Ben's swan song

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space opera, pluto, grand tour

These days when I read science fiction it is almost always a short story collection or anthology. One author whose work I have read on and off since about 1970 is Ben Bova. His "home base" genre is semi-hard science fiction: realistic fiction without fantastic elements, but certain future developments are of necessity only sketchily described, if at all. Recently I encountered the last of his Grand Tour series of novels and decided to read it: Pluto., AKA The Outer Planets volume 3. Bova died before the novel was finished; his literary heirs chose his friend Les Johnson to finish it. The result is a page-turner worthy of the name.

The time frame is a bit vague; the action takes place about 150-200 years in our future. I presume that earlier novels in the series flesh out the fusion drive that lets spaceships bomb around the solar system as though it were the Atlantic Ocean in the age of steam; a Sino-Russian-American war that resolved itself into the "frenemy" status of these three powers in the recent past (of the novel); the Space Forces of these three powers; and the establishment of outposts and mini-colonies on the moons of Neptune, Uranus and other planets.

A central figure is a professor who has been fused with an AI to save his life, or at least his personality, after a horrific accident. Naturally (as things go in the SciFi realm) he has become a megalomaniac, with some justification for his hubris since he now experiences things a dozen times faster than "ordinary folk". He has found some kind of artifact on Pluto, detected by a faint neutrino signal that seems to be caused by very slow matter-antimatter annihilation (I must note at this point that really, really new physics will be required to be able to engineer a neutrino detector/spectrometer smaller than an auditorium. Neutrinos are called "ghost particles" for excellent reasons). The professor had "gone rogue" on the surface of Pluto in order to track down the artifact, and the research ship Tombaugh had asked for help to rescue/recover him; the Space Force ship that did so is the Aurora.

Once the professor and the artifact have been retrieved and are aboard the Tombaugh, the two ships travel to Charon, the largest satellite of Pluto, to quickly investigate a gravitational anomaly there, before continuing either to Earth or to an outpost on (near?) Uranus to further study the artifact. That's where the story really begins. Where the artifact found on Pluto is about the size of a yard-long piece of drainpipe, what the scientists find on Charon turns out to be some kind of under-the-ice city, also dormant. Dormant, that is, until they try to drill into it. It awakens and the fun begins. The "Charon anomaly" begins sending out minirobots that are apparently reproducing even as they begin to transform Charon in some enigmatic way. Attempts to capture a minirobot by the Americans aboard the Aurora, then by later-arriving Russians and Chinese, are fruitless and fatal. Whatever the big anomaly is, it can disintegrate stuff!

At some point, the artifact from Pluto "awakens" and begins sending out not minirobots but nanobots. The scientists and most of the crew of Tombaugh are evacuated when it become clear that the nanobots have gotten into the ship's computers and begun to drive it toward Charon. It never becomes clear whether the Pluto artifact and the Charon "city" represent the same technology, or even the same alien species.

I've already told too much. I wanted to point out that the ending might have been different had Bova written it. His collaborator points out in an Afterword that Bova was a "seat of the pants" write who didn't pre-plan his work. I can't presume to read his mind, particularly since he passed away six years ago, but I expect he would have made it more clear that the artifact was originally hunting the city and had been sent to destroy it, in an interstellar war that had played out millions of years ago. Or maybe the story would have written itself out in another way. Who knows; the book is great fiction in any case.

Building Kepler's platonic-solid Solar System

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, generation starships, solar system engineering, totalitarianism, culture shock

It takes a lot of backstory to assemble the worldviews in Fortress Sol by Stephen Baxter. Rather than drive off readers with 10-plus chapters of stage-setting (in a 37-chapter book), the author wisely metes it out in digestible portions as needed.

Seen from afar—say, half a light-year away in the Oort cloud—two Earth-born cultures, separated by a millennium, are about to collide.

• The generation starship Lightbird has been traveling for a century from Ross 128b, a habitable planet of the red dwarf star Ross 128, eleven light-years from the Solar System. Energy for its propulsion is from lumes, enigmatic creatures of deep space that can apparently convert matter to antimatter, or extract antimatter from vacuum energy. The author doesn't dig too far, a decision I support. Ross 128b was colonized a thousand years earlier.
• The residents of the Solar System spent a good part of that thousand years enveloping a sphere a little larger than the orbit of Uranus in the Mask, a carbon nanotube structure that hides the inner seven planets from the universe, and hides the universe from within. Material for the Mask, and for an inner structure, the Wrap that hides the Sun from view, was derived from partial demolition of Jupiter and the other giant planets, except for Neptune, which was destroyed by lumes, an event that started the whole adventure. The lumes were thought to be weapons of a super-advanced interstellar culture that was preparing to invade. A millennium later, no invasion has yet arisen. An interplanetary "railway" called the Frame was also built to facilitate travel everywhere inside the Mask, but mostly in the orbital plane of the seven surviving planets.

Both cultures are totalitarian in nature. Aboard Lightbird, everything must contribute to the progress of the four-generation mission of reaching the Solar System. That includes decisions about who is allowed to be born, and such a decision is at the core of a neurosis that afflicts a young woman named Muree. She is one of a few who care for the onboard lume tank. The lumes have proven useful, and an ecology that promotes a tank containing about 100 of them is managed such that they create a new lume about each day, even as another lume is consumed in providing energy to drive the constant acceleration of the ship, and power its life support mechanisms. (Note, the amount of antimatter needed for this would be just a few grams per day, so a different consumption rate might be warranted. I don't know how much a lume is supposed to weigh.)

Ruling the many trillions of humans in the Solar System, most of whom live aboard the Frame or in orbital habitats, an oligarchy has totalitarian control of many matters, including a deep secret about the actual disposition of the Sun. The crux of the drama is a quest by Muree, once she has become an ambassador from the starship to the Fortress Sol, as the Mask-bound society is called, to learn what is really going on inside the Wrap. A young man named Rab is Muree's opposite number, and their collaboration is soon seen as a conspiracy by the rulers of Fortress Sol.

My grasp of political science is tenuous at best. Naturally, the unraveling of a thousand-year-old political system is not for the faint of heart, and I wouldn't have a clue how to advise Mr. Baxter about it. So I'll stick with intriguing ideas, and leave it to you to read the book for yourself, and get from it what you are equipped to consume.

The Frame is found to be analogous to the nested-Platonic-Solid model of the Solar System devised by Kepler, before he determined that planetary orbits are (almost) ellipses. I say "almost" because the influence of all the planets upon each other perturbs the orbits a bit. There is a reason the planets are spaced far apart!

In Kepler's model, the five Platonic solids each enclose a sphere that just touches each planar face, and each is enclosed in a sphere that just touches all its corners. From outermost inward, they are a cube (8 faces), tetrahedron (4 faces), dodecahedron (12 faces), icosahedron (20 faces), and octahedron (8 faces). The fit is not exact, but the thickness of the spherical shells takes up the slack between the nearest and farthest points in each orbit from the Sun. The outermost sphere contains the orbit of Saturn, and so forth inward.

The Frame is planar, with rings and spokes. It is a rotating structure that has "trolleys" which move along the rings and inward or outward along the spokes. To get from a station on the Frame to a planet, one takes a shuttlecraft. A few numbers were used, and the math is fascinating.

First, the rotation of the outermost ring of the Frame, some distance outside the aphelion of Uranus, is sufficient to produce a centripetal force (rotation-induced artificial gravity) of 1/3 G. In the past, I did calculations to find out the stresses in a large, rotating ring with a centripetal force of 1 G. It turns out, if the radius of the ring is 1 km, we don't have any material that can sustain the stress, except perhaps carbon nanotubes, but only if they are continuous, with no breaks. Thus, a thread of nanotubes with a structure similar to cotton thread (composed of entwined strands a few cm long) is much weaker and would pull apart at much lower stress. I want to know if this Solar-System-spanning rotating Frame is feasible, based on science so far known.

Rough analysis: I don't know where my notebook is from doing that analysis, so we'll indulge in a bit of hand-waving instead. I'll begin with the basis that carbon nanotubes would be barely adequate to hold together a rotating ring of 1 km radius, with 1 G of centripetal force at its periphery. Our basic equation for centripetal force is F = Mv²/r.

• Subproblem 1: How big can r be if the target F is 1/3 G? Since v = αr, where α is angular velocity (degrees per second, perhaps), and we assume M is always 1 (that is, 1 kg), F = α²r. Thus, at constant angular velocity, F is proportional to r, so the radius for 1/3 G is 1/3 the radius for 1 G.
• Subproblem 2: What is the radius of the outer ring? It must be outside the aphelion distance of Uranus, which is 20.073 AU or just over three billion km. I don't know how much the passage of Uranus close to the Frame would perturb it, but let's ignore that for the moment, and posit a radius of 3.1 billion km.
• SP 3: The 1 G rotating, 1-km-radius ring has a peripheral velocity of 99 m/s and rotates one full turn every 63.5 s. We want F to be 9.8/3 = 3.267, and r is now 3.1 billion km (or 3.1 trillion m), which will equal v². The square root of the resulting 10.13 trillion (in units of squared velocity) is 3.182 million m/s or 3,182 km/s. This is about 470 times the orbital speed of Uranus. Uranus completes an orbit of the Sun every 84 years. Any point on this ring must therefore orbit the Sun about every 65 days. 

