Charlie's Diary

I'm glad to hear someone else, with a lot more fiction credits than me, express this sentiment so vigorously. I've got a couple of things I'd like to be writing and I just can't, because they rest on extrapolative developments for the next few years and nothing I extrapolate feels right. I'm not worried about being right - no predictions here, since both products involve supernatural elements anyway. I'm just worried about not being wrong in laughable ways.

I also find myself less willing to engage in fictional doomsaying (and both of these projects involve more bad stuff, and then some more bad stuff, coming right up) at a time when the real-world prospects seem so bleak. Some part of me...no, it's not that I believe anyone reading my stories would read them and just give up. But it's a time when good people have to do a lot of things without a lot of confidence that it'll all work out, and I feel guilty about feeding fantasies of escaping responsibility for doing one's part. So I'm moving my doomsaying to frameworks that don't start with "well, from here...".

Posted by: Bruce Baugh | September 28, 2008 3:04 PM

Luckily I have a project I'm working on that is not impacted by these global events. But I have two other projects that ... well, one of them depicts a disaster overrunning the USA in an alternate-2003, and getting my teeth into it while the current mess is unfolding feels wrong: we're living through science-fictional events unfolding on a global scale, and what I was going to write simply feels inadequate. As for the second project, the sequel to "Halting State", I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

I don't mind writing a novel that will be laughably obsolete ten years after the publication date, but I dread writing the equivalent of one of those "USSR attacks USA in 1994" thrillers that came out in 1991.

Posted by: Charlie Stross | September 28, 2008 3:13 PM

I can see where your difficulty lies, Charlie. I've heard similar complaints from other authors -- trying to guess politics in a decade as well as technology would seem to be a recipe for having your book forgotten in a year. Who in 1998 would have expected the War on Terror, for example? Or such a rapid modernization of China?

Regarding predictions about the US, most people in the US can't even agree on what our budget really looks like. It all depends on how you classify things like health spending, social security, and other entitlements. There's also the problem of state spending and taxation being considered -- I suspect our state governments are larger and stronger than most sub-national governments in Europe. For example, going by national budgets, the UK government spends twice the percentage of GDP as the US government does.

The US budgetary problems are ideological in nature. One party wants strong defense and low flat taxes, the other wants moderate progressive taxes and strong social programs. As a political compromise we get low progressive taxes with strong defense and social spending. We could change our tax rates slightly, or lower some spending slightly, and the problem would go away. Sadly, a balanced budget doesn't have much traction with the electorate right now.

Posted by: Andrew G. | September 28, 2008 3:16 PM

The "alternate Earth" approach may be best. It worked pretty well in Ken MacLeod's "Execution Channel". The bizarreness of actual current events made the nudges in the book unremarkable. And by the time we got to the spindizzies I just said "OK".

Writing this stuff must be difficult in these surreal times. We live through these crises and they seem (to me anyway) simultaneously banal and absurd. Could a character in a novel believably say, as SEC Chairman Christopher Cox did on Friday, "The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work"? How can you achieve verisimilitude without seeming Dadaist?

Maybe you should just write "419" et al. in "LOLcat".

Posted by: JDC | September 28, 2008 3:33 PM

Charlie, whether subconciously or not, your analysis indicates (or even advocates) a kind of deterministic fatalism. Taking to the Nth degree, what's the point of planning anything if the future is so unpredictable?

I fully agree that the future event scatter plot is complex, but while I enjoy your fiction immensely, and while I'll grant that you do not aim for the gadgetmania of Verne (JuleS), I did not presume, in the past, that you aim for the social commentary of Wells.

But if you do, surely there are no worries. 1984, after all, remains timeless, even though Winston and Julia don't text each other, and the title is 24 years in the past.

Posted by: Arthr | September 28, 2008 3:36 PM

Charlie, whether subconciously or not, your analysis indicates (or even advocates) a kind of deterministic fatalism. Taking to the Nth degree, what's the point of planning anything if the future is so unpredictable?

I fully agree that the future event scatter plot is complex, but while I enjoy your fiction immensely, and while I'll grant that you do not aim for the gadgetmania of Verne (JuleS), I did not presume, in the past, that you aim for the social commentary of Wells.

But if you do, surely there are no worries. 1984, after all, remains timeless, even though Winston and Julia don't text each other, and the title is 24 years in the past.

Posted by: Arthur | September 28, 2008 3:36 PM

Just curious, how do you think the SNP government has made the prospect of independence less likely?

Posted by: Esther Sassaman | September 28, 2008 3:39 PM

Andrew G: on the war on terror ...

In 1999 I was writing the first draft of "The Atrocity Archive" (which later became most of "The Atrocity Archives"). Along the way I wanted a bunch of mad bastards who'd try to summon up a Lovecraftian horror just to fuck with California. So I did some research and picked a promising candidate.

Two years later, in late 2001, the book was being edited for its first publication, as a serial in the short-lived Scottish SF magazine "Spectrum SF". I got an email from the editor. "Charlie," he said, "I think this was a really good prediction, but do you think you could maybe find someone a bit more obscure for the scene in Santa Cruz than Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida?"

