigates further, it becomes clear a ruthless adversary is seeking the secrets of the ancients and willing to kill to obtain them. But who, and what is the secret?

This is another superb adventure/thriller in which you'll be as mystified as the protagonist by the identity of the villain until almost the very end. There is a large cast of intriguing and beautifully portrayed characters, and the story takes us to interesting locations which are magnificently sketched. Action abounds, and the conclusion is thoroughly satisfying, while leaving abundant room for further adventures. You, like I, will wish you had a friend like Guido Bartoli. The novel can be read stand-alone, but you'll enjoy it more if you've first read The Code Hunters, as you'll know the back-story of the characters and events which set this adventure into motion.

The author kindly let me read a pre-publication manuscript of this novel. The Kindle edition is free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

 

December 2020

Cline, Ernest. Ready Player Two. New York: Ballantine Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1-5247-6133-2.

Ernest Cline's Ready Player One was an enormous success, blending an imaginative but plausible extrapolation of massively multiplayer online role-playing games and virtual worlds into a mid-21st century network called the OASIS, which has subsumed the Internet and its existing services into an immersive shared virtual world encompassing communication, entertainment, education, and commerce. Ready Player One chronicled the quest of hunters for the Easter Egg hidden by the deceased co-creator of the OASIS, which would confer sole ownership and control over the OASIS on its finder, with independent egg hunters (“gunters”) contending with a corporation bent on turning the OASIS into an advertising-cluttered Hell and perfectly willing to resort to murder and mayhem to achieve its nefarious designs.

James Halliday, who hid the Egg, was obsessed with every aspect of 1980s popular culture: film, music, television, fads, and video games, and the quest for the Egg involved acquiring and demonstrating encyclopedic knowledge equal to his own. The story is thus marinated in 1980s nostalgia, and has a strong appeal for those who lived through that era, which made Ready Player One a beloved instant classic and best-seller, from which Steven Spielberg made a not-entirely-awful 2018 feature film.

With the quest and fate of the OASIS resolved at the end of the original novel, readers were left to wonder what happens next, and they had nine years to wait before a sequel appeared to answer that question. And thus, Ready Player Two, which is set just a few years after Parzival and his bang of gunters find the Egg and assume control of the OASIS, was eagerly awaited. And now we have it in our hands.

Oh dear.

One common reaction among readers who have made it through this sequel or abandoned it in disgust and dismay is that it “reads like fan fiction”. But that is to disparage the genre of fan fiction, some of which is quite good, entertaining, and obviously labours of love. This reads like bad fan fiction, written by somebody who doesn't get out enough, obsessed with “transgression” of the original story and characters. This fails in just about every way possible. While the original novel was based upon a plausible extrapolation of present-day technology into the future, here we have a randomly assembled midden of utterly unbelievable things, seemingly invented on whim in order to move the plot along, most of which were developed in just a few years and in almost complete secrecy. Rather than try to artfully give a sense for how this novel “transgresses” even the most forgiving reader's ability to suspend disbelief, I'll just step behind the curtain and make an incomplete list of things we're expected to accept as the landscape in which the plot is set. Many of these are spoilers, so if you care about such things, don't read them until you've had a crack at the book (or it has had a crack at you, as the case may be).

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.   (Show Spoilers) (Hide Spoilers)