If you leave a station orbiting above Uranus and want to catch up to a station on the Frame, it takes a bit of a push. If you accelerate at 1 G in your shuttle:  v = at, or t = v/a. 3,182,000/9.8 = almost 325,000 seconds, or 3.75 days. If instead, you can handle 3 G's for thirty hours, that will do it.

I'll leave it to the physics-inclined to figure the hoop stress in the ring. You can be sure it is thousands of times the ultimate breaking stress of a carbon nanotube. 

Anyway, I figured all this after the fact. The "invention" of the lumes and the astonishing Solar-System-scale engineering imagined in Fortress Sol yielded quite an arena for space-cowboy derring-do, as Muree and her allies try to uncover the big lie at the root of the political system. What a fun read!

Getting to know a hive mind

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, mysteries, murder mysteries, space fiction, space aliens, sentient starships, writers, generated images

In the opening scene of Infinite Archive by Mur Lafferty, the protagonist, Mallory Viridian, is learning to communicate with a hive mind that consists of a large number of wasplike aliens. As I read, I realized that I would really like to illustrate the book. My "contract artist" for the images in this post is GPT-Image-1.5, accessed via Leonardo AI.

The book is chock full of ideas: multiple kinds of hive minds; aliens ranging from the Gneiss (my favorite; they are living rocks) to the Sundry (one of a few species of waspoids) to the Miu (catlike), and of course, the spaceships themselves; living libraries—both the larger spaceships and the hive minds—; language interpretation via a brain app…and so forth. The setting for most of the action is a mystery writers' convention being held on an enormous spaceship that is quite different from the others nearby at a station cluster. Mallory is a mystery writer. She also has a "talent" for being if not present, then nearby when murders happen. She solves the mystery, then writes a book about it. It's a living. In this case, communion with a hive mind, and the powers that this unlocks, are crucial to catching the murderer.

In the 2040's or so, First Contact occurred a number of years in the past (apparently about 2030), there are lots of loosely confederated alien species, and humans aren't yet trusted enough to be given the secret of space flight. But humans can apparently afford space tourism and even get jobs aboard certain ships, so they get to gallivant around the galaxy with everyone else. In a charming turn, spaceships aren't built, they are grown. Mallory has been given custody of a baby spaceship about the size of a tennis ball. It seems to be able to lift out of her jacket pocket and zip off at times, without burning anything. The drive mechanism is not mentioned. Antigrav, perhaps? By the time things get serious the little ship, named Mobius is bigger, softball sized, and beginning to look more like a rugby ball. Later on he (ships have gender) figures in a rivalry between different wasplike aliens.

It is hard to get too deep into the plot of the story without giving too much away. So let's stick with some ideas and their ramifications. Two of Mallory's allies are seen in this image, along with a catlike alien rather different from a Miu, but this is the best that the program could offer. The Miu is no ally, not quite an enemy, but definitely a player, just in another conceptual direction.

I'll skip to the convention. It doesn't get off to much of a start before there is trouble. First, Mallory's book agent is present, and tries to get her involved in a LARP (Live-Action Role Play) "game" that doesn't go well. I'll leave it to the reader to learn why she storms out. Then, it appears that some of the other authors present who have the same agent aren't all happy with one another, nor with the agent.

The convention itself kicks off with several acts including a performance by a popular Punk-ish band, apparently all human, though this isn't explicitly stated. 

During the musical performance, the first murder occurs, soon followed by a second. Mallory goes into high gear. She is now comfortable communing with, and getting help from, the Sundry hive mind she's been bonding with. This helps a lot, and I'd better leave it there.

I understand that Ms Lafferty has written other books. I plan to track them down. This one is an enjoyable romp.

SF (mostly) the way I like it

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space opera, short stories, anthologies

A few days ago I reviewed (here) a volume of science fiction and fantasy short stories. I didn't care for most of them, and rejected even reading nearly half of them, based on the opening sentence or two. And this for one of those "Best of" volumes! Fortunately, I had a volume of more satisfying stories to follow: New Adventures in Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan, with fourteen stories and only one that I skipped. This image, produced via Dall-E3, doesn't match the theme of any of the stories; I just happen to like it.

A word about where fantasy fits in. Whether it is about space or not, fantasy tales tend to eschew the rules of physics, any physics. In a fantastical story, physics only works when the author wants it to, so the characters are usually subject to gravity, for example, but a select few—or sometimes all of them—can zip about, seemingly gravity-free, as needed. In science fiction, including space fiction and space opera, the primary physical law to be broken, in a myriad of ways, is the speed of light. There is typically some explanation for how this speed limit is broken or sidestepped, so that the world of the story has consistent physics. In fantasy, physics need not be consistent.

Space Opera, in particular, relies on some kind of FTL (faster-than-light) mechanism, because the stage of a typical story spans at least a few dozen light-years. The last story in this volume, "The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir" by Karin Tidbeck, is one of my favorites, and relies on a kind of enormous spacefaring crab that ducks below spacetime—one of many versions of "subspace" or "hyperspace"—and then emerges to land on this or that planet, using some slower means of propulsion. This space crab is analogous to a hermit crab, except that the host "shell" that needs to be replaced from time to time is typically a large apartment building. This is a unique idea, one of the best I've encountered in decades.

The first story, "Zen and the Art of Spaceship Maintenance" by Tobias S. Buckell, is my other main favorite. The protagonist is a robot, really a type of android, a human mind in a powerful mechanism. Such servitude is temporary (but can last centuries), and the android is constrained to human-favoring laws similar to Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" (look 'em up). Android as he is (my surmise as to gender), he manages to outwit an evil human. All it takes is a nearby black hole and some fine-tuned astrogation.

I had a bit of fun with the premise of "A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime" by Charlie Jane Anders. See, there's this really enormous space creature named Vastness, described as "half the size of a regular solar system". It is apparently telepathic, and holds millions (trillions?) in thrall to satisfy its rather gargantuan needs. I thought, "OK, could it really be half the size of a solar system? Can it avoid becoming a black hole?" A few simple calculations showed, not really:

• The radius of Neptune's orbit, one possible measure of the size of our solar system (and the smallest possible such measure) is about 30 AU, or 4.5 billion km. Got a better choice for a "regular" solar system? Anyway, the term ought to be "stellar system".
• For simplicity, let's go just below half of that, and posit that the radius of Vastness is 2 billion km.
• The volume of Vastness is then 33.5 billion billion billion cubic km, or 3.35E28 km cubed. (The E stands for "ten-to-the")
• In cubic meters, that comes to another factor of a billion, or 3.35E37 cubic m.
• Flesh is just a little denser than water, so we'll use water for a stand-in. A cubic meter of water weighs 1,000 kg.
• The mass of Vastness is thus 3.35E40 kg.
• The Sun's mass is just under 2E30 kg. Vastness weighs almost 17 billion times as much as the Sun.
• At this website we find that the Schwarzschild Radius (event horizon radius) of a 17-billion-solar-mass black hole is just over 50 billion km. That's about 25 times the radius of Vastness and about 11 times the radius of Neptune's orbit.

QED Vastness is a black hole with a Schwarzschild Radius about 11 times the radius of Neptune's orbit.

Furthermore, here, near the end of the page, we see that a black hole of 4.3 billion solar masses would have a density of 1 g/cc, or 1,000 kg/cubic meter. The mean density of a black hole is inversely proportional to its mass, so heavier black holes are less dense. Vastness is too heavy to be "only" half the size of a "regular" solar system.

Onward! Another interesting idea is found in "Immersion" by Aliette de Bodard. Posit a whole-body Oculus Rift or similar system, that also projects an avatar of your choice around you to at least partly mask your appearance. Will such a system mediate your experience of the world to the point that you cannot function without it? Consider how many of your friends would find themselves utterly inept at everything without their phone. Or how about you? Could you function for a whole day without it?

Space opera is my favorite SF genre, because it removes enough limits on the author's imagination, while still requiring a modicum of realism, that the ideas can range farther and probe deeper than in any other genre.

Voices from all directions

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, short stories, anthologies

Good collections of science fiction short stories are hard to find these days. I cut my SF-reading teeth on anthologies, much more than novels, in the 1960's. I don't know whether a lot fewer short stories are being written—it does seem that there are fewer SF periodicals than before—or that there are just fewer collections being published. Thus, I glommed onto a new collection of stories by Jack McDevitt instantly.

A Voice in the Night, which closes with a story of that title, contains 24 stories, mostly written during the past decade, but a few dating back as far as 1986. A few of the stories take us into alternatives to the Conan Doyle world of Sherlock Holmes, a few are straight Campbellian problem-solving romps, and many are various sorts of space opera with the author's particular twist. Or two.

The general milieu of a McDevitt space opera is a universe in which humans are the only spacefaring species, or even in which no other planet found in the past 10 millennia has even had bacterial life. But there are a few that are closer to a Star Trek universe, crammed with aliens, though in those stories, I note that nobody has FTL, and the only contact is via radio. Interspecies conversations take decades to unfold, and tend to be rather local!

McDevitt's stories have new ideas aplenty, and a couple have a different take on the viewpoint God might have. But I realize, in every case, to discuss the idea would be a spoiler, and I'd prefer for anyone reading this to have the joy/shock of getting into these stories for yourself. So that's it, folks. I loved the stories, I read them all-too-quickly, and I hope I find other collections, by this author and others, that are as compelling.

Star Wars - through other eyes

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space opera, short stories

I must admit I like Star Trek more than Star Wars. As I recall, I saw only the first two episodes of Star Wars, now called Episodes 4 and 5. But that was enough for me to enjoy reading Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View, a collection of 40 short stories celebrating 40 years since the first film was screened.