It was obvious back in 1999 that ObL and AQ were mad bastards who wanted to attack America. So obvious that they were the #1 candidates for a work of fiction.

As for China -- you know that in the USA, 90% or more of House Representatives are lawyers by training? And in the UK, 70% of MPs are lawyers or senior corporate managers by training? In China, the central committee are all science and engineering PhDs. They're the cadre Mao called for in the mid-1960s, in the wake of the failure of the Great Leap Forward, when it was obvious that China needed science/engineering managers if it was going to get anywhere. They trained in the 1960s, were driven out and persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, rehabilitated under Deng Xiaoping, and finally hit the big time as senior managers and party bosses in their 60s. Hence their shitty record on social policy and civil rights, obsessive focus on stability, and emphasis on technology and modernization. In other words, our failure to predict China's current modernization is due to our failure to look at the type of people who were rising to the senior ranks.

On the ideological nature of the US budgetary problems ... I agree up to a point. That's how the crisis evolved, and why it's still gridlocked. But the current situation isn't sustainable.

My take on it is that in a best-possible-outcome, the USA could reduce military spending substantially, pull back, divert resources to reconstructing civilian infrastructure, and come out a decade or so down the line as a kind of super-Germany (a rich, industrial Federal republic with a strong economy and a high quality of life for its citizens, but relying less on force and more on soft power and international treaty organizations for its diplomatic muscle). Alas, I don't think that's the likeliest outcome by a long way ...

Posted by: Charlie Stross | September 28, 2008 3:44 PM

JDC @ 4: An "alternate future" is certainly a good possibility. I think John Barnes did something similar in his "Century Next Door" series. IIRC, the wrote the first book before the fall of the USSR, and had to retroactively make it an alternate history in later books.

Pournelle's "CoDominium" books are a good example too -- retroactively making it an alternate future.

Posted by: Andrew G. | September 28, 2008 3:47 PM

Of course, given the way the Russians have been acting recently, the Fulda Gap is suddenly looking slightly under-defended...

Posted by: Katie | September 28, 2008 3:49 PM

Esther @7: by effectively re-focusing attention on the West Lothian Question, which opens a huge can of worms. What currency does an independent Scotland run on (given that 80% of our trade is with the rest of the UK)? What does the defense policy of Scotland look like? What constitutional structure does it have -- does it remain a Monarchy (remember, Lizzie Windsor is not only Queen of England, she's Queen of Scotland) or would Scotland become a republic? What about EU membership? (Some EU states -- notably Spain and Belgium -- are shit-scared of the idea of regional states fissioning off and acquiring full EU status in their own right because of the precedent it would set for e.g. the Basque region.)

Scottish independence is actually a really complex headache which, even if it goes ahead, will take years of delicate negotiation to achieve. I suspect the span of such negotiations may exceed the duration of any SNP majority in Holyrood, and as Labour (the other governing party up here) is opposed (for strategic reasons -- they'd lose a huge number of MPs in Westminster) I think it's questionable.

The one thing that might make it work would be a Tory landslide in Westminster ... but that's a wildcard that isn't going to be turned over until 2010.

Posted by: Charlie Stross | September 28, 2008 3:51 PM

Charlie @ 8:

I agree, I don't think it's very likely the US will reduce military spending by much. Perhaps in 2011 or so we will mostly out of Iraq and if we aren't somewhere else we could reduce spending a little. But seeing how there's strong public support for a strong, modern military I don't see that happening. Just paying troops and keeping equipment up to day will call for a large budget.

More likely is a tax increase, probably letting by the Bush tax cuts lapse. Though there are other unpopular taxes that may be lowered or removed that would probably cancel out any effect, such as the Alternative Minimum Tax or lowering the corporate tax rate.

Posted by: Andrew G. | September 28, 2008 3:58 PM

Just another little observation, I noticed while watching the Presidential debate on Friday that both McCain and Obama referred to the Corporate Tax Rate as "business taxes". It's an obvious move to conjure up images of small business when discussing the tax rather than large corporations. I won't be surprised if we see a big push to lower "business taxes" in the next Congress.

Posted by: Andrew G | September 28, 2008 4:01 PM

Imagine trying to do strategic planning for any large corporate anywhere. Awfully hard now.

James Fallows did a US future projection for The Atlantic a few years back that's a bit uncanny now - 'countdown to a meltdown'.

Here's a recent blog where he describes it:

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/from_the_archives.php

Maybe Fallows could try his hand at the science fiction realm.

Posted by: John Faughnan | September 28, 2008 4:03 PM

In 1988 I was a senior in high school, on the debate team. I remember one debate tournament in particular, hosted at a local college. When debating the negative, a common technique is to find some plausible link on the affirmative's case to some outcome that has horrible negatives. I don't actually remember the specifics of the affirmative's case, but the negative case we ran was something like:

This will cause [x].
[x] will lead to the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The USSR breaking up will lead to lots of little countries with nukes, which is obviously a bad thing, with predictable contents.

We had totally destroyed our opponents, they literally had not been able to respond to anything in the case. It was a negative they were wholly unprepared for.

