One fictional choice an author can make is to include a thinly-veiled – or entirely open – version of him/herself in the tale. One of the better known examples of this Dante Alighieri including himself as the main character in his “Divine Comedy.” In lesser hands, the concept is often lazy wish fulfillment and says nothing good about the author and his/her skills. In my own limited store of crappy fiction I have at least tried to avoid this as much as possible.

Still, I have one story idea – almost certain to never go much further than this lameass blog post – that would include a “self insertion” so blatant I might as well use my own name for the character.

The story came to me in a flash a few weeks ago. The basic idea is not that clever, since it has been done in various forms numerous times: some geographic region finds itself displaced from time, dropped somewhen else. Hijinks ensue. (see: “1632,” “Island in the Sea of Time”).

The specific idea that occurred to me was this: a few square miles of my local area (Thatcher, Utah) suddenly – apparently due to bad management or some cosmic paperwork foulup – finds itself in the same physical location, but in mid 1942. Hijinks then ensue.

Thatcher is a small place, but if such an unlikely event were to occur, somewhere in the region of 500-800 people would find themselves in a different time period. This makes for an interesting situation; a single person could disappear into the background and not affect history, but a region like this with hundreds of people *won’t* be able to hide. Sooner or later, the FBI is going to find the place *terribly* interesting. A small, *kinda* isolated place like this would provide the possibility for the event to remain hidden; were it instead a block of Chicago, there’d be no hiding it.

Obviously, there will be some immediate problems, first up being the lack of utilities. Until new power and gas lines can be hooked up, most of the homes here will be dark. Cell phones won’t work. The internet will be non-existent. But 2016-era cars will still function and can be gassed up… but that will draw stares and paying for the gas might be problematic.

Since it’s wartime, something you *don’t* want to have happen is to bring the wrath of FDR’s government down on you. You will want to maintain some measure of control. So my thinking is that some small number of 2016-folks will need to find the nearest Army base or FBI office (both available about 40 miles from here) and nonchalantly stroll in, find someone with power, and show them a functioning Iphone and say something akin to “if you’d like to know more, meet me up in Thatcher tomorrow, noon.”

Assuming you can get hold of some 1942-officials who can accept the situation without freaking out, a whole lot of things will happen. Here you’ll have hundreds of people who know how the war will turn out. Some fraction of them will be reasonably well versed on certain historical details… their father served in Iwo Jima, their grandfather was in D-Day, etc. And there will be books.

Here’s where it’d be *real* difficult for me to not self-insert into this yarn. Because in my basement I have a couple shelves specifically on the Manhattan Project and nuclear weapons in general. Just *imagine* how the War Department would go absolutely ape with this treasure trove. Everything from “ok, let’s stop wasting time on Thin Man” to “let’s have a chat with Mr. Fuchs,” to “will someone *please* keep Mr. Slotin away from the screwdrivers.” I could have endless fun showing “Trinity and Beyond” to Robert Oppenheimer and the like.

Then there are the books on rocketry, jet engines, aircraft design, etc. My house is incredibly boring today, but in 1942, nations would have gone to war over what I’ve got. And with all due modesty, I could probably keep a whole bunch of folks entertained for years just rattling stuff off.

The firearms in probably every house, including a range of modern sporting rifles and “assault weapons” including AR-15’s, AK-47/Saiga’s would be of great interest to the Army and Marines. No doubt there are some really interesting things out here; wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a Barrett or two.

The trick would be for the 2016-locals to maintain control. It would be easy for the 1942-Army to simply sweep in, confiscate everything and lock all the 2016-folks into deep dark holes; this is the FDR era, after all. But if the 2016-folk are able to convince the 1942-authorities that the best approach is to be civilized, this sleepy little wide spot in the road could become one hell of a research facility. The 2016-folk would become fabulously wealthy on royalties.

Care would have to be taken in how 2016 technologies were utilized. Let’s face it, 1942 scientists would not have been able to meaningfully analyze a smart phone. The tech wasn’t there to build the tools needed to study the tech. A microchip would be difficult to explain… and without good scanning electron microscopes, they wouldn’t even be able to *see* the details of the chips, assuming they could disassemble the things to get at ’em without destroying them. A lot of 2016-tech would be simply inaccessible. Still… crappy junk people have long ago tossed into their attics would be monumentally useful. A cheap transistor radio that was last on when Kool and the Gang were relevant would provide all kinds of entertainment value to Bell Labs. Imagine if practical transistors were “invented” in, say, 1943.