The stories each present the experience of a minor or side character in certain well known scenes, such as the Mos Eisley cantina or the attack on the Death Star…most of them. Some limn a scene between the scenes, such as "There is Another" by Gary D. Schmidt, in which Yoda learns he is to train one more Padawan, the one he is least willing to train. The more memorable scenes get stories from several points of view each.

The writing is excellent, though a bit hagiographic in places. I enjoyed every one of the 40 stories, a rare occurrence for me when I read a short story collection.

I think I enjoyed the stories more than I did the film, but had I not seen the film, I would have enjoyed the stories less. To various degrees, the stories can stand on their own, but it really requires familiarity with Episode 4 to understand what is going on.

Finally! Some genuine Science Fiction

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space flight, space aliens

John Campbell's recipe for a good short story (SF or not, but especially SF): "Pose a problem, and then solve it." The corollary for writing a novel: Do it 25 times. There was a period of a few years that I read a science fiction book, either novel or collection, almost every day. Then the genre began to change, and eventually even Isaac Asimov began to write more about sex than about science. "Hard SF" of the kind that characterized the Golden Age vanished. Fortunately, that couldn't last forever. For the past couple of decades, even as the library shelves formerly filled with speculative fiction were being taken over by sword-and-sorcery fantasies and post-apocalyptic dystopias, a few writers have been returning to imaginative technology as fodder for their work. I am thinking of post-1990 books by Stephen Baxter, Catherine Asaro and Ben Bova, for example.

This week I made acquaintance with work by an author new to me, John Sandford, and his collaborator, Ctein. The book is Saturn Run, and it is full of good ideas that are backed up by good science. I'll leave it to others to comment on how well the geopolitical US/China conflict is depicted. Geopolitics runs along a dimension I cannot "see". Among the new ideas, these stood out to me:

• A type of ion engine called VASIMR, VAriable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, has been on the drawing board for a while, and small ones were tested some time ago. Scale 'em up from a few watts to a few GW per ion beam, and you have a way to slowly thrust a vessel weighing a few hundred tons up to the kind of speed that can cross 1.4 billion km in a year or less. Let's see, 1.4 billion km / 31.6 million seconds = 41 km/s average. The authors ramp up to about 140 km/s and back down again, covering the distance in more like nine months. The "Variable" part is the genius of the engine. High velocity exhaust = high specific impulse, but has a poor momentum-to-energy ratio for accelerating from a stop to the "lower" velocities, less than a few km/s. So you get more oomph at the low end when starting out, and better high-end acceleration by ramping up the exhaust velocity as the ship accelerates.
• Conversion of electrical energy to thrust is stated as "not quite 50% efficient". Maybe by the year 2066 they'll be able to do better than the thermodynamics of Sadi Carnot, which fix a limit of 40% efficiency for any thermal-to-thrust system. Anyway, if you are using 8 or 9 GW to thrust the ship, you have another 9 GW or so of waste heat to dissipate.  In space, radiating heat away is the only option. A phase-change liquid-metal scheme, and certain ancillary tricks, serve to make a radiator that runs at 600 degrees and is "only" the size of a couple of football pitches, rather than the size of Chicago.
• First Contact is not with the aliens themselves, but with a conversational AI that can proctor certain trade deals to allow humans to obtain a limited amount of alien technology. This includes methods of making and safely storing usable amounts of antimatter for the next spaceship generation. Interestingly, the galactic civilization the authors present bases contact between species on proctored trade deals, strictly avoiding interspecies contact. It seems they learned the lesson that we have yet to learn from our own history of inter-cultural contact!

I did find myself wondering how much plutonium they'd have to carry to run a 20 GW nuclear reactor for a couple of years. The words "nuclear waste" never appear, but I suppose it was wise to put that issue off to a very different kind of novel.

Of course, science fiction is not just about purely technical matters. People are immensely variable, and authors play characters off one another regardless of genre. I was particularly impressed with the well rounded characters in Saturn Run. Sanderson and Ctein created characters that a reader cares about and feels for. I admire this in a writer. I've tried to write fiction, and found I have no proper feel for creating characters that are believable, likable, or that can induce empathy in a reader. The most sympathetic, at least to me, is a central character, Sandy Darlington, a paradoxical and hiddenly broken man, who manages to think of things nobody else remembered to take account of.

If I go on any more, I'll introduce spoilers. If you like SF that emphasizes science, yet with eminently human characters (even the AI!), this is for you.

Surviving a trip to the stars

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, starships

Here's a conundrum. You want several generations of people to live aboard a starship or space station; to remain healthy, they need gravitation, or the semblance of it via rotation. In a small vessel, Coriolis effects when people move about are downright disturbing, so you want the rotating diameter to be large, the larger the better. How large can you go?

In various SciFi stories I've read of can-shaped craft about 2 km in diameter, rotating on the long axis, and also of various kinds of ring-shaped craft. In Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, the starship has two rings with a common hub (the "spine"), so it is a nice double ring, and the diameter is 15.3 km. It rotates to provide 0.83g, to prepare the inhabitants for the gravity they will find on their target world in the Tau Ceti system. However, in the second half of the novel (spoiler alert), one of the rings and half the spine is detached and returns to the Solar System, and on the return journey the rotation is increased to provide 1.1g. This is a decision by the ship's AI systems, because of the expectation of great debility among the returnees, so they won't be wholly disabled by Earth's 1g field. A kind of suspended animation is used because food has run out, and they'll arrive weakened and starving.

What are the stresses holding a large, rotating ring together? I won't go into the whole analysis. Suffice it to say that the fiber stress increases linearly with diameter for a specific g force. This is because a ring twice the diameter will have twice the mass, but is held together with exactly the same cross-sectional area. I remember calculating years ago that a steel hull could be no larger than about 2 km in diameter, and just barely hold itself together. If you want to have dirt and people and buildings inside, you need to make it smaller so the steel can support the extra mass.

However, we have better materials. Kevlar is almost twice as strong as steel, and weighs a quarter as much. So a Kevlar hull with a diameter as great as 21 km could just barely hold together. Make it only half as large, and it can then support internal stuff equal to the mass of the hull. Then we have carbon fibers, which are more than 1.5 times as strong as Kevlar, though they are a little denser. A carbon-fiber hull could be as large as 27 km. I am told that carbon nanotubes are a great deal stronger than this, but nobody knows how to make them kilometers long, and the glue in a matrix holding a bunch of them in an overlapping configuration isn't strong enough to permit their full strength to be employed.

Maybe they will have solved that dilemma by the 25^th or 26^th Century, when the ship to Tau Ceti is sent out. If not, carbon fibers are a pretty good material, as long as they aren't degraded by space grit during a decades-long flight at 0.1c (some 67 million mph or 108 million kph). The way author Robinson gets around the abrasion conundrum is by having some sort of magnetic shielding field warding off anything smaller than a few millimeters, and radar and avoidance taking care of the rest.

Of much more interest to the author, and even readers as nerdy as I am, are the biological, chemical and social situations in an ecosystem that remains closed for, eventually, 170 years, and is later re-closed for a further 180+ years. A super-engineer named Devi worries constantly about the future of the colonists—and their animals—who are smaller and on average less capable than their ancestors of 6 generations previously. But no reason is given for why her daughter Freya becomes the tallest person aboard, at 2.02 m (6'-7.5"). Devi is also faced with the gradual unbalance of various nutrients and other elements in the ecosystem. Phosphorus, for example, is gradually getting bound into insoluble minerals from which it is increasingly costly to re-extract. Crop yields are falling. Late in the voyage, certain bacteria are found in hidden globs of water in low-and no-gravity spaces along the spine, where they are degrading various materials, threatening the physical integrity of the ship's systems, and maybe even of its hull.

Then we come to the people. No matter how committed, emotionally balanced, and perhaps politically uniform the original generation might have been, genes rearrange themselves with every generation, and there is no predicting what mix of traits might dominate after several generations.

The term "island biogeography" is used a few times. There is an important aspect of a small, isolated population that is worth exploring a little. Suppose you've managed to gather an extremely diverse collection of a 2-3 thousand people, such that the maximum variety of favorable alleles of the human gene set present in the founder population. They pair up and have two children per couple (allowing for accidents, the "replacement rate" is historically 2.1). Each child has a random assemblage of exactly half the alleles of each parent. The two children of each couple will carry forward close to 75% of the total genetic variation found in their parents. If the parents somehow had totally unmatched allele sets, then some 25% of these will be lost to future generations. The statistics get remarkably harder to determine with more realistic mixes of alleles. But some numerical experiments I've done, kind of a Monte Carlo simulation, indicate that after 4 generations the remaining gene set is about 67% of the original. Also, a few genes, quite at random, have increased their representation among that generation by a factor of 3 or 4, while a larger number are about twice as prevalent, and the rest are about as common as ever. Let's hope the genes growing towards dominance are going to make future generations more healthy. Since there is an artificial cap on conceptions and births, natural selection only appears in the form of miscarriages or stillbirths, though I suppose some children will be deemed too flawed to be allowed to reproduce, and a few "lucky" couples get to produce an extra child to compensate.