And then we get the results. We had lost. Because our proud, leftist, college journalism professor who was the debate judge said "Nothing can break up the USSR, so your case falls apart".

I still have that judging sheet somewhere in my old files. When only a few years later it actually happened, I felt like looking up that professor, just to scream at them.

BTW Charlie, your figures on US spending are grossly wrong, per wikipedia at least. Mandatory expenditures on welfare programs are somewhere north of a trillion and a half dollars, far, far eclipsing military spending.
The total budget is almost three trillion dollars, so spending twenty percent on military expenditures doesn't seem that grossly out of line, with a war going on.

Posted by: Skip | September 28, 2008 4:16 PM

Fascinating post, Charlie; thanks for bringing the challenges of writing near-future SF to light.

If I understand correctly, you are saying that the current volatility of the political and economic climate makes it harder for any neat-future SF novel written today to be seen as prescient tomorrow.

Thus it would seem your goal in writing near-future SF is to 'get it right', as it were, and to accurately predict how events will play out. But doesn't the very volatility that makes this so hard right now also present you with the maximum flexibility in telling any tale you wish to tell? You're not restricted as a writer in 1983 would have been; you can conjecture and describe any variation of possible outcomes given today's factors, and not be constrained by near certain probabilities.

I don't know; instead of feeling restricted by the free-fall nature of the current moment, I might instead feel liberated.

Posted by: Phil | September 28, 2008 4:18 PM

Skip @ 16. It doesn't really matter whether the military expenditure is reasonable vis a vis social expenditure when you just don't have the money to pay the whole bill, the unwillingness to accept that you either raise taxes or cut programs (unless you adopt a truly Keynesian solution of capital spending your way out of the recession), various addictions to McDonalds, SUVs and useless military spending, and have just received a letter from your bank manager foreclosing on your loans because of those addictions.

Don't worry, Charlie. Just remember that those we are allowed to elect are too venal and stupid to actually do anything - if anything can be done. Your books will be fine.

Just don't expect too many of us to be able to afford them.

Posted by: martyn | September 28, 2008 4:33 PM

Phil @16: written SF, like all other literature, is an exploration of the human condition; but the human condition isn't a constant and doesn't exist in glorious isolation. If you want to write an exploration of what it's like to live hand-to-mouth as a survivor a generation after a nuclear war, then it helps to have some background in mind as to what exactly happened. And it enhances the immediacy of the reading experience -- makes it more real for the reader -- if you anchor events to the present, with some sort of "how we got from there to here" story (even if it's never explicitly documented; just having it in the background will affect your narrative).

SF isn't, really, an attempt at predicting the future; for that, you need to go look at futurology. But in the specific case of near future SF, you are by definition writing a story anchored in the present and set in times we can hope to live to see. We may not be trying to predict the future accurately, but there's a certain scope for embarrassment if we get it ludicrously, ridiculously wrong.

Posted by: Charlie Stross | September 28, 2008 4:38 PM

Charlie @ 8

Re: the Chinese, one does wonder if China will be able to pull off a hybrid central planning model longer term, however, as wealth starts to concentrate.

In the US, politicians and their consultants have been mastering the election of "regular people" -- even Clinton's victory fits this model, Bush more obviously so. Without taking a position on the current election, it's clear that neither candidate is "regular people", perhaps that's a good start.

Posted by: Arthur | September 28, 2008 4:42 PM

Skip @15 --

It's not a war.

If there's a war on, you raise taxes. You have rationing, economic and industrial rationalization, you mobilize, and you (likely) have conscription.

What y'all have got isn't a war; it might be a continuation of policy by incurring casualties, it might be an exercise in insecurity management by a narcissistic nihilist, it might be a live propaganda exercise, but it's not actually a war.

Charlie --

All you have to do is postulate a couple-three additional overwhelming events, that will obscure the current one.

So, let's say, Greenland goes much faster than anyone expected or would dare predict; it turns out there's a big volcano down there, and take just enough ice pressure off it and _whoomp_. (something has to explain the mountains-round-the-outside topography; make it a Yellowstone scale supervolcano crater, and the rumbles get sufficiently mistaken for ice mass changes that this is a surprise...) So the EU has been refocused on resettlement (no matter how good the Dutch dikes are, suddenly they have to get not only higher but _wider_, very fast, plus North Germany and nearby regions; the Danes are moving to Greenland but there's no dirt yet, and so on.)

The US finally has the second civil war, for whatever accumulated mass of reasons; 60 million dead (they used nukes) later, there are five or six little regional nations, variously damaged, and a global financial system twitching at the loss of New York, Boston, Baltimore, and LA.

While the US is distracted by the Civil War, the Chinese make a grab for Taiwan. The Taiwanese respond by setting off a global firmware kill switch installed in everything with an IC in it they've ever made. Excruciating politeness is used to note that their own defense hardware is not subject to the kill switch; the one Japanese (Japan has gone dark and stopped moving...) SSBN who launches at them only gets 4 off before being sunk by the Chinese navy (standing orders are standing orders) and laser anti-missile defenses prevent a detonation. East Asian markets take some time to recover even so; Taiwan, while _officially_ reunited with Greater China, is actually primus inter pares in a league of coastal city states that have effectively declared independence from the interior.

