[REVIEW] Donald Moffitt

By and large, I was introduced to science fiction through Charlottetown's second-hand book stores. The American author Donald Moffitt was one of my first discoveries, via a creased paperback copy of his 1977 novel The Jupiter Theft. What caught my attention, I think, as I was skimming the first few pages, was the parenthetical mention of the United States' annexation of Canada in the aftermath of a violent terrorist campaign by Canadian-associated New England separatists. What kept my attention was the vast scale of Moffitt's seemingly hard sci-fi narrative, describing the struggles of a band of intrepid humans to escape from a million-year-old alien civilization that travelled through space drawing its fuel from captured gas giants. The characterization wasn't the most realistic, I knew even then, and the plot was somewhat clichéd--how do we keep the military from screwing things up? how can we quickly spread across the galaxy--but I enjoyed it.

A couple of years later, in the same bookstore, I came across Moffitt's The Genesis Quest and that book's sequel, Second Genesis. In The Genesis Quest, Moffitt seems to have been the first science-fiction author of note to come up with an interesting idea: What if human DNA, and human culture, was transmitted across tens of millions of light-years, to be reassembled by a curious non-human civilization? The Genesis Quest was a better novel than The Jupiter Theft, creating believable non-humans in the benevolent Juxt and plausible--only somewhat clichéd--grounds for conflict. Second Genesis reverted somewhat to type, although Moffitt certainly didn't lack for scale. (All I'll say, to avoid spoilers, is that I hope there weren't any native biota in the Delta Pavonis planetary system.)

My opinion of Moffitt as a basically competent science fiction author only began to change when I came across his novels Crescent in the Sky and A Gathering of Stars. Set in a vaguely alternate-historical setting,as the Islam in Sci-Fi site notes, these books do carry on in Moffitt's tradition of grand hard-sci vistas. The only problems with these books is the fact that the Islamic world-civilization they describe bears more similar to Disney's Aladdin than, say, the infinitely superior novels of George Alec Effinger, or, in fact, any plausible modern Islamic society. Were I a Muslim, I'd certainly be offended; as a non-Muslim, I'm unsurprised that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Moffitt could get away with weak characterization and clichéd plotting with his overpopulated late 21st century United States in The Jupiter Theft, or the patchily-informed Juxt-raised recreated human culture of The Genesis Quest and Second Genesis, since these three novels described cultures not very removed from his (my) own. He just can't get inside other cultures, or other people. Worse, as james_nicoll pointed out in his caustic review of The Jupiter Theft, Moffitt's hard sci-fi isn't very hard at all. It seems, for instance, that one cannot maintain powered relativistic orbits around gas giants without introducing new laws of physics.

What do I think of Moffitt now? I still want to like him, if only for his Genesis novels and the scope ofThe Jupiter Theft's reworking of Sol's planetary system (61 Cygni's, too). Is that enough? I've known for some time that it's easier for me to like science-fiction authors than literary authors, mainly because I've looser standards for the former. Given my past concern about the future of science fiction, I wonder if that's a responsible attitude for me to take. Can I still like Moffitt and care for good writing?

(This is where I open the floor to the audience. People?)

[BRIEF NOTE] Ceres, a new planet?

atomic_orrery, a new LJ user already of note, has pointed out that the Hubble Space Telescope's latest observations of the asteroid 1 Ceres have revealed some interesting discoveries about that largest asteroid.

The astronomers used Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to study Ceres for nine hours, the time it takes the asteroid to complete a rotation. Hubble snapped 267 images of Ceres. From those snapshots, the astronomers determined that the asteroid has a nearly round body. The diameter at its equator is wider than at its poles. Computer models show that a nearly round object like Ceres has a differentiated interior, with denser material at the core and lighter minerals near the surface. All terrestrial planets have differentiated interiors. Asteroids much smaller than Ceres have not been found to have such interiors.

