[NON BLOG] Happenstance

After debouching on the north side of Bloor street from the Yonge-Bloor station, a young Asian woman passed my a flyer for this language school (E-mail link), phone number 416.988.2862.

The flyer promised that in 23 hours, I'd acquire basic language skills in Japanese, and even offered a free trial lesson of a half-hour's length. So, naturally I phoned and set up an appointment for a trial lesson at eight o'clock tonight.

I'll let everyone knows what happens. It would be nice to have fluency in a second language other than French, and though I've been oscillating between interest in Spanish and German I think Japanese would be cool to have.

[NON BLOG] Some More Things I Like

• Yonge Street and Bloor Street West. I like the different streets and neighbourhoods of Toronto for different reasons. These streets attract me because they're so active and attractive. Bay Street's fine skyscrapers give that street a distinctive character but the street is too broad and underpopulated to feel particularly intimate, while Queen Street West certainly has a sense of compactness and busyness throughout its length but feels as if it's trying too hard. Yonge and Bloor feel very credibly urban, and very wonderfully civilized in all of the senses of that word.


• The Toronto Public Reference Library. This library has six levels. I haven't gotten past the second floor. I do not know when I will do this. I do not think that I care. I do not think that anyone who knows of my work background and/or my interest in the written word needs to ask why I don't care.


• A Deepness in the Sky. There's something appropriate in the fact that I began reading this 1996 book by Vernor Vinge, prequel of sorts to the 1992 A Fire Upon the Deep, almost exactly two years after I bought a copy of A Fire Upon the Deep on the strength of James B.'s recommendation of the two books to me. A Deepness in the Sky is a very strong book, one that I enjoyed more than its far-future galactic-rim space-operatic successor. Perhaps this is because Vinge's Qeng Ho sublight trading culture is more generic and hence more readily comprehensible than A Fire Upon the Deep's Singularity-era interstellar civilization. Even so, there was something fundamentally appealing about the book, and I've the utmost admiration for any writer who can make arachnoid aliens so plausible.


• The Western Mediterranean World. I first came across this geographical survey of the lands surrounding the western lobe of the Mediterranean--the Iberian peninsula, Mediterranean France, Italy, the Dalmatian coastline of then-Yugoslavia, the Maghreb--in the Education Library at Queen's last October; a month later, I acquired a copy of my own via a sale at the Kingston public library. The book dates from the 1960s--Italy is caught midway through its economic boom, Spain at its boom's beginning, the Maghreb just after decolonization-but it does a fantastic job of describing the physical and human textures of the territory. Books like these make me wish that UPEI had a geography program.


• Eating out. Prince Edward Island got its first Indian restaurant in 2002--or is it 2003? Kingston's restaurants provide the interested diner with many more opportunities for eating out. Toronto offers the quasi-gourmand wannabe another couple of orders of magnitude more choice. Inasmuch as, right now, I'm an Unemployed Young Post-Student (tm), I don't have the funds needed to explore these choices on my own. I have gone on dates recently, though, and I can confirm La Paloma and Dutch Dreams each offer excellent ice creams in the Italian and Dutch traditions, respectively, while Café Diplomatico
and the Retro Café are rather nice restaurants. Each in its own way, of course. Smaller hole-in-the-wall type restaurants like neighbourhood bars and downtown pizza places also have their charm.

[NON BLOG] Five Items, in Brief

1. Thanks to talktooloose, I attended games night, hosted by snowmit and redrunner and with the additional presence of their non-livejournal friend C. I was surprised to realize, once I learned of snowmit's background in university-level debating in Atlantic Canada around the turn of the century, that I recognized him. C. did something very nice with sliced potatoes baked in some sort of cream and snowmit improvised dip, while talktooloose brought a nice green apple soda. Following C.'s departure, a game of Fist of Dragonstones ensued. It's an interesting game, and I'd like to believe that I understood its rules. (snowmit won, incidentally.) redrunner and I then stalked talktooloose as he walked his cute-if unrecognizable from the perspective of May-dog Klondike. She's a cartoonist incidentally, responsible for the excellent comic Bird and Moon; Mike Mignola, artist behind Hellboy, likes her work, as do I, so go see.