At that point, you can postulate what that would do to your independent Scotland. (Moderate to severe recession, very likely, though if they're making pumps, have stable banks, or are selling engineering services for seawalls, they're probably doing pretty well.)

Posted by: Graydon | September 28, 2008 4:54 PM

In the US, politicians and their consultants have been mastering the election of "regular people" -- even Clinton's victory fits this model, Bush more obviously so.

Bush just came across as one, a glance at his background would have revealed otherwise to anyone awake at the time.

Posted by: Adrian Smith | September 28, 2008 4:55 PM

Arthur @6: Charlie's not saying he's afraid of making incorrect predictions. He's saying he doesn't want to publish a book that's already grossly incorrect when it's published -- a phenomena unique to our times.

It's pretty clear that there needs to be a new model for near-future SF. The readership is hungry for it, but the current model disincentivises its creation -- witness its almost total absence from the current offerings. There's definitely a market there for someone with the right model.

I know "419"'s publication details are set in stone. But as for other near-future projects, if there are any, online serialization would allow a certain amount of adaptability, especially if you left the most unpredictable details unresolved. You may be forced to play continuity doctor, like the clean-up crew on a fragmented SF show, but thinking on your feet like that could be a lot of fun, too.

You could put a tip-jar on the site and say the next instalment will be made available when a lower bound is met (someone else's idea).

Posted by: insect_hooves | September 28, 2008 4:57 PM

Adrian @21 -- oh, to be sure. It's a matter of winning elections, after all, not truth in media :)

I'm a committed conservative and I have never struggled with my choice as much as I have this year. But Charlie's analysis about China's ascendandcy non-withstanding, I'm not quite ready for technocracy (if that's what it is), either.

Maybe we have to go back to some really "old" SF like Pohl's for ideas, and presume that Wall Mart and Google will be running the world.

Posted by: Arthur | September 28, 2008 5:16 PM

Graydon@20,

Yes, you do all of those things, if necessary. Raising taxes? If you happen to be on the left edge of the laffer curve, which I don't believe US tax policy has been since about 1916, sure. We raised taxes for WW1 sharply, WW2 somewhat, cut taxes slightly during Korea, basically lef them unchanged in Vietnam, raised them slightly for gulf war I (resulting in Bush Senior not being reelected for breaking his 'no new taxes' pledge).

So the evidence on that one's inconclusive. As for the other things, , we mostly did them for WW1 and WW2, and not for any of the others.

Now I'll certainly grant you that a large fraction of the country doesn't believe we're at war. This is, of course, due to mainly two factors. The complete incompetence in our current president in actually, oh, delivering that message, and the active opposition to the message from journalists who grew up as members of the anti-war left during Vietnam. Our journalists are so far out to the left that they wouldn't even think there was a war on if there was an attack on US soil that left thousands dead.

As far as overspending, martyn@17, sure, we're spending beyond our means right now. But when 50%+ of the budget goes to mandatory welfare programs, and only 20% to the military, it's pretty hard to blame all of the deficits on the military spending by any rational human being. If we, as a society, don't break ourselves from the over-reliance on government handouts, then yes, a blowup is inevitable.

Posted by: Skip | September 28, 2008 5:20 PM

Arthur: my take on Technocracy (the US ideology of that name) is that the only reason it hasn't built the same pyramids'o'skulls as the other modernist ideologies is that it never really had the opportunity. Technocracy as practiced in China is getting its chance right now; if they keep building coal-fired power stations they way they're currently doing, I suspect a 22nd century historian will certainly find it easy to pin the "genocide" label on the donkey.

On the other hand, it's not certain what alternatives they face. China's in a cleft stick; if they don't complete their modernization within 25 years -- including the 500 million peasants they haven't touched yet -- they are fucked, but if they do modernize, the environmental damage will be colossal.

Posted by: Charlie Stross | September 28, 2008 5:22 PM

I wouldn't worry about the unpredictability of the future (although I'd avoid horizon forecasting). SF's track record of predicting the future has always been wretched. All the current conditions theatens to do is to drop SF's accuracy rating from 0.01 to 0.001.

My favourite example at this second would be In The Wet, which wasn't too far off on some technical details of futuristic aircraft but which assumed India would be a loyal suppporter of the Monarchy in the 1980s, which is an interesting idea given that the book was written after India became a republic.

Posted by: James Davis Nicoll | September 28, 2008 5:25 PM

insect @ 22

I get it. My point stands that cautionary tales appear to be nearly timeless (or else we wouldn't be still reading the Greek philosophers). I freely bow to Charlie's obvious expertise in the matter, but I would think that more people buy Charlie's books more for "the sense of wonder" that they provide, than based on the expectation of specific predictions. I, for one, remain entirely convinced that it's going to be crabs, not lobsters. I mean have you seen these things on The Deadliest Catch? They are absolutely ready to govern.

Posted by: Arthur | September 28, 2008 5:30 PM

It would be "interesting" to have a Balkanised China and a Balkanised US. Didn't the Chinese say some time ago that the world needs a stable China because if they have some sort of crisis that creates a refugee problem with as few as 10% dispossessed the rest of the world is stuffed? In the meantime I think I will polish off my "will code for food" sign.