The astronomers suspect that water ice may be buried under the asteroid's crust because the density of Ceres is less than that of the Earth's crust, and because the surface bears spectral evidence of water-bearing minerals. They estimate that if Ceres were composed of 25 percent water, it may have more water than all the fresh water on Earth. Ceres' water, unlike Earth's, would be in the form of water ice and located in the mantle, which wraps around the asteroid's solid core.

It's fitting that, in a year when Pluto's status as a planet has been threatened by the discoveries of larger worlds in the Kuiper belt, astronomers are making the case for bodies smaller than Pluto to be considered as proto-planetary in their own right. The term "planet," it seems, is losing much of its latent meaning as a descriptor for a world of note, as worlds the size of traditional planets like the Galilean moons of Jupiter, Saturn's Titan, the Earth's Moon, and Neptune's Triton attract interest in their own right and smaller bodies stake their claims.

The possible revision of Ceres' status might bring that world to the attention of space fans. I've argued elsewhere that Ceres' relegation to the ranks of the minor planets has ensured it the neglect of astronomers and space scientists. All the established planets save Pluto have already received at least one space probe mission, and many of the large moons besides; Dawn is slated to arrive at Ceres only in 2016. A Ceres that is considered more planet-like might well attract more attention, especially since the world may be well-suited for extensive industrialization and even colonization as atomic_orrery notes. A world with abundant water ice, low gravity, and a location near the Earth could prove quite useful.

[LINK] Arrival Day

As usual, the Head Heeb is serving as nucleus for the 2005 Arrival Day blogburst.

Welcome to the third annual Arrival Day Blogburst, commemorating the arrival of the first Jews in New Amsterdam on September 7, 1654. As I explained two years ago, Arrival Day is a holiday of the American Jewish people rather than the Jewish religion - a celebration of the Jewish community and its contributions to the United States. As such, non-Jews as well as Jews are welcome to join in the celebration.

My 2003 and 2004 entries remain online. Wait for my 2005 entry.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Arrival Day 2005

I was stuck for a theme for this year's Arrival Day posting until I reread my posting last year for Arrival Day about the history and future of Canada's vibrant Jewish community, and note that the theme of this year's Arrival Day (as announced at the Head Heeb) was the study of the connections of American Jews to larger wholes.

Canadian writer Marq de Villiers reported in his Into Africa about a visit to Cameroon, a country officially bilingual in English and French with a restive Anglophone minority inclined towards separatism. de Villiers reported meeting the Bamileke people, a group of two million people whose homeland straddles the colonial English-French language frontier. Despite their common ethnicity and similar vernacular languages, the Bamileke appeared--to de Villiers--to be divided by the colonial language divide, internalizing the divide to such a degree that Francophone Bamiléké and Anglophone Bamileke were starting to distrust each other. Ethnic solidarity was trumped by politics, it seems, and a community divided.

Canadian identity--more precisely, English Canadian identity--was created, or at least enhanced, by a well-established policy of constructing a group identity for the Anglophones of once-British North America that was distinct from the group identity shared by the Anglophones of the United States of America. This frontier began as an artificial frontier, yes, but so what? No one credible is seriously arguing that the Walloons are really French, or that the Latvians should throw their lot in with the Lithuanians. For diasporic populations like Jews, which consider themselves united bodies despite political frontiers, the US-Canadian frontier poses a serious questions. What sort of relationship will Canada's small but growing Jewish population build with the Untied States' large but stable Jewish population? What sort of relationship can be built? Jews on both sides of the 49th clearly do share many common cultural elements--shared use of the English language, similar histories of immigration and assimilation, and so on--but Canadian Jews also maintain their own, national, communal institutions separatedfrom their American counterparts.