That "cap" produces the greatest source of suppressed resentment: you have to have a strict totalitarian system, rigidly enforced in certain areas, or the mission will fail. You can't run such a small, closed ecosystem as a democracy. Midway through the book political polarization leads to violence and warfare. Robinson is ready for one aspect of this: an earlier generation that experienced in-ship conflict wisely programmed all manufacturing systems that, if someone tries to produce a firearm or projectile weapon of any design whatever, it will explode and dismember or otherwise damage whoever tries to use it. So warfare is carried out by throwing things and making stabbing weapons and clubs.

One message of this book is that faraway planets could be more dangerous than we imagine. The toxic, high-energy chemicals in the soils of Mars, chemicals that cannot be produced in quantity on a living planet, are one example used to illustrate that "terraforming" an alien planet may be many hundreds of times more difficult than we'd like to think. Authors galore have imagined terraforming, carried out in a quasi-human time frame of 50-200 years, but Robinson's characters find themselves discussing the need to keep their ship working for several thousand years while their remote descendants turn the planet into something that won't kill on contact. That's why a third of them return to Earth.

Inorganic-chemical troubles are just the beginning. A kind of super-prion is the stated cause for the original planetary body to be abandoned. The place had been found to have lots of oxygen in its atmosphere, but this was considered "abiotic". A mistake, it seems. An oxidizing atmosphere is so out of balance it cannot arise inorganically. Better to go to a planet or moon with an atmosphere in near-equilibrium, so you can be sure no life has taken hold. Any life of any kind on an alien planet is likely to be much too toxic for us to survive there.

The discussion of the closing years of the return, when the ship must calculate all kinds of gravity-looping billiards through the solar system (the "catcher" laser system gets a late start and can't slow down the ship all the way), goes on for too long for my taste. It is dramatic, and I suppose Robinson had some kind of simulation software to set up the planetary passes…or maybe he just put it all together of whole cloth. It is a piece of great writing, quite gripping, but wore me out.

There is a curious oversight in a couple of places. In the midst of a discussion of river deltas and braided streams in one place, and the v-shaped formations seen in beach wash, a character muses that perhaps this is the origin of the term "delta-v". Anyone with a glancing acquaintance with physics knows that the "v" here refers to velocity, and delta-v means change in velocity. When you want to maneuver from asteroid to asteroid, for example, attaining the right delta-v while using minimum fuel (encapsulated in the term "specific impulse" for straight-line acceleration, but lots more complicated otherwise) is the most critical consideration. Such considerations led to the Apollo astronauts receiving training in jeeps they drove in circles in the New Mexico sands, learning the tricks of docking satellites without running out of fuel. In another place, the use of GPS navigation on the Tau Ceti planet's moon is mentioned, with no indication that a set of GPS satellites was deployed. I found that a bit jarring. As long as I'm in error-checking mode, there's one more: on p 443 the neap tide is stated as the larger. Not so, the larger tide is the spring tide, which occurs when sun and moon are either at conjunction (new moon) or opposition (full moon). Neap tides occur at the first and third quarters, and are much smaller.

Enough negative blather. It's a great tale. Robinson's writing is a tremendous pleasure to read. The book is full of interesting ideas and discusses a great many things we need to consider when planning to colonize any bit of "outer space". A very fun read!

Three for a reason

kw: omnibus review, book reviews, nonfiction, science fiction, space fiction, naturalists, apes, politics, polemics

Even reviewing three books I'll have to keep it short. The injury in my fingertip is slow to fully recover. In order to type I put a pressure bandage over it; that reduces edema.

These are three quite disparate books! First, interstellar fiction at its best:

A lovely bit of space opera: Shipstar by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven. Niven has made his name with epic stories of immense space mysteries, in settings where starships are a bit like clipper ships: costly but in frequent use; and alien constructions of incredible size are discovered and explored.

Several years ago in Bowl of Heaven these authors introduced something even more huge than the Ringworld of Niven's "Known Space" books. The Bowl is somewhat wider than Earth's orbit, and its technology uses a captive K-class star for illumination and propulsion. Having a surface area a few million times that of a typical planet, all in perpetual daylight, such a world can support trillions or quadrillions of beings.

The story is a drama of interactions between the humans who have arrived at the Bowl and the various species they encounter there, particularly the elephantine, birdlike "Astronomers" who are nominally in charge. As the story reached its climax I remembered a 1967 episode of Star Trek, "The Squire of Gothos", in which an all-powerful being turns out to be a misbehaving child once his parents intervene at the end. As always in work by both Niven and Benford (and collaborations), we find a bracing panoply of alien minds and cultures.

The Bowl itself is of more interest to me. Several times the characters discuss its dynamic equilibrium. Rather tricky that, holding a star with the Bowl's gravity while inducing it to form a jet—similar in principle to the nucleus of an active galaxy, just star-sized—to propel both Bowl and star across the galaxy. The jet's forces counteract the gravity that would draw star and Bowl together. What I didn't see discussed is how they make it turn around to slow down. The stability of the system turns out to depend on plasma-beings called the Diaphanous. One one hand, I first thought this a copout, but it also emphasizes Niven's determination to imagine some kind of intelligent life for every possible environment. The centers of stars and the surfaces of neutron stars await…but not the interiors of black holes; that's been done.

Second, encounters of a quite different sort underlie Kindred Beings: What Seventy-Three Chimpanzees Taught Me About Life, Love, and Connection by Sheri Speede. This remarkable woman first became a veterinarian, but yearned for something more worthwhile than spaying pets and treating heartworm. An opportunity to visit Cameroon opened up a new world to her, and at the age of forty, she jumped in with both feet.

There are several threads in the book, including lots of autobiography. I'll leave it to her to describe the twists and turns of her own life. She had been blessed with an upbringing and early experiences that helped her cope with the very difficult lifestyle in rural Cameroon. Her passion has been to set up and maintain a sanctuary for orphaned and rescued chimps. Now you can learn of the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center here.

The book opens with, and later develops the background story leading to, the death of Dorothy, among the first of the rescued apes. Dorothy became a kind of tribal matriarch to the sanctuary chimpanzees. When she died, Dr. Speede had to perform an autopsy, but afterward, wheeled her covered body by the compound for the other apes to view her. The clear grief on their faces was captured in a photograph that has done more to crack open the anthropological community, and the world at large, to the understanding that chimpanzees have emotions very much like ours. No longer can anyone get away with claiming that "they don't feel in ways we can relate to" or "they don't really feel pain" and so forth.

Creating and running a nonprofit of any kind, particularly an ape rescue enterprise in Africa, takes an incredible amount of fundraising and much time-consuming political effort. The author was favored with a network of support that built up quickly, and the time was ripe for a logging company and numerous regional and tribal chiefs to encourage and support the work. Still, there was a level of effort and commitment that would have deterred her had she had any idea what she was getting into. Those who do great things are often blessed by this kind of holy ignorance. They do the impossible simply because they don't yet know it is impossible.

I wept often while reading, sometimes in joy, sometimes in pain. I suspect, so will you.  I would hope better of my fellow humans, some of whom are degraded to the extent we see in rampant animal cruelty. I am also encouraged by those who express the best of humanity by, in any way, helping what they can help. I recall telling someone of a similar, small effort, and he responded, "That is just a drop in the bucket." I replied, "Yes, so where is your drop?"

Third, something to rile the blood, whether your political slant is left or right or neither: a set of Lou Dobbs chalk talks in book form, Upheaval. Lou Dobbs is unabashedly conservative. We need more like him. These days, the public face of conservatism is, at best, shamefaced. Conservative "leaders" are embarrassed to be conservative, except for a few who claim they are conservative but are actually somewhat left-leaning moderates…they are conservative only by comparison to the rampant collectivists who run this administration and the Senate.

Lou Dobbs wants to do something about that. His weapon is facts, well-researched and well-presented facts. In that, he is more effective than Ross Perot was around 20 years ago, with his flip chart campaign ads. The trouble is, most Americans either don't care enough to realize that the scandal of the month really will affect them, or they are all, "Don't confuse me with facts. My mind is made up." American politics is "American Idol" set on a larger stage. The one who can sing best and get the audience whooping gets the most votes. Nobody even listens to the words of the song.

For me, an unabashed science nerd, I find the following a most telling symptom of our malaise (my bullet points, not his):

• American astronauts have to rely on getting a ride with Russian cosmonauts to get to and from the International Space Station. I'll bet that ends if we do more than weakly, squeakily protest the current Russian "adventure" in Ukraine.
• The next visit to the Moon will be by the Chinese. They have said so. They began orbital flights in April of 1970 and intend to send Chinese astronauts to the Moon by about 2020. The next six years ought to be interesting. I wonder if they will bring back the American flag from Tranquility Basin as a souvenir.
• The latest three countries to launch orbital rockets were Iran, North Korea and South Korea, all since 2009.

Hell, if North Korea, "the dark spot on the map of the Earth at night" can afford a space program, anybody can! We spend more on dog food than on NASA.

Quite frankly, the most fundamental of fundamental problems in this country is risk aversion. America was not started by the risk averse, but now it has been taken over by them.

Do you know why I do not get more politically involved? Too imaginative, too emotional, and I don't want to die of apoplexy. I had to read the book in spurts and starts. A steady diet of polemic, even polemic I agree with and as well presented as this, makes me too upset to sleep well. Lou Dobbs is right much more than he's wrong. I hope someone is listening.