2. Walking south past Harbord, I saw a very nice chair--straw-seated, made solidly of black-painted wood-placed on the side of the road with the garbage. It's apparently quite common to appropriate abandoned materials on the street in Toronto; I myself, last April, rescued some books, including lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel's The Indelible Alison Bechdel, of the comic Dykes to Watch Out For, and a collection of articles written by an Islamist journalist praising the Iranian Islamic Revolution dating from the early 1980s. (I think there's some level of irony operating there.) Since I needed a chair for my room, I took it. Only once did I succumb to the temptation to mimic Dave Gahan in the video for "Enjoy the Silence". Now all I need is another bookshelf and a computer table. If you're in the GTA and you see anything in decent shape, please let me know.

3. The First Meeting of the Counterfactual Threats Assessment Group (Toronto) met Sunday afternoon at 2 o'clock, with myself, James Bodi, and schizmatic in attendance. The conference began at the Starbucks on the corner of Yonge and Wellesley over assorted caffeinated beverages and soon shifting to Volo Italian café further up Yonge for drinks and a light late-afternoon lunch. Very little actual counterfactual history was discussed, apart from parenthetical references to L. Sprague de Camp via the Ostrogoths. Instead, dialogue covered territories as various as preferred/mocked science-fiction novels and writers, the joys and tribulations of Toronto's urban character, intranational and international cultural differences, and the really, really nice weather. (This fault shall be corrected, somewhat at least, at future meetings.)

4. Dance Dance Revolution is a game requiring far more physical coordination than I possess. I envy people who possess that coordination.

5. Just taking a look at my Livejournal friends page, mikedavsi got married, taem has a very interesting idea for a computer game, and schizmatic has an excellent post on GNXP about the differences between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism in the Islamic world.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On Space Colonies (Part 6)

One topic broached Sunday afternoon was the lack of economic realism in fantasy novels. Crooked Timber has a brief piece on this. We three agreed that the problem can be traced back to Tolkien and Middle Earth. Consider that there is no hint of any settled agrarian economy capable of supporting Gondor's war machine, or the question of just how exactly Mordor is supposed to equip its would-be conquering hordes if the entire country is a barren volcanic wasteland. The skill of Tolkien's achievements elsewhere in Middle Earth, in the construction of a single broad history with a vast array of detailed cultural elements, certainly shouldn't be underestimated. It is safe to say, though, that his worldbuilding fails on that critical point.

Science-fiction writers often face similar problems with economics, in their case with the economics of spaceflight. In certain settings--for instance, that of a post-Singularity nanotech economy where material scarcity is no longer an issue--questions of economics really do become irrelevant. In reality, questions of economics will be very important for future space colonies. My writings last year on space colonization (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) explored this. In these posts, I came to the conclusion that for the foreseeable future-say, the next century or so--settlements in space will not only be capital-intensive and dependent on massive investments for a long while, but that the most successful colonies will be those supported by prosperous and relatively powerful Earth-based polities, whether great powers (United States, Russia, Japan, China, Brazil) or confederations (the European Union, perhaps MERCOSUR). Space will not be a viable domain for libertarians.

This conclusion leaves something very important unspoken, though: What happens to the colonies which lose out to more viable settlements? When the European Union's Ceres settlement, for instance, manages to not only develop a better industrial base for the mining of volatiles and maintenance of spacecraft than the half-dozen independent settlements on that world, but acquires a large domestic market for consumer goods, just what does happen to the independents?

( Let's take a look at the histories of Western colonial empires. )

( What does this mean for marginal and failing space colonies in the future? )

( What does this mean for science fiction writing? )

( What does this mean for space colonies? )

For the independents, then, barring remarkable and unexpected successes--remarkable discoveries, unexpected successes, defections or radical transmutations in the larger colonies--they will be destined to first relative then absolute decline. Cultural separatism may encourage group bonding and limit defections; but by the same rationale, cultural separatism will limit their influence in wider human space, and might just postpone the date of decline. Their best bets for continued viability and relevance, ironically enough, might lie in successfully finding niches in the broad state-dominated economies of human space.

( Counter )