Posted by: shane | September 28, 2008 5:45 PM

Once again, Charlie shows himself to be smarter than

any of our brain dead politicians. "Pull back on military

spending and become a kind of Super-Germany". Exactly what

we should do. Our stupid military interventions in Iraq

and other places are not sustainable. We are essentially

repeating the mistakes of the USSR!!!!

Posted by: D. Williams | September 28, 2008 5:56 PM

The thought of the American media being considered "far out to the left" is truly amusing.

Posted by: Robert Prior | September 28, 2008 6:08 PM

Charlie @11: I m certain that a lot of the news media and bloggers will be thrashing out these issues once a referendum vote becomes closer (it's promised for 2010 in the manifesto), but when canvassing across Scotland, SNP activists find that even a lot of Labour-identified voters support independence or at least want to have a vote on the issue. Support for independence has remained level but support for the SNP has grown since May 2007.. looks like modest progress to me, although we do need answers on these questions.

I think that taking it slow on greatly controversial issues such as republicanism is a good idea.. Ireland has about 80 percent of their trade with the UK and do fine with the Euro, and negotiations on things like how much of the British debt we would assume will be hairy.

People also contiue to have a huge hate-on for Labour, which does translate into pro-independence sentiment in a lot of constituencies.

Your book Halting State was really delightful to read for me and a lot of other SNP supporters.. you had a realistic, non-hysterical and nuanced depiction of an independent Scotland in there, although you did have an Edinburgh train pulling into Central :)

On a side note, I think Central Station looks like Bioshock and Queen St Station looks like Portal..!

Posted by: Esther Sassaman | September 28, 2008 6:08 PM

I think I'd have to disagree with your central premise Charlie.

The world is getting easier to predict as events close off potential futures. Take the situation 3-4 years ago. The breakdown in the superpower position of the US was obviously on the horizon, but the when and how were totally up in the air. The current financial meltdown limits the degrees of freedom. Couple that with knowledge of the extant asymmetric threat (helped on by dubya) the vast cultural divide between red and blue states, the peak oil situation, the demographic timebomb, etc. - its easier to concoct a viable 2022 scenario to set your story in than it was before.

Plus of course it only needs to remain viable for a few years (so you can make the bulk of the money).

The remembered near future SF novels tend to focus on recognisable repeated themes anyway 1984(surveillance societies, Distraction(fragile IP 'property' and the rise of a new superpower), Snowcrash(new worlds). If '419' ends up having anything to do with the title its about fraud, something that will always be with us, and has plenty of open avenues (fraud = copy, so with a perfect copy, what's the difference anyway?)

Sit down now with the cards, take time over making the connections and consequences right, and its perfectly possible to come up with a valid and reasonable 2022 that won't be too far from the truth in any world that still exists. The difficulty will be on exactly how we get there and what happens when - but an author can sidestep those.

JMS recently put out a call for advice on the world of a million years hence - now THAT'S a difficult prediction.

Posted by: Ian Smith | September 28, 2008 7:19 PM

Charlie:

look at the bright side, at least now you know that you can't be sure about anything you write on that topic. I for one prefer this confusion to the ignorance before.

To try and be somewhat constructive:

have you considered writing novels about other areas of the world? The Middle East and Africa are in a situation comparable to China 30 years ago. Fertility is dropping, there will be a generation of young, rebellious, creative, productive people without any obligations to feed 6 children and a wife.

Or what about focusing on a smaller, more local perspective, that will be easier to predict since the major impacts of industrial change, the mortgage and (yet to come) credit(-card) crisis etc. where the of grand scale politics are shadows looming over, but not dominating the scene, while being more relevant to "the people on the ground". (And given the huge diversity of human culture you will always find at least some group of people to point out who will fulfill your predictions spot on. ;-) )

Or just change the genre and resort to a parallel of events in a similarly murky situation. Think Baroque Cycle, or The Crucible or, of course, the far-enough-future where anything goes.

Posted by: tp1024 | September 28, 2008 7:19 PM

Arthur: I definitely agree with you on the timelessness of cautionary tales. Near-future SF is an entirely different beast, though, and scratches an itch for a large chunk of Charlie's base. It would be a shame if it disappeared due to unmarketability simply because global event speed dropped below the threshold of publication speed -- especially since many of us are reading it more for the tech than the politics. The sensawunda goes without saying.

And this is not to imply that art even has a "shelf-life". For example, older experimental electronica is still good even though faster hardware enables a broader sonic palette. It's not like the old stuff is obsolete. Obsolescence has no place in art. I'm thinking more about the artist's ability to pay the bills, which unfortunately depends more on its superficial qualities.

Posted by: insect_hooves | September 28, 2008 7:22 PM

Re: Scotland -- I visited last week (only three short days) -- and was asthounished by the amount of symbolic independence, from the blue-white flag shown everywhere to Bank-of-Scotland and Scotrail and ... to the behavior of our Scotish project partners.