A Dyson hemisphere

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space aliens, space travel

In their first collaboration, Larry Niven and Gregory Benford have come to lead that subgenre of Science Fiction that combines hard science, some blue-sky projections thereof, and believable sociology of both human and alien societies. In the case of Bowl of Heaven, the hard science keeps all speeds below that of light and accepts certain other known limitations of physics, the projections (or speculations) push engineering to the scale of a solar system and also posit a ramscoop that uses superconducting magnetic fields a few thousand times greater than any so far known, and the sociology involves a dozen or so humans confronted by not just one or a few quite alien species, but a profusion of them, in a colossal engineered ecosystem.

Most SciFi aficionados know the concept of a Dyson Sphere, the product of a society that captures all the radiation of a star as its energy source. Though Dyson first conceived of a hollow sphere, the concept was soon modified to encompass myriads of large, stellar-light-capturing orbital habitats in a thick shell about the star, sufficient to block all or nearly all of its light, and emitting waste heat primarily at wavelengths between 8 and 20µ (the human body's thermal radiation, at 310K, peaks at 10µ). So far, no deep-infrared stars suggestive of such structures have been observed. The orbital mechanics of such a system are formidable, and collisions might be so frequent as to make the scheme impracticable.

Niven's best-known foray into the partial Dyson Sphere arena has been the famous Ringworld series. Now we have an even more ambitious engineering project: Build a hemisphere centered on a flare star (a late K or early M star that tends to have a strong stellar wind), that supports many (quadrillions, I suppose) steerable mirror segments. Its radius is roughly an AU (150 million km). A wide ring at the equator supports a habitat with the area of many trillions of km², and the structure rotates to produce centrifugal "gravity" in the habitable ring. There is a hole at the center (the rotational axis of the hemisphere) with a special function. The mirrors reflect the star's light to focus on an area at the "rear" of the star (we can presume its axis of rotation), heating it and focusing its stellar wind into a jet that passes through the hole in the hemisphere. This begins to drive the star. Some sort of engines in the hemisphere counteract its orbital instability until the star begins to accelerate sufficiently to closely balance the tendency of the hemisphere to fall inwards. Then the job of the engines is quite a bit easier, or at least less energetic. Now you have a "ship" that is similar in size to the orbit of Earth or perhaps Mars, that can cross interstellar space over a span of millions of years.

This idea by itself could be fodder for a simple high-concept novel. For Niven and Benford it is mainly backdrop. Put it out there, make it a few tens of millions of years old, populate it with a cadre of large, birdlike alien species and an uncountable number of "adopted" alien species whose members they have plucked from star systems as they swung by in ages past. Then add US.

A ramscoop from Earth, bearing colonists heading for a star they've named Glory, catches up with this star-centered Bowl. Now, we all know that paying a visit to aliens who can engineer on such a scale is quite foolhardy. But it happens that the colonists, most of whom are in frozen sleep, have a problem. The small "awake" crew has discovered that the ship's top speed is a few percent low. Low enough that they can't keep a crew awake and alive long enough to get to Glory. They figure the Bowl might be able to supply them with materials they can use to replenish their stores, so they do pay the ill-advised visit, and of course the landing crew is partly taken captive and partly escapes to re-learn their Boy Scout skills as they flee hither and yon, evading capture while they learn what they can about the Bowl and the habitat.

I have wondered in the past just how big a spinning structure could be, to produce about 1g of apparent gravity. It turns out that the stress intensity for 1g of centripetal acceleration increases linearly with radius, such that the strongest known steel could not produce 1g when the radius is greater than a few hundred meters. Perhaps some kind of carbon nanotube assembly could hold together a structure of a km or so diameter. Both Ringworld and the Bowl would require materials with a tensile strength a few million times greater than any known. However, I was able to keep such considerations from marring my enjoyment of the book and its concepts, and I trust so can most SciFi readers.

A great deal goes on in this 400-page book, as we glean insights into the various cooperating "big bird" denizens and some of the Adopted species, and as one human group begins to learn to communicate with their "hosts" while the other searches for understanding and some kind of bargaining leverage. Here, the volume ends. I suppose a trilogy is planned (though the authors promise but one sequel, Shipstar).

The possibilities of quite distinct psychologies that the authors explore in the big birds are fascinating. Is our human Bicameral Mind going to be a handicap or a detriment, compared to their more unified psychology? It makes me wonder if the future volume(s) will explore the possibility that human psychology could become more unified, making our "unconscious" more consciously accessible.

There is a character, Fred, that I found myself identifying with. He is socially awkward but totally at ease with machines and computer code. In a conversation he describes his problem-solving technique, which takes advantage of sleep, and I was saying, "Yes! That's just what kept my programming career going for 4 decades!". I figure that either Niven or Benford must do this, or they know quite well someone who does and has described it. It is comparatively rare as an explicit technique, though many people have experienced waking up with a worrying problem solved.

Now I have my marching orders, to track the progress of the next volume, Shipstar, and any possible successor volumes. I can hardly wait.

All that in 3 centuries

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, interplanetary politics

Is the key to longevity a dose of androgyny? Could Al Gore's global warming film have been too conservative? Might we, and soon, command energies sufficient to make visiting Mars no more costly than taking a cruise ship from Los Angeles to Sydney? Can quantum computing lead to conscious computers? Is there a genuine solution to the problem of poverty? In Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 the answer to the first question is Yes, to the last it is No, and the rest are Maybe's or qualified Yeses.

The backdrop of the novel is a combination of continued ecological destruction on Earth, continued technological progress in both access to interplanetary space and ultrafast computers, and progress in anti-aging, at least for some. From a viewpoint near the year 2400, the plotline centers on converging events in the year 2312, including the rewilding of Earth by animals and plants that had been propagated in thousands of spacefaring zoos (also used as interplanetary cruise vessels) and a turning point in the relationship between humans and their mechanical creations.

An important subplot is the courtship between two main characters, a 113-year-old "man" and a 137-year-old "woman", Wahram and Swan, with the interesting complication that both of them have both fathered and mothered children. On the spectrum of male-female, which today has only two endpoints plus a tiny cluster of hermaphroditic "errors" that are typically corrected by surgery (and a tiny number of people who become medically switched to the opposite pole), our two protagonists, and apparently all who partake of extended longevity, are near the 25% and 75% points.

I found myself wondering, "Who pays for all this stuff?" Is it really affordable for Swan to go from Mercury, her birthplace, to Earth, Venus, Titan and other locales near Saturn, and back and forth a few times between some of these places, and then to Mars? Saturn is a billion or two billion km from everywhere else, so to get there in a month you need to crank the old rocket up to around 600 km/sec, some 20 times the speed of Earth in its orbit. The 2312 Solar System is apparently filled with city-sized hollowed-out asteroids running shuttle service hither and yon, but the velocities implied by the narrative mean you need huge energy expenditure from time to time to keep your cruise ship from heading off into interstellar space. It is stated that there are 16,000 of these zooming around. You also need a pretty fast shuttle just to catch one to get on it.

Well, I can suspend disbelief enough to enjoy the multitude of interesting ideas the author weaves into the book. The idea of walking around Mercury near its terminator, so you are just ahead of being baked by the Sun, leads to some interesting plot devices, including a long tunnel walk by Swan and Wahram. A walking speed of under 4 km/hr is sufficient at Mercury's equator, and at a greater latitude, the speed needed is less so you can trot ahead enough to get in a few hours sleep before the Sun catches up with you. You just need a space suit with an air and food and water supply for 176 days, and a way to eject waste, to do a circumnavigation on foot.

A big political notion is the balkanization of humanity. The possible rise of self-directed, quantum-computer-based AI in one secretive culture, and attacks on Mercury and a couple of other places that could only have been carried out with the help of extremely capable "qubes", drives events toward one of the pivotal events in early 2312. Considering the probable need for petaflop or even exaflop capability in a phone-sized device that is required for this to work, is 300 years enough time? Probably so, and maybe quite a bit less. The bottleneck in AI progress will be, as it always has, programming not hardware. You can't program what you don't understand. Assuming humans return to space in the next century or so, and learn to (and can afford to) hollow out 30 km asteroids and colonize them, balkanization is the most likely outcome. Unity is hard to achieve, and harder to maintain, as the increasingly creaky American experiment, and the faltering European experiment, demonstrate.

The book ends on an optimistic note. While I am skeptical that the space developments found in it are likely, I am more optimistic that the human race can increase in wisdom over time. It is either that, or self-extinction. K.S. Robinson votes for wisdom.

Space opera the way it ought to be done

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space opera

Some nine thousand years from now, will star travel be cheaper than intercontinental travel is today? Will dropping in on an orbital station be of no more consequence than visiting the Walmart in the next town? That is the world of Jack McDevitt's Alex Benedict novels. Firebird is the sixth in a series that began with A Talent for War, first published in 1989.

Alex Benedict, famous for completing an archaeological investigation begun by his uncle Gabriel Benedict, and now his uncle's heir, is best known as a purveyor of antiques. This makes him unpopular with museum curators, who decry the supposed desecration. This fact adds a twist or two to the plot of this novel, in which Alex and his aide Chase Kolpath investigate the disappearance of a famous physicist, and then uncover a quirk in spacetime that may solve a number of other cases of disappearing starships.

The key idea related to the vanishing starships is that black holes, as they move through space, cause a damage track in spacetime that diverts a starship which attempts to enter hyperspace at or near the track. The ship is whipped forward in time by a few years or a few decades, and thereafter tends to appear for a few hours before vanishing for the same period, over and over. The climax of the novel is a rendezvous with one of the missing starships, and the attempt to rescue the passengers from their time warp. For the passengers, three weeks have passed. For "outside space", seven thousand years. The few passengers rescued are truly the oldest "relics" Alex has ever recovered, but they are living and breathing and speaking an archaic French dialect. An epilogue closes the loop on the rest of their fellow passengers.