• James Halliday, before his death, funded the successful development of an Oasis Neural Interface (ONI), which provides a full, bidirectional, link to the neurons in a user's brain, allowing complete stimulation of all senses and motor control over an avatar in the OASIS.
• The ONI is completely non-invasive: it works by sensors it places on the outside of the skull.
• The development of the ONI was conducted in complete secrecy, and was not disclosed until a trigger set by Halliday before his death revealed it to the finder of the Egg.
• The ONI is able to provide a fully realistic experience of the OASIS virtual world to the wearer. For example, when an ONI wearer eats an apple in the virtual world, they have the sensation of crunching into the fruit, smelling the juice, and tasting the flesh, even though these have not been programmed into the simulation.
• The ONI can, in a brief time, make a complete scan of its wearer's brain and download this to the OASIS. This scan is sufficient to create an in-world realisation of the person's consciousness.
• Halliday made such a scan of his own brain, creating (in total secrecy) the first artificial general intelligence (AGI), which he called Anorak. In attempting to modify this AI, he caused it to go insane and become malevolent, but the lovable nerd Halliday let it continue to inhabit the OASIS.
• Every time a user logs into the OASIS, the ONI makes a nearly-instantaneous complete backup of their brain, sufficient to create a conscious intelligent copy inside the simulation. This has been done in complete secrecy, and not only OASIS users, but its new owners are unaware of this.
• The ONI can be used a maximum of 12 hours at a time, after which (the same precise time for all wearers, regardless of their individual physiology) it causes severe and irreversible neural trauma. Disconnection from the OASIS without a proper log-out can leave the user in a permanent coma. Regulators are perfectly fine with such a technology being deployed to billions of people, relying on the vendor's assurance that safeguards will prevent such calamities.
• Over a period of three years, largely in secrecy until it leaked out, Parzival and three of his partners have had built, at a cost of US$300 billion dollars, an interstellar spacecraft with a fusion drive in which they plan to make a 47 year voyage to Proxima Centauri to “search for a habitable Earthlike planet where we could make a new home for ourselves, our children, and the frozen human embryos we were going to bring along.” They plan to set out on this voyage without first sending a probe to determine whether there is a habitable planet at Proxima Centauri or having a Plan B in case there isn't one when they get there. Oh, and this starship is supposed to get its power from its “solar panel array and batteries” for the four decades it will be nowhere near a star.
• Halliday, after creating the flawed artificial intelligence Anorak, leaves open the possibility that it can seize control of the OASIS from his designated heir.
• Because ONI users logged into the OASIS are effectively unconscious and completely vulnerable to attack in real life (which they call “the earl”), the well-heeled opt for an “immersion vault” to protect themselves. Gregarious Simulation Systems' (GSS) top of the line was MoTIV, the “mobile tactical immersion vault”, [which] “looked more like a heavily armed robotic spider than a coffin. It was an armored escape vehicle and all-terrain weapons platform, featuring eight retractable armored legs for navigating all forms of terrain, and a pair of machine guns and grenade launchers mounted on each side of its armored chassis—not to mention a bulletproof acrylic cockpit canopy for its occupant.” The authorities are apparently happy with such gear being sold to anybody who can pay for it.
• The rogue AI Anorak is able to bypass all of GSS's engineering, quality control, and deployment safeguards to push a software update, “infirmware”, on more than half a billion ONI users, which traps them in the simulation, unable to log out, and destined for catastrophic brain damage after the twelve hour limit is reached. This includes four of the five owners of GSS. And “Anorak has completely rewritten the firmware in some sort of programming language they've never seen before”—and it worked the very first time it was mass deployed.
• Despite having the lives of half a billion hostages, including themselves, in their hands and with the twelve hour maximum immersion time in the ONI ticking away, Parzival and partners find plenty of time to wisecrack, taunt one another about their knowledge or lack thereof of obscure pop culture, and costume changes.

  Art3mis snapped her fingers and her avatar's attire changed once again. Now she wore Annie Potts's black latex outfit from her first scene in Pretty in Pink, along with her punk-rock porcupine hairdo, dangling earrings, and dinner-fork bracelet.

  “Applause, applause, applause,” she said, doing a slow spin so that we could admire the attention to detail she'd put into her Iona cosplay.

• On top of all of these inanities, the main characters, who were just likeable, nerdy “mixed-up kids” a few years ago, have now become shrill, tedious, “woke” scolds.

  “Look at this lily-white hellscape,” Aech said, shaking her head as she stared out her own window. “Is there a single person of color in this entire town?”

  Parzival: Her school records included a scan of her birth certificate, which revealed another surprise. She'd been DMAB—designated male at birth. … Around the same time, she'd changed her avatar's sex classification to øgender, a brand-new option GSS had added due to popular demand. People who identified as øgender were individuals who chose to experience sex exclusively through their ONI headsets, and who also didn't limit themselves to experiencing it as a specific gender or sexual orientation.

• The battles, the battles….

  The rest of the Original 7ven joined the fight too. Jimmy Jam and Monte Moir each wielded a modified red Roland AXIS-1 keytar that fired sonic funk blast waves out of its neck each time a chord was played on it. Jesse Johnson fired sonic thunderbolts from the pickups of his Fender Voodoo Stratocaster, while Terry Lewis did the same with his bass, and Jellybean Johnson stood behind them, firing red lightning skyward with his drumsticks, wielding them like two magic wands. Each of the band members could also fire a deadly blast of sonic energy directly from their own mouths, just by shouting the word “Yeow!” over and over again.

  “Yeow?” … Yawn.

Spoilers end here.   (Hide Spoilers)

I'm not going to even discuss the great quest, the big reveal, or the deus in machina switcheroo at the very end. After wrecking an interesting imagined world, destroying characters the reader had come to know and like in their first adventure, and boring the audience with over-the-top descriptions, obscure pop culture trivia, and ridiculous made-up reasons to plug all of the myriad holes in the plot, by the time I got to the end I was well past caring about any of them.