In the post-war period, there would be opportunities for the 2016-folk to make *buckets* of money. Assuming everything remains functional, I can see movie studio execs coming out here under armed military escorts to watch DVDs and Blu rays, and negotiating for the right to point their cameras at the screen. A lot of the movies on my shelf would make no sense in 1942; imagine trying to sell “The Matrix.” But… “Star Wars?” Yeah, I can see Fox executives backing up a dumptruck full of cash to get *that* on film.

The weird area is when authors in 1942 find out that 2016-people have books they won’t write for another few decades. It’d be interesting to have Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov come pay me a visit. Would they *want* to read the books? What would the courts decide as to the ownership of, say, “Starship Troopers?” 50% to the 2016-person with the book, 50% to the 1942 author? How about books written in the 21st century by authors who not only haven’t been born yet in 1942, but who now very likely won’t be born?

Anyway.

I’ve talked this idea over with a friend; there’s much more to it, but it’ll probably not go much further (because why would it?). Still, I had an idea for the very last scene: after the time travel hijinks, the US defeats Germany in mid 1944, Japan later that year; the USSR is weakened and shoved way back. The US occupies *all* of Eastern Europe; Mao Tse Tung meets with an unfortunate accident. Communism is thus contained and quickly fades into the obscurity in which it belongs. A few years after the war, the arrival of 2016-Thatcher is revealed; the role it played in the fabulous technologies that have appeared in recent years comes to light. Through the early 1960’s Thatcher is a better-guarded military reservation than any Manhattan site. But after the late 1960’s, the secrets have all been wrung out. The adults from 2016 are pretty much all dead by 2000; the children from 2016 are quite old by the time 2016 rolls around again. In the second 2016, Thatcher is no longer a closed-off camp, but an open-air museum with some high-tech labs continuing to develop new technologies. And so when The Day rolls around in the second 2016, the place is loaded to the gills with tourists who want to be here. And then… there’s a mighty flash, and at the exactly same day and hour, the second iteration of 2016-Thatcher disappears again.

A British TV show from 1984 demonstrates the state of the art in electronic communications. At the time, the precursors of AOL and Prodigy and such were on their feet (CompuServe started in 1969), offering video game downloads over phone lines via modem, but it’d be a few years yet before email really caught on. Still, this is earlier than many people really assume email-like services to have been available. This was not a true internet, as it did not have the nuclear war survivability redundancy that the ARPAnet would give it, but it’s a fun early stab.

Note just how easy it is to log on…

Today being Pi Day – 3.14.16 – the Science Channel ran themselves a commercial:

I hope a better quality version pops up. And the version I saw seemed to be a bit longer.

Someone *will* make this album available.

So, “protesters” in Chicago created enough of a physical ruckus that Trump cancelled a rally. The protesters believe that they scored a victory. But who *really* believes that Trump and his followers won’t use this as a rallying cry? Something authoritarians pretty much *need* is an external threat to rally the faithful against.

I understand some of the appeal of Trump. He is not politically correct, and that’s great. He’s a vulgarian, and that’s kinda ok. But he is a braggart, which would be dubious at the best of times but wholly bizarre considering his staggering record of failures. His relationship to honesty is downright Democratic in its tenuousness. The main thing his fans seem to like is that he projects himself as the Strong Man in the Mussolini sense… and I just can’t accept that. As a supporter of individualism, the idea of rallying around a Dear Leader or Maximum Leader or First Citizen or Big Boss or whatever just makes me friggen’ ill.

Lookin’ like 2016 is gonna *suuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.*

A Russian Proton rocket has successfully launched the ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars spacecraft. ExoMars – an orbiter and a lander – is specifically designed to look for signs of life on Mars. It’ll be a while before results can come back. The lander will separate from the spacecraft in October and is to land on October 19.

Orbiter aerobraking into a circular Mars orbit will take place between January 2017 and November 2017, with science operations starting in December 2017. This of course assumes success… the Europeans and the Russians don’t exactly have a spectacular record with Mars landers.

The planet had its biggest temperature spike in modern history in February

Well. There’s some good news. February was 2.43 degrees F warmer than the 1950-1980 average.

The temperature anomaly is due to El Nino stirring up ocean waters, dredging up warmer waters from the depths. El Nino years are typically warmer for just that reason… but this time El Nino started off from a warmer baseline, with warmer deep waters. As El Nino fades off the temperatures should decline, but probably won’t go back down to average.

And as always, if a good fraction of this warming is caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide, who’s to blame? The socialists, communists, environmentalists and other anti-nuclear activists.

Here’s a nifty little magnetic dart launcher. The velocity/muzzle energy seem to be pretty low for any practical purpose, but maybe with some scaleup – and maybe with some liquid nitrogen coolant, I dunno – it might be a nifty and cumbersome way to make a pest of yourself.