Another very interesting idea is that of sentient Artificial Intelligences, or AI's. Everyone has at least one of these, but a planet that was carried through a dust cloud has lost all its biological inhabitants, leaving a world full of AI's to fend for themselves. Some become insane, and even pathologically homicidal when humans visit the world after its emergence from the dust cloud. Since pathology is not allowed by their original programming, this starts a debate about their status as possibly sentient and thus worthy of rights and even citizenship. Of course, Alex winds up in the middle of the mess when he and Chase "rescue" an AI from the lost planet, one who has been overseeing a schoolhouse for millennia and is not only bored out of his mind, but fearing retribution from the pathological AI's for his friendly contact with people. In a few thousand years, if humanity survives, computers powerful enough to emulate a human brain in a space no larger than a real brain will certainly become possible. I wonder if they can be "programmed" to be intelligent, or if instead, training will become the norm?

The book is a pleasure to read. A cover blurb on the hardback copy compares McDevitt's work to that of Asimov. As I recall, Asimov's later novels consisted primarily of dialog. McDevitt is also a master of believable dialog. Other than that, the worlds that he builds differ quite a lot from Asimov's, which is all to the good. We need fresh ideas more than a further exploration of older ones. I note in this Wikipedia article that he'll be 77 this year. That is the prime of life for an author.

Superkitties, round two

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, cats, cat lovers

I reviewed Catalyst last September, the first novel of backstory by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough about the telepathic Barque Cats, which kill vermin, provide companionship and in general guard spaceships everywhere. The second book in the current series is Catacombs.

At the end of Catalyst a space-faring Egyptian cat named Pshaw-Ra has enabled dozens of ship cats to escape a galactic destroy order that is based on a mistaken understanding of the remnants of scarab beetles in their feces. The scarabs came from the super-Egypt located on planet Mau, to which the cats are taken as Catacombs begins.

The focus of this yarn is the culture clash between the ship cats, some of which are becoming telepathic with their chosen "cat persons" due to ingesting the special scarabs, and the cats on Mau, which are regarded as deities. Much of the plot is driven by the machinations of Pshaw-Ra, who is the Grand Vizier to the Queen of Mau. The former queen, Pshaw-Ra's mate, has died while he was gone, and their daughter (of course the vain, evil one) has taken her place. In the middle third of the book, the action takes place in the catacombs attached to an underground city (Mau is quite hot, topside).

A huge, magical serpent that inhabits the underground tunnels has to be driven back a couple of times, and is finally, it seems, killed, but Phoenix-like, seeming death is part of its cyclical life. It becomes space-faring as a cloud of energy-hungry mini-serpents that threatens to extinguish some of the stars in the settled Galaxy.

Wouldn't you know it, the next generation of cats, crosses between the ship cats and the Mau cats, are just the right warriors to eliminate this horde of mini-serpents and save the threatened stars. The book ends with the end of the first battle, successful for the cats, but boding more to come.

With quite a bit of willing suspension of disbelief, the book makes a fun yarn. In the interest of continuing the series, I offer these possible title words:

• Cataract: More goings-on beneath Mau with its underground river.
• Cataclysm: Terrible danger for the nascent race of Barque Cats, ending with a hairbreadth escape.
• Catamarans: An interlude on a more watery world, perhaps with a swimming version of the big serpent.
• Catatonia: The Cats are threatened by a paralytic syndrome.
• Catapult: I can't think of a plot line, but I had to include the word.
• Catenary: Super Cats design suspension bridges (A catenary is also a type of geodesic in a uniform field, which might make more sense with space-faring felines).
• Categories: The librarian duties of the more literate Cats.
• Catalogue: A companion volume listing the names and special abilities of the varieties of Barque Cat; sort of like Pokemon catalogue lists.

The limits of human enhancement

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space aliens, space warfare, battle suits

In Cobra Guardian, the second book of the Cobra War trilogy, Timothy Zahn presents not one, but two ways to make a super-warrior. The drama revolves around Cobras, men and women implanted with servomechanisms for extra strength and speed, enhanced senses of hearing and vision, and a variety of laser, electrical and sonic weaponry. These make a single Cobra roughly the equivalent of an Abrams tank. It required the might of hundreds of Cobras to defeat a warlike branch of the Trofts, some of whom are more inclined to get ahead by trade and treaties, while others prefer conquest. The Tlossies are a Troft demesne of traders who are allies of humans, but reluctant to go to war against other Trofts on our behalf.

A sometime rival planet of humans, denied knowledge of Cobra technology, has developed warriors they call Djinni, who wear external robotic strength-enhancing and sense-enhancing technology and weaponry that makes them quite equal to Cobras, and in certain ways even more deadly.

In the middle of the mix is the planet Caelian, which has fascinating biology. In a ramped-up Darwinian system, the plants are bad enough, but even the mildest animals are downright nasty. "Flossies" look a little like sheep, though their curly pelt is more like steel wool. A large contingent of Cobras is required to guard the ordinary humans on the planet, a never-ending assignment.

On the other four planets that host Cobras, though, they are seen as anachronisms. It has been a few decades since the warlike Trofts were beaten back, and they are being seen as an unneeded expense. Politicians argue "austerity measures" that include cutbacks in Cobra funding. Then Troft warships attack all five Cobra-bearing planets.

As it happens, unknown to the Trofts, automated surgical machinery has been developed that can reduce the time needed to augment a human to Cobra in five days, and in another breakthrough, cognitive-enhancement drugs enable them to be trained in just a few more days. If the allied worlds can beat back the Troft invasion long enough to produce a few hundred new Cobras, they can win this phase of the Troft wars.

I was most fascinated by the extreme biology of Caelian. It is a wonder anything stays alive. Wind-blown plant spores turn any organic material into a green forest of rapidly-growing, and carnivorous, plants. That includes the clothes you are wearing, but fortunately not your own skin (while you are alive). Once a few plants take hold, insects follow, and they all seem to be hungry for blood. Bigger animals follow the insects, and if you don't keep the plants scraped off your clothing, you will soon be eaten by the bigger bugs and their predators. Then there are the larger predators; anything over ten pounds in size will gladly take on a human.

The humans on the planet have developed a silicon-based fabric called silliweave that denies the plants a foothold, as long as they keep plant spores wiped or scraped off it regularly (blown-in dirt can feed the plants—and it is always windy). That's a chemical technology I find interesting. What they really need is some way to keep the plant spores from gaining that first foothold, even if a little dirt has blown onto a garment. They are working on that…

I find Caelian more plausible than Cobra or Djinn, however. The energy source for their acrobatics is left unstated. An armor piercing laser hidden in a leg bone (or alongside it) needs to dissipate a few megawatts, if briefly. Even a "fingertip" laser that can zap mere mortals will cook the finger in which it operates. And jumping ten or twenty meters, straight up? I'll wait until I see it. Of course, these capabilities make for some truly rollicking fight scenes.

The book ends with an opening for Cobra Gamble, due out in another year or so. In that book the author will have to bring together all the threads laid out so nicely for us in this one.

Beyond the game

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space fantasy, space warfare, video games

My son has been playing the XBox game Halo, in several versions, almost since its inception late in 2001. I am sure the main draw for him is the combat and its realistic venue. What I didn't know until recently is that its developers and fans have together created quite a backstory and universe in which the combat game unfolds. Nor that it has become a multi-faceted franchise, managed by 343 Industries, a unit of Microsoft.

One facet is several series of novels, and the one that came my way is Halo:Cryptum by Greg Bear, the first of a projected trilogy. The cover proclaims it "Book One of the Forerunner Saga". To get a better grasp of the covering story and backstory, see this Wikipedia article. Here I concern myself with certain ideas.

Interstellar and intergalactic travel in the Halo universe is accomplished by travel through "slipspace", and "slipspace chips" seem to answer to the trilithium crystals of Star Trek, as an energy-conversion mechanism to retrieve vacuum energy, and as an access mechanism to the variety of subspace or hyperspace the term connotes.

The Forerunners themselves begin much as humans do, and are of similar size and shape, but go through a series of changes, as many as four, which in the book are called Mutations. This is a misuse of the word, and Greg Bear ought to know better, though he is probably constrained by the language of the franchise. Such a change to an individual is more properly termed a metamorphosis, making the protagonist of this novel, with the first name Bornstellar, a first instar who metamorphoses to the second instar halfway through. This second instar is called his First Form, and his height then exceeds two meters. His Third- or Fourth-Form father is some four meters tall, and has changed aspect almost beyond recognition. This is the way of Forerunners. (By contrast, human metamorphosis, like mammalian growth in general, occurs gradually, or we'd more readily compare ourselves with locusts or butterflies.)

A particular emphasis is placed upon the armor all Forerunners wear nearly all the time. It is an active agent, controlled by them through an AI agent called an ancilla ("female slave" in Latin), and the term is used for all AI agents, of all levels of power. Nearly all speak with female voices. This probably answers to the human prejudice in favor of being served by women in most personal matters. The armor cares for its wearer, and can keep a person alive—for not only Forerunners wear such armor—even in vacuum for a time, and even when gravely injured.