Posted by: Till | September 28, 2008 7:22 PM

Is Scotland the UK's Quebec?

Posted by: James Davis Nicoll | September 28, 2008 7:31 PM

In 2005 the housing bubble was pretty visible, and on-the-ground reports of lolrific lending and appraisals started to pour into the Internet. What we didn't have was a convenient memetic tag for it. "Subprime" is a misleading one to hang on it in a lot of ways but it's a comfortable moral narrative (especially since it could not have swept up such good, superprime citizens such as present company). Whether this framing of the facts survives as consensus reality until 2013 is unclear. Our host's national market will unwind too, and the coastal California I see out the window is ungodly leveraged ("I see debt people"). "Alt-A Crisis" doesn't sound as good and it's hard to say it with a sneer.

SDI sure looks like a resounding success from some people's points of view. "History is written by the winners", sure, but is that tautological if we're talking about memetic warfare?

Posted by: Jay Carlson | September 28, 2008 7:36 PM

Charlie @ 8:
I can wish, I can hope, I can dream that something of this nature comes to pass. If I believed it truly possible, I would feel less like expatriating is my best option. But I can also be almost certain absolutely nothing of the sort will happen because those who love and support the structure of power as it is will not willingly give up the status quo. They will fight tooth and nail and drive an entire country into the ground to prove they are right, and never admit failure or hypocrisy. Unless unprecedented shifts in basic social and political ideology happen alongside sweeping changes in priority, we are not going to spend the money, time, and effort needed to rebuild the infrastructures currently decaying in the US. This includes the transit, informational, power supply, medical, and industrial. A good five or ten years of diverting major segments of GNP would do it, and leave the US in an excellent position even after the hardship.

Mind you, Germany's unemployment rates in some areas are still pretty nasty. Their take on freedoms of speech, religion, and choice are far different than those of the United States. But they have an awesome economy.

Posted by: TechSlave | September 28, 2008 8:03 PM

But think about the one crazy thing about this whole "finacial crisis"... only 9% of people are having problems with their mortage. That means about 90% of US homeowners ARE paying their mortgages on time. What type of messed up system falls apart with "only" a 90% payment rate? Honestly the whole "crisis" stinks of bad bookkeeping and greed! This is why the Europe is quickly on its way to being more successful and important world-wide than the US.

Posted by: Paula | September 28, 2008 8:04 PM

James Nicoll @ 36: Is Scotland the UK's Quebec?

Maybe it's Norway, ca 1900.

Posted by: Roy G. Ovrebo | September 28, 2008 8:11 PM

I would say that it's not possible to write novels set in the present, either. By the time one is published, some of the details will have changed. If the writer is lucky, none of them will be major events.

Note: In theory, it should be possible to write about the medium-to-far future (several centuries or more) without this kind of problem. However: Jerry Pournelle and Jack Chalker (among others) had the Soviet Union surviving much longer than it turned out to manage. Chalker solved the problem by having Nathan Brazil push the universe's reset button; Pournelle hasn't had it so easy.

Posted by: Dan Goodman | September 28, 2008 8:16 PM

I doubt many of those saying today's situation was easy to predict three years ago are currently living off the proceeds of investments based on those predictions, which is analogous to an author's investment in a near-future SF novel.

Posted by: insect_hooves | September 28, 2008 8:17 PM

Charlie, have you considered your first couple paragraphs as an indictment of the SF publishing industry, rather than a lamentation of the speed of current events?

Consider: Editorial cartoonists can comment on current events in near-realtime. Even faster if they publish on the web instead of on dead trees.

Television comedy shows (The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live) parody current events with only a day or two of advance notice. South Park's episode about Elian Gonzalez parodied an event that had occurred just three days earlier, and that's an animated show!

So maybe the real question should be Why does print SF take so long to get published?

Posted by: Avram | September 28, 2008 8:24 PM

Charlie@11: regarding Scottish independence: What about EU membership? (Some EU states -- notably Spain and Belgium -- are shit-scared of the idea of regional states fissioning off and acquiring full EU status in their own right because of the precedent it would set for e.g. the Basque region.)

Hasn't Greenland already set that precedent? It split off from Denmark (sharing a Queen, though) but continued as an EU member for a few years until it left:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland#Sovereignty

Posted by: Ed Davies | September 28, 2008 8:27 PM

Charlie, have you ever tried to write in a fantasy genre?

Posted by: Anatoly | September 28, 2008 8:38 PM

Avram: So maybe the real question should be Why does print SF take so long to get published?

For a variety of structural problems relating to printed books in general and the way they are sold and marketed. This is an insoluble problem within the current structure of the publishing industry.

(Also: books take time to write -- several weeks at best, usually months, sometimes years.)

Esther @31: call me a skeptic but I don't like some of the SNP's policies. Random examples: raising the age for alcohol sales and consumption looks like a bad attack of treating symptoms rather than the underlying pathology; the local income tax is a disaster waiting to happen (and as centralizing as Maggie's poll tax ever was), the general attitude to the two big cities and Edinburgh in particular sucks, and I think their ideological opposition to nuclear power is desperately wrong-headed. They seem to share a lot of NuLab's authoritarian knee jerk instincts, combined with a parochial outlook that they badly need to shed if they want to be taken seriously as a national ruling party. Luckily I live in a Labour marginal where the challenge is Lib-Dem, so I get to vote my conscience ...