And here’s the carbine version of the Gyrojet rocket gun (previously shown in pistol form). It’s one of those great ideas that really just didn’t work all that well. I still think a modernized version could be made into a practical and entertaining weapon, but as pointed out in the video the original Gyrojet carbine, if made today, would instantly get you in trouble with the feds. The rounds were 13 millimeters in diameter… 0.3 mm greater than anti-firearms laws passed in 1968 would allow (anything above 50 caliber is considered a “destructive device, except, somehow, shotguns).

A modernized Gyrojet in carbine form could probably be made to burn propellant fast enough to burn out just before the end of the barrel, so that it would have full velocity right at the muzzle. Or at least have a boost/sustain rocket grain to get a sizable fraction of the energy at the muzzle. And give it a decent replaceable magazine, for frak’s sake. And a solid-fuel ramjet sustainer…

Before I read “Tuf Voyaging” I re-read Frank Herbert’s “Dune.” Last time I read “Dune” was circa 1983, a few months before the David Lynch movie came out; while my memories of reading the book are pretty faint, I do remember clearly thinking “WTF is that? That wasn’t in the book!” as I sat in the theater and watched the movie.

So, yeah, once again I’m reminded “I’m friggen’ old.”

Anyway, the book is dense. Lots of stuff, people, places, background. So it’s nice that there is now this handy video summary of the story of “Dune:”

And here’s the Thug Notes summary of “Dune” (thanks to blog reader mzungu for pointing this out):

I recently finished George R. R. Martin’s novel “Tuf Voyaging.” This is a fix-up… i.e. a collection of short stories stuck together as a novel. And it’s a good read.

The stories revolve around one Haviland Tuf. From a certain point of view Tuf is a sci-fi cliche: he’s a trader, hauling merchandise from star system to star system on his own personal FTL starship. This could be Han Solo… but he ain’t. Tuf is 2.5 meters tall, chalk white, devoid of any hair and extremely fat. He is *not* a sex machine; indeed, unlike Captains Kirk and Solo, he dislikes physical contact with humans, including women. Numerous personality quirks point to Tuf having something akin to Aspergers Syndrome. And he has cats. What little affection he shows throughout the ten years covered in the book is lavished upon his cats.

As the story starts, he is seriously down on his luck. But soon he comes into possession of a new ship… a “seedship” produced a thousand years earlier by the “Federal Empire.” That was the peak of mankinds technological prowess and power; the seedships were built to fight a war against an alien race, and while humanity won the war, the end result was an interstellar collapse of civilization. The seedships were not just big warships, though… they were biological warfare platforms, capable of cloning viruses, pests or monsters to drop on enemy worlds to attack the populace, crops or ecosystems.

Throughout the book, Tuf uses the capabilities of his ship to fix various problems encountered on different worlds… improved crops for an overpopulated world, monsters to fight in arenas, predators to fight rampaging sea monsters. In other hands, these could be some pretty stock stories. But in Martin’s hands… Tuf is faced with some very difficult challenges, and meets them with very hard-nosed answers. Several reviews I’ve read online say that as the stories go on, they get a bit darker, with Tuf becoming especially brutal at the end. But really, the darkest moment in the whole thing takes place less than halfway through the first story, when one of the most heartbreaking scenes I’ve read in literature suddenly jumps up and forces Tuf to do something shocking. But while it’s horrible, it is clear that his response is the least bad of the options; and with his unemotional approach, he just goes ahead and does it. And this moment tells the reader what they can expect from Tuf in the future: he is eminently ethical, but he will drop a hammer on you if that is in fact the best solution. Several times Tuf nonchalantly breaks characters with his bare hands without a moments hesitation, because that’s what needs to happen.

In the end, characters recognize that Tuf is, more or less, a god, because he not only has the power of a god (he can completely terraform a world at whim, replacing the existing ecosystem with something completely different), he has the will to *use* that power. And as with the gods of old, your best approach is to *not* tick him off.

A few years ago there was a momentary flurry of interest when Martin mentioned the possibility of “Tuf Voyaging” becoming a TV series. I doubt it’ll ever happen. Just *try* to imagine a show headlined by a fat, bald brilliantly sarcastic Vulcan, with no romance or sex scenes; instead of pitched cinematic space battles,conflict is resolved by Tuf reasoning with the antagonists… or by simply threatening them with extinction. And while I’d love to see the show, I dread one scene: if you’ve read the book, you know what I mean when I say “Mushroom.” Holy crap, I can hear the wailing, of shock, sadness and rage, if that scene was shot and aired as written. That said… a warrior woman riding a T-Rex storming down the kilometer-wide hallway down the middle of the “Ark” seems like it’d make a hell of a shot.