This young person, Bornstellar, has defied his family, visited the home planet of humans, and accompanied by two humans, including a re-engineered Florian ("hobbit" in recent scientific literature), goes a-treasure hunting, only to encounter the cryptum (not a crypt, which would hold a corpse, but a suspension chamber to retain an exile in time) of an ancient warrior named the Didact. The Didact kidnaps him and the humans, later guides him through a "Mutation" that eventually converts him to a sort of clone of the Didact, and then leads them all into an adventure that gets them crosswise with the highest Forerunner authority. The book ends with Bornstellar, exhibiting a mixture of First Form types, replacing the Didact, who has been executed. I find it ironic that the most powerful figure in this saga (so far) is a Librarian, and wife of the Didact/Bornstellar. Located for the time being in an intergalactic Ark, the protagonists are now in position for the opening of the second novel, due out in a year or less.

While the author has a compelling writing style, this is less of a page-turner and more of a book to keep you thinking. It bears some resemblance to the work of Olaf Stapledon, who wrote of galaxy-spanning civilizations and star-building and -destroying cultures of future men. While many epic SciFi works and series owe their vision to one writer or to a small collaboration, this is Microsoft at work, and their stable of fantasists. So far, the Halo universe hasn't become the "camel" most committees tend to create. May it remain so.

A quest against the longest odds

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, starships, video games

Consider a video game with just a few levels. You have no weapons, you don't know the rules of play, you begin with only one ally whom you have no reason to trust, and you soon realize everything else out there is trying to kill you. You've just awakened from an idyllic dream to a nightmare: you're naked, freezing, hungry and thirsty. You have to find your way somewhere, you aren't sure where; you will gain a few useful allies and avoid a host of enemies; you must find food and water that won't poison you; you realize you are on a damaged starship; and you hope to find out why and what and all the other questions any good reporter asks. You don't know your own name.

This is how Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear begins. It takes about a quarter of the book to set the stage to the point detailed above. The book really does read much like I'd expect a narrative of a questing video game. Before there were video games, we played a text version of "Adventure", on mainframe computers, using text terminals. The computer would write,

You are in a long hallway with closed doors along both sides. It recedes as far as the eye can see in either direction. The fifth door on the left appears open and lighted. Do you want to go forward or turn around and go the other way?

Depending on how smart the program was, you might answer "Go forward and enter the lighted doorway". Then it would tell you what you see now. And so forth… Adventure was hugely popular until it was replaced by Doom and similar games with a more visual interface.

The starship of Hull Zero Three is an intriguing design. Its fuel and water supply is a comet several kilometers in size, harvested from the Oort Cloud. Technologies we haven't yet discovered are behind the "diverter" (a shield against cosmic dust and debris), freezing and revivifying apparatus, cloning from an artificial DNA library, and the "bosonic drive". I must assume the drive has a specific impulse of about a million seconds for the craft to attain a speed of 0.2c while using only half its fuel.

Note: Specific Impulse is the number of seconds a rocket engine can produce one pound of force using one pound of fuel (or 9.8 Newtons using one kilogram of fuel). The best launch rockets currently in use have SI of around 500 seconds, and the best ion engines for off-earth use approach 8,000 seconds.

Back to the starship. It has three hulls, imaginatively named 01, 02, and 03. The protagonist, called the Teacher throughout, even after he is given a name, is awakened in 01, finds his way forward to some kind of control center, and gains a few allies along the way. They stretch the definition of human, but it seems they all are. They find a shuttle craft that takes them to 03, where additional allies await, but so does possible doom for Teacher. He has, at this point, found out that he has been cloned many times; he has seen rooms full of corpses identical to him. It was at this point that I began to think of the book's plot as a video game, because you get so many "lives" in video games.

In Adventure, there were no extra lives. When you died, the game was over. You could restart it, but you had to go from the beginning; no restarting from a "save point". In the book, I suppose it is somewhat like that, because this incarnation of Teacher starts from the birthing chamber just like all his earlier selves. He finds that he's been trying, and failing, for hundreds of years, after some kind of conflict, perhaps a civil war on shipboard.

The ship's hulls themselves are enigmatic. Apparently they reconfigure using some kind of shapeshifting technology similar to what we saw with the "liquid robot" in Terminator 2. I wonder, even if such a technology is possible, whether it'll ever be cost-effective outside certain very narrow applications. Many neat technologies were commercial failures. Nonetheless, the changing landscape adds to the challenges Teacher must face, the tests he must "pass", to make certain the ship is able to continue and complete its mission. In the end, his key asset is his conscience.

I like a book that keeps me thinking. Hull Zero Three is full of interesting ideas, has a compelling narrative, and was an entertaining read.

The other is a mirror to ourselves

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, far future fiction, space aliens

I thought long and hard about how much to reveal of Echo, Jack McDevitt's latest space opera. Humanity has been in space 8,000 years, traveling hundreds of light years takes less time than driving from Florida to California, and a moderately wealthy antiquities dealer named Alex Benedict can afford his own starship. In eight millennia of looking, only one sentient alien species has been discovered, and they are called the Mutes, for reasons never detailed in this novel. Beyond that, I'll come down on the side of dealing in ideas, not in story plots.

The central thought is expressed by a comment made by a minor character. Faced with a cosmos nearly empty of Others, humanity is faced with only the "echo of themselves". And Echo is the name chosen for a stellar system upon which a mystery rests. Suppose we achieve star travel, look everywhere, and find that we truly are alone. Then what? The question that informs this tale is, yes, one other alien civilization has been found, but no others: Now what? Does that make our existential angst worse or better?

To the quintessential businessman, everything is business. A travel agency CEO becomes the villain of the piece, but like my thoughts on, "Does the Devil know he is evil?", author McDevitt has a quote opening one chapter that begins, "Truly evil persons do not recognize their own malevolence." It is attributed to Tao Min-wa, whom I cannot verify, so it may be a "future quote", as several are in the chapter headings. But I like finding an author whose thoughts echo my own.

Throughout the book's quest, Alex and his assistant Chase are dogged by the attentions of a hired killer. Chase becomes the hero who eventually thwarts the assassin, just as she is nearly the first victim. I was reminded of old "Assassin's Guild" cornball routines. This requires a digression.

When I was in college, forming a non-lethal Assassin's Guild was a popular pastime. People would think up creative ways to do someone in, then act them out with harmless props, like a pillow instead of an anvil to be dropped on someone's head. One of the spy series that was popular on TV at the time took up the theme in one episode, which opened with someone actually getting killed in an AG sort of way: a cartridge had been secreted into a telephone handset, which went off when a tuning fork of a certain pitch was struck, killing the person who'd answered the phone. The creativity theme was carried along for a while, but when it came time to bump off the hero of the series, all these creative people grabbed pistols and began running around almost like a Keystone Kops version of guerrilla fighters. It was hilarious!

That is how I felt here. The killer's first attempt was overly elaborate, and requires readers who don't know any science: A lovely artifact arrives in the mail. It is stated as being the size of Chase's forearm, so it's no more than a cubit in length, about half a meter. When she sets it upright, lights come on inside, but then she begins to suffocate. Turns out it is sucking the oxygen out of the room. She gets rescued of course. But an explanation is offered that ruins it. The object is said to be filled with powdered magnesium and there is also a battery-operated cooling device. When the magnesium gets cold, it quickly absorbs oxygen.

There is a limit to the amount of disbelief I can suspend. I know enough chemistry to realize you can't get cold magnesium to absorb anything. It is a flammable metal, and the oxidation of the metal is ferociously hot (I've done it). A magnesium flare is the brightest one there is! Chase would have run for her life, not stayed around long enough for the oxygen level to drop. Further, there is more oxygen in a room than one might imagine, plus, Chase is told the device removed the oxygen from the whole floor of the house.

Let's do a little math. Under ordinary conditions, near the temperature and pressure a scientist calls STP (the S is for standard), air weighs about 1.28 grams per liter (g/l). Twenty percent is oxygen, or 0.256 g/l. An ordinary living room contains about 50 cubic meters, or 50,000 liters. The oxygen in that volume weighs 12.8 kg. A magnesium atom combines with one oxygen atom, but weighs 1.52 times as much, so absorbing 12.8 kg of oxygen requires 19.5 kg of the metal powder. That is upwards of forty pounds, something Chase is unlikely to be able to lift with one hand. And what about that bit that the whole floor of the building was deoxygenated? A modest house's first floor has a volume greater than 200 cubic meters, contains 50-60 kg of oxygen, which would require 75-90 kg of magnesium. So, that's two strikes against this idea. The chemistry won't work, and the mass of reactive metal would be much too great.

The other brainstorms attributed to the hired killer are at least remotely plausible. And in the end, a "proton cannon" is used. The range of energetic protons in air is about a meter, so you have to get the cannon rather close to its target. In this story, it seems to have a greater range... Oh, well, just like in the spy story, when you really gotta kill someone, may as well use a gun.

Businessman plus hired killer. That's one element. There is the true believer, an explorer who spent more than a century looking for aliens and didn't find any. There are two people who, added to Alex and Chase, make this a double love story. And Alex and Chase themselves, what drives them? They are two faces of an ultimate realist, one who wants to know the truth, regardless, one who wants to get it right.

Now I must back off and say I really enjoyed the book. The author is a compelling writer, and the basic ideas kept me thinking throughout. I tend to swing back and forth between Fermi's question, "Where is everybody?" and, "When we get out there, they'll be everywhere." Maybe civilizations are rare "out there", but I can't imagine they are so rare that we are the only one in our Galaxy (we have little hope of ever communicating with anybody in another galaxy). The question asked by this book is, "But what if we are?"