TechSlave @38: the high unemployment and poor industrial development in the eastern bits of Germany are indeed bad ... but the question to ask is: if the USA had annexed Mexico about 15 years ago, how well integrated would the former Mexico be by now? Because that's the equivalent situation.

Posted by: Charlie Stross | September 28, 2008 8:45 PM

I'm glad to hear you say that about Halting State. While I enjoyed the read quite a lot (thanks!), I did get the feeling that it was very much a story written for people like me in a time like now, and I was wondering how much of that was overt and/or intentional.

While not doing any major writing projects to speak of, I'm rather worried about the size of those error bars, too - I just got engaged to an American, and suddenly their politics is even less comedic than before.

Posted by: Dr. Curiosity | September 28, 2008 8:46 PM

"We are living in interesting times; in fact, they're so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF."

Um. I think it's more of a call to be audaciously and clearsightedly wrong. Audacious because this is a heroic age, and our literature should probably reflect that; clearsighted because most of the phenomena we live through have solid explanations.

Also, your numbers are badly off. The U.S. federal budget is about 2.7 trillion dollars, of which about 1.2 trillion are for well-known social transfer payments, and a chunk more for less well-known sorts. (You stated, "a domestic budget around the $350Bn mark.") The military figure you give is about right.

I could go on a bit about comparative tax policy, but it's tremendously dull and filled with ideological disinformation. But the U.S. is on the low end of tax rates globally speaking -- in terms of amounts actually collected, and not listed rates -- and well to the left on the "Laffer Curve". [1]

[1] I can't believe that people of goodwill still believe in the mystic powers of an upside-down parabola drawn on a bar napkin for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, back when they looked like Patrick McGoohan and Jamie Gillis. Do those people still believe in the domino theory too? If so, when did Thailand go Communist?

Posted by: Carlos | September 28, 2008 8:50 PM

As Yedgeny Gaidar explains it,

It's "Yegor Gaidar".

Posted by: dmitry kim | September 28, 2008 8:50 PM

insect_hooves: The event was widely-known and predicted, which is why it was on the cover of The Economist.

The exact timing was not, leading to many people repeating that quote about how the market can stay insane longer than you can stay solvent. Nor was (or is!) how to plan for consequences---people have been in deflation-vs-hyper-inflation flamewars for years, since strategies to profit from one could be disastrous under the other.

It's like the Oracle telling you, "the climate's feedback loop has been broken". Sucks. Now what? (Personally, I've been hiding behind the sofa; given this analogy's Kim Stanley Robinson setup, you can tell how well my genre instincts work.)

Anyway, my point isn't about prediction, it's about prediction of consensus explanation.

Posted by: Jay Carlson | September 28, 2008 9:01 PM

Well, Charlie: If you have a hard time writing near-future SF, how about going for far-future hard SF again?

Of the books you have written, I like Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise the most. Maybe another one in that universe? There is enough room for more in it, I think.

Just a suggestion :)

Posted by: Markus Sablatnig | September 28, 2008 9:13 PM

To Graydon at number 20:

It's not a war. If there's a war, you raise taxes.

The USA is spending as much money as it ever has on any war since 1945, in absolute terms and in relation to GDP, and raising taxes is the rational thing to do.

Note the word 'rational': please accept my apologies if I am being wilfully obscurantist in choosing a word that is laughably archaic in all discussions of fiscal policy and politics.

No, the US is raising borrowing, not taxes, and foreign powers that Washington seems eager, from the rhetoric, to classify as 'hostile' hold trillions in treasuries and dollar-denominated assets. Just as well they happen to be major trading partners, or the might've been turned into enemies and caused a total collapse of the government by ceasing to fund continued spending... And, perhaps, so devalued the dollar as to render gasoline completely unaffordable.

Meanwhile, the US army is breaking down - speak to a reservist, not to a Pentagon PR flack - and has long passed the point at which the difference in manpower supply and demand has forced previous administrations to impose a draft. Or withdraw from the conflict, although I am at a loss to think of an example. It's that word 'rational' again, and the irrational response of buying mercenaries in the hope that 'privatising' war will make it seem that you are not at war is exacerbating the problem: security contractors in Iraq are depleting the regular ranks by paying better money.

Not at war, indeed: perhaps, by your measures of taxation and conscription, it would be rational to say the USA ought to be at war. In terms of casualties taken - and especially in terms of casualties inflicted, which the rest of the world notices, discusses publicly, and judges far more worthy of consideration than is fashionable in America - the country is most definitely at war.

The extent to which it might seem not to be, if you depend on domestic media, suggests thatvthe wartime exigencies of censorship are rigorously applied: I can think of no other explanation for this astonishing state of cognitive dissonance.

That is, perhaps, a matter of opinion and I welcome all replies. But the facts on the ground are a massive manpower commitment, a significand body count, and the financial commitment of a war.

