[B5] The Earth Alliance Fact Book
Sep. 21st, 2005 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldIn Babylon 5, the Earth Alliance is a character in itself. Unlike Star Trek's ill-defined and frequently self-contradictory United Federation of Planets, the Earth Alliance is a polity with clear origins, clear chains of command, and clear problems. How are the member-states on Earth accomodated? What is to be done with the colonies? How, exactly, are Earthers reacting to their bizarrely averted obliteration by the Minbari? In Babylon 5, politics matters. That's why one might have thought I'd have been excited to be lent, by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thebitterguy, Mongoose Publishing's RPG supplement The Earth Alliance Fact Book.
One would have been terribly, terribly wrong. The equipment described is decent enough, I suppose, though I lack the expertise needed to evaluate the designs. If the designs are as competent as the rest of the supplement, though, the entire book needs to be trashed. The author, one Bruce Graw, managed to write a future history for Babylon 5 that combines a neocon's fantasy about the way the world should be with complete ignorance about what nations are actually like and a remarkable display of stereotypes. The Third World War, on the face of it, makes no sense, while the solution in the early 22nd century to Muslim terrorism (an impermeable blockade followed by a conquest of the entire Islamic world) would be far more likely to end in a crusade than not. Belarus is not a Baltic state, the heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania aside, and the relationship described between the Russian Consortium and its post-Soviet neighbours has little grounding in any likely reality.
Oh. It's best not to mention in much detail the descriptions of the French as ingrates bitter that the United States saved them in all three world wars, the Balkans' miraculous preservation of an anachronistic and not-really-existing heritage of poverty and hatred into the mid-23rd century, the United Islamic Nations' origin in a secret pact signed by terrorist-exporting countries, the reduction of most of the Chinese population into breeding machines/serfs, and the absence of any African or Indian languages apart from Afrikaans and Hindi as optional languages for characters. Next to this, the systematic and massive flaws in planetology and stellar nomenclature in the colonies section come almost as a relief.
I do think that the passages describing Earth's contacts with non-human civilizations and the Psi Corps are decent. This leads me to the conclusion that Graw just isn't good at writing about normal human beings and their societies, about the way that they interact with each other and with wider social groupings on a regular basis. This is a problem for a writer who is actually competent, but it's more of an issue for his unfortunate readers. I feel sorry thatthebitterguy had to actually pay money for this.
thebitterguy, Mongoose Publishing's RPG supplement The Earth Alliance Fact Book.One would have been terribly, terribly wrong. The equipment described is decent enough, I suppose, though I lack the expertise needed to evaluate the designs. If the designs are as competent as the rest of the supplement, though, the entire book needs to be trashed. The author, one Bruce Graw, managed to write a future history for Babylon 5 that combines a neocon's fantasy about the way the world should be with complete ignorance about what nations are actually like and a remarkable display of stereotypes. The Third World War, on the face of it, makes no sense, while the solution in the early 22nd century to Muslim terrorism (an impermeable blockade followed by a conquest of the entire Islamic world) would be far more likely to end in a crusade than not. Belarus is not a Baltic state, the heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania aside, and the relationship described between the Russian Consortium and its post-Soviet neighbours has little grounding in any likely reality.
Oh. It's best not to mention in much detail the descriptions of the French as ingrates bitter that the United States saved them in all three world wars, the Balkans' miraculous preservation of an anachronistic and not-really-existing heritage of poverty and hatred into the mid-23rd century, the United Islamic Nations' origin in a secret pact signed by terrorist-exporting countries, the reduction of most of the Chinese population into breeding machines/serfs, and the absence of any African or Indian languages apart from Afrikaans and Hindi as optional languages for characters. Next to this, the systematic and massive flaws in planetology and stellar nomenclature in the colonies section come almost as a relief.
I do think that the passages describing Earth's contacts with non-human civilizations and the Psi Corps are decent. This leads me to the conclusion that Graw just isn't good at writing about normal human beings and their societies, about the way that they interact with each other and with wider social groupings on a regular basis. This is a problem for a writer who is actually competent, but it's more of an issue for his unfortunate readers. I feel sorry that
thebitterguy had to actually pay money for this.