Fortunately, the question of what separates Americans from Canadians isn't politicized. It's very unlikely that anyone, Jewish or otherwise, will be put in the uncomfortable position of Mira Furlan in 1991, who was cruelly attacked for not taking note of the differences separating Croatia from Serbia during Yugoslavia's dissolution. The US-Canadian frontier just doesn't matter that much--Canadians certainly aren't in the same position as Croatians! There's still the potential for much mutual misunderstanding, though, in keeping with past patterns of Canadian defensiveness and American obliviousness in US-Canadian relations. Will this be repeated in the 21st century on a smaller scale? Stay tuned.

[NON BLOG] Tea Houses

Eating Thai spring rolls cheaply at a restaurant on Bloor Street West east of Bathurst a half-hour ago and in a où sont les neiges d'antan sort of mood, I was taken by nostalgia thinking of the Chinese tea houses of Charlottetown. They opened only recently, just a couple of years after the millennium's passage, but I liked them, for their foreignness and for their excellent green tea and for their cheap food.

I haven't come across their like in Toronto yet. I must not have looked hard enough.

Prince, n'enquerez de sepmaine
Où elles sont, né de cest an,
Qu'à ce reffrain ne vous remaine:
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

[URBAN NOTE] Overheard on the Streetcar

I got up out of my seat on the Queen Street streetcar two stops before my own, waiting by the doors at the rear.

A group of men, well-dressed, who got on at Queen and University were standing there, clustered around a slim guy with a goatee and black jeans jacket talking about Ute Lemper's first album. I suspected before, but when he rolled his eyes to the side I knew then.

I like being able to pick up on these cues. Details do matter.

[BRIEF NOTE] Aha!

In the original timeline of the Traveller RPG universe, on day 132 of year 1116 of the Third Imperium, in the middle of a formal audience requested by the Archduke Dulinor of Ilelish, Dulinor shot, in order, the stand-in for Emperor Strephon, the Empress Iolanthe, the Aslan Yerlyaruiwo ambassador, and the Crown Princess Ciencia Iphegenia. The Emperor seemingly and his two closest relatives actually dead, Dulinor went on to claim the throne of the Third Imperium. Most unfortunately for the whole of civilization, Dulinor could not keep the Iridium Throne. His attempted decapitation of the Third Imperium actually resulted in an exceptionally bloody decade-long multi-sided civil and interstellar war, this conflict ending only when one faction's accidental deployment of murderously insane self-replicating artificial intelligences ended civilization.

In GURPS' relaunch of the Traveller RPG universe, on day 132 of year 116 of the Third Imperium, as Archduke Dulinor of Ilelish was descending in his personal shuttle to a formal audience with Emperor Strephon of the Third Imperium, his shuttle exploded with the loss of all passengers. At Dulinor's official funeral almost a hundred days later, the Emperor Strephon delivered a somewhat unusual eulogy, concluding that "Dulinor died in the blackness that he wore in life, and as in that life, never being fully of it, but also not rejecting it. We will not see his like again."

The creators of the relaunch have admitted that something clearly happened to abort Dulinor's failed coup attempt. What this something is has never been explained, but a recent discussion on a message board elsewhere has suggested that the key might lay with Dulinor's daughter Isis. The only time that she appears in the original Traveller timeline, a half-dozen years into the nightmarish conflict that had already killed billions of people, she had tried to placate some restive subject worlds only to watch in horror as paranoid security forces massacred a crowd. She wasn't an enthusiastic political actor on her father's behalf, understandably, perhaps, given that not only did her father start this pointless war, but that he began it by murdering the Crown Princess, her best friend from childhood, and the Crown Princess' parents. In the GURPS revision, interestingly enough, not only is she given the title of Archduchess of Ilelish by the Emperor following her father's death, but she had arrived in secret at the Imperial capital at some point considerably before her father's funeral.

Now, I'm not saying that, hoping to save the life of her best friend and to prevent her father from committing treason, Dulinor's daughter told the Third Imperium's security agencies just what Dulinor was planning. It does make a certain sort of sense, though. If nothing else it's satisfying to imagine that you know what happened.