Telepathic kitties

kw: book reviews, science fiction, cats, space fiction

Noted cat lover Anne McCaffrey and introduced the Barque Cats, spaceship cats that hunt vermin and detect leaks and other dangers, in a the novels of her Tower and Hive series. Now she has teamed up with fellow cat lover Elizabeth Ann Scarborough to produce a few books of backstory, the first being Catalyst.

As the book begins, Barque Cats are already established as a special breed of angora coated cat, bred for intelligence and spaceworthiness. During the course of the novel, a few cats develop a telepathic bond with humans, a one-to-one bond between one cat and one caretaking person. The kidnapping (catnapping) of a prominent breeding cat first triggers an adventure story as her Cat Person sets out to find her, then morphs into a second story of interstellar intrigue involving an ancient Egyptian space vessel and its feline captain. Mysterious glittery scarab-like beetles round out the cast.

In the book's setting, shared with the Tower and Hive series, the Earth is long abandoned and people have been in space for millennia. One can hop aboard a shuttle and drive out to meet an orbital mother ship, to be taken to another solar system, with the same nonchalance we go to the station to catch a train to New York. Absent the space elements, the story could have taken place on Earth, limited to, say, the Kentucky-Tennessee-Ohio area of the US…or even all within Ohio. Just substitute cities for planets.

The Barque Cats are truly extraordinary. The authors posit cats that can speak amongst themselves almost from birth, and a few chapters relate cat-to-cat dialog (catalog?). They quickly learn Standard (AKA English) also, at least to hear. The telepathic ones communicate ideas that their link-fellows interpret in words. For an animal with a two-ounce brain, this is a stretch, and requires a great deal of willing suspension of disbelief.

It is an entertaining yarn nonetheless. A cat person like myself will enjoy cat fiction, no matter how far-fetched. But I suspect if I had a telepathic link to my cat, its "utterances" would be no more complex than "Food!", "Open door!", "Play!" and "Stop that!", which I understand in Cat already.

Enceladus or Bust

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space aliens

Just to set the right expectations, the space aliens in Threshold by Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor are long extinct, having apparently blown each other up in an interplanetary civil war about the time the dinosaurs went extinct. The book is the sequel to Boundary by the same two authors, and I presume much more is explained there.

In keeping with much modern adventure fiction, there is the obligatory setup of intrigue and power politics, and the expected psychopathic villain, this time a ship's chief of security. While he is the only true villain onstage, there are hints of bigger, more evil villains behind the scenes, even funding his hidden agenda. An unusual feature of this novel is the death of about 90% of the characters, including half of the named cast. It also ends in a cliff-hanger that ensures at least another book (or five) in the series.

Setting all that aside, there are two good ideas of how to power a spaceship, and some really blue-sky notions about nanotechnology and "smart dust" type sensors. The "mass beam" propulsion system is one way to reduce the amount of onboard fuel a ship needs. A railgun type of propulsor sends lots of dust into space ahead of a spacecraft, timed to intercept its expected trajectory. The first half of that trajectory, its velocity will be much greater than the ship, so as it is captured (by a means not explained), it transfers momentum to the ship. It also can act as reaction mass by being heated in an onboard nuclear reactor and spit out the back again. In the latter part of the trip, the dust is traveling slower than the spacecraft, which is now pointed the other way, so the ship is slowed by catching the dust, and slowed again by using it for reaction mass. If the "mass" is smart enough, it can be guided by a ship-mounted laser to more accurately center on the expected trajectory, which reduces waste. I shudder at a technology that can produce thousands or millions of tons of material composed of germ-sized robots.

The nebula drive is more subtle. It uses a huge magnetic field to entrain dust, either dumb or smart, which is pushed upon by both the solar wind and by sunlight. The magnetic field is supported by room-temperature superconducting ribs extending from the ship's midsection (the superconducting technology is courtesy of the extinct aliens). In areas away from a planet's magnetosphere, the field's effective diameter can be a thousand kilometers. That can catch a lot of sunlight. Tacking maneuvers are needed in the second half of a trip, to use the sunlight and solar wind to slow the spacecraft.

Then there is the smart dust itself. The technical protagonist, named A.J., deploys two kinds of the stuff. One kind, called Locusts, is larger, the size of a pencil eraser or so, and a flotilla of these can carry out complex jobs and those requiring strength. Faerie Dust, on the other hand, is almost invisible but can interact with electronic systems. Both communicate with A.J. by cooperatively generating a radio signal and acting as an extended antenna.

The capabilities of such micro- and nanosensors (and -effectors) are gradually unfolded as the novel proceeds. At one point, a dose of Faerie Dust is made into an antipersonnel weapon by A.J. to immobilize a few bad guys. Somehow they get inside their bodies and interrupt key nerve signals. At another, A.J. is able to gain partial control of another ship's propulsion and communications systems. The guy must have an IQ of 700. In real life, just writing the virus code one wants the dust to carry could take months, and the software that allows the dust motes to insert code fragments into a computer system could take decades to perfect. He does the first job in a matter of hours, and the other over a week or two.

The novel is fast-paced, which necessitates leaving out a lot: its time frame is just about ten years. Even with the super-fast drives described above, it takes a few months to get a ship to Mars or Ceres, and even longer to get to "outer system" space, Jupiter and beyond.

The rub in interplanetary voyaging is the time required. The ballistic orbit between Earth and Mars, the Hohmann orbit, takes about a year, each way. The NASA Mars project is considering a somewhat more costly alternative that cuts the one-way time to about eight months. To get three men to the Moon and back required a little over a week, and the supplies, mainly water and oxygen, were a huge inventory item. Multiply that to between seventy and ninety weeks for a Mars mission. The more water, oxygen and food you take along, the more fuel you need to push it all into the transfer orbit, slow the craft down at Mars, get back into Mars orbit, and return to Earth.

But put all that aside and enjoy the ride. It is likely at some point that people will go to Mars and even farther. Some of the ideas in Threshold may indeed be used to help them get there.

My intro to Honorverse

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, military fiction, space opera

Many years ago, when I first read Foundation by Isaac Asimov, I was halfway through before I realized that it consisted almost entirely of dialogue. I slowed down for a while and took notice. Asimov was a master of writing dialogue. I have found nobody similarly skilled at writing stream-of-consciousness. I quickly tire of interior monologues.

I had not got far into Torch of Freedom, by David Weber and Eric Flint, before I realized that this is another book that is very heavy on the dialogue, but with less skill than Asimov (maybe that isn't saying much). It also contains lots of interior monologue, as the authors depict at least seven facets of a multilevel intrigue and attempt to bring a reader "inside the head" of at least one protagonist from each facet. I've made it sound like I didn't like it. Let's say it is an acquired taste, and with nearly 600 pages to acquire it, I did find myself enjoying the book.

I admit I got it because of the cover, which depicts a spacecraft approaching "Fun City", a combination space station and roller coaster with a partly blacked-out marquee. It was a rather "splash in the pool" introduction to David Weber's Honorverse series. Fortunately an appendix lists and describes the dramatis personae and their allegiances, because you really do need the playbook to follow this game.

Honorverse is set in the 4000's, some 19 centuries "post diaspora"; presumably starship travel via hyperspace and wormholes was discovered in the 2100's, and star travel became as cheap, relatively speaking, as traveling to the New World via caravel in the mid-1600's. In some ways, the Honorverse milieu is similar to the 1600's. Slavery (of the genetic variety) is rampant in a large part of human space, the settled portion of the Galaxy is balkanized to an extent similar to Europe during the Enlightenment, and a new planet-nation of freed slaves has just been set up. This is Torch. Its freeing is the subject of an earlier novel in the series.

This novel focuses on and climaxes with the Battle of Torch, a space battle with laser-tipped missiles and giant warships that can accelerate at rates that make this old physics junkie shudder (hmmm: 200G of acceleration, with "inertial dampers" so the crew can survive, for a 2-million-ton craft… let's just say that you have to annihilate the mass of a small star to supply the energy needed for an hour's run)

I am less interested in the military aspects, though, compared to the social settings: one near-totalitarian state called Mesa that uses eugenic tinkering to produce its alpha, beta, and gamma "star lines"; the vastly powerful, but largely unaware Solarian empire; a slave-production "corporation" known as Manpower, Inc., which practices a kind of reverse eugenics and is allied with Mesa; and several smaller "star nations" with various allegiances—and two of them are at war; in addition to Torch. Once the pace quickens, about halfway through the book, the reader has seen the point of view of at least a couple of people from each of these constituencies.

The human stories focus on Queen Berry of Torch and several of her staff and allies, on "Ganny El" and her gypsy band that occupy the roller-coaster emporium, on two agents, Anton and Victor, who carry out intelligence-gathering on Mesa, and on a family with a brilliant but doomed foster daughter, a victim of eugenics that has overreached its limits. Interestingly, I can't recall a specific portrayal of any of the Manpower folk; that's probably on purpose.

Space opera fulfills its role best when events are too large for one planet to contain. This is such a case. Torch is not just a super-Liberia and Mesa is not just a super-Reich. The events of a book like this might have fit on Earth in the 1600's but cannot now, with every battlefield within a day's airplane ride from anywhere. In a faster-than-light setting, it takes plenty of space for travel to take days rather than hours, and for a Napoleonic sense of timing to bring together the forces for a dramatic climax. The Battle of Torch retains the freedom of the emerging star nation, setting the stage for as many novels as David Weber can write.