Posted by: Nile | September 28, 2008 9:25 PM

This was the PBS News Hour episode that made the problem clear to me.

REAL ESTATE BOOM
May 17, 2005
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/economy/jan-june05/housing_5-17.html

"JEFFREY BROWN: And finally how important are these factors we're talking about the housing market, how important are those to our national economy?

NICOLAS RETSINAS: Oh, it has shored up the economy. Many of us believe even during a recession it was the housing sector that kept us through, the ability of people to refinance and take out cash. Just one specific number to give you an example: Home building accounts for about 5 percent of our economy. But over the last five years it's accounted for 12 percent of our average growth so it is disproportionately contributed to this economy."

They clearly knew that there was a problem then and did nothing.

When I saw that episode in 2005, I moved heaven & earth to retire a year early so that I would be out when the crash came.

Things will get worse when the next President comes into office and the market sees that there is no magic wand to fix things. That's when the collapse really hits, by February 2009.

The "Crazy Years" will be over by 2015 and most of your income--along with any surviving US authors--will be from EU sales, not US. Now is the time to start doing like Ian Banks, publish with one foot in mainstream fiction the other in SF/F/H. A Dan Brown style crossover series, _The Da Vinci Code_ Meets _Cthulhu_, done with your standard mix of humor and horror, would be a major hit in any market.

You could be Charles X. Stross for mainstream, and Charles Stross for SF/F/H.

Just a thought.

Posted by: allynh | September 28, 2008 9:30 PM

Jay Carlson: Point taken, although I'm not saying it wasn't easy to see back then -- we were all the same news junkies then that we are now. But putting your livelihood where your pen is on global events three years hence is decidedly risky business. "Whoops! Your novel on Chinese global dominance missed China's spontaneous social implosion two years into the publishing cycle! Game Over."

Posted by: insect_hooves | September 28, 2008 9:35 PM

But... the entire 20th century has seen massive changes in virtually all realms. Think about 1908. Now think about each decade since. In 1918 the world had undergone a huge, a devastaing war that killed many, saw the first use of chemical warfare at scale and caused the decline/toppling of several governments. 1928? A decade of optimism in the US, a very tough decade in Germany. But it was GREAT. Until the next year. 1938? A decade of economic depression... 1948? We'd just been through another world war, tens of millions dead. And those are just the large scale historical events. Physics went from knowing classical physics needed revamping to special and general relativity and quantum dynamics. Biology? From pre-antibiotics to the beginnings of control over the genome. Virtually any field of knowledge you can name underwent similarly drastic advances.

So, while I see what you're saying, I don't agree that the last decade is really all that special. If there's anything that's marked the last century it's the pace of change. Given that, why even bother writing near-future fiction if you're trying for some verisimilitude? Aside from the alternate history loophole, any near future SF is bound to be provable wrong a few years after it's published. If that bothers an author, why do it? I'm not being negative by the way... I really am interested in the motivation to write speculative fiction that's set so close to present conditions versus either far future fiction or fiction in a medium term future (100 years or so away).

Posted by: rick | September 28, 2008 9:39 PM

9% mortgages in default? Where did that figure come from? Everything I've seen says that they're running 5--6% right now.

Posted by: Nix | September 28, 2008 9:51 PM

James Nicoll @ 36: Quebec is Canada's Scotland.

Except without the kilts or bagpipes, and one hopes without the haggis. (You can't escape bad drunken singing anywhere, though, but *perhaps* the singers aren't seconds from heart attacks because their diets are so bad.)

Posted by: Nix | September 28, 2008 10:13 PM

It can get worse than that: I've currently got a short story languishing in development hell because it features as the main plot device long term hostages being released from imprisonment by a South American guerilla army. Came up with the idea early on this year (March-ish) and had it rapidly overtaken by current events. I don't want to write contemporary fiction.

Posted by: Andrew Doull | September 28, 2008 10:56 PM

Skip
The US has almost zeroed out the welfare system. It is not even a line item in the budget. I think that it is down to roughly four dollars a year per capita.
In real terms it is somewhere in importance between the subsidized grazing for ranchers and the agricultural real estate tax exemption part of the agricultural cowfare state.
Welfare the way you think of it in real terms peaked in the late sixties and early seventies. Most of the people reading this blog weren't born that far back.
I saw Alabama's welfare expenditures listed as sixteen million a few years ago. That's million, not billion.

Posted by: wkwillis | September 28, 2008 10:59 PM

Correction of fact: It was Treasury secretary Henry Paulson who got down on his knees (to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi). Not Fed chairman Ben Bernanke.

Cite: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/26/AR2008092603957_pf.html

Posted by: Patrick Nielsen Hayden | September 28, 2008 11:14 PM

I have to agree with the perception that painting a reasonably believable picture one to two decades hence appears to be pretty difficult right now. But then that's always the case in times of great change. Even before the recent 'adjustment' Sterling, Stephenson and Gibson all seem to have retreated from exploring those boundaries, though not necessarily because it appeared to be too difficult to predict.

However since you name checked Paul Kennnedy specifically, it's worth referring back to his thesis. That Empires rise due to factors of the time - in a post-industrial age population is all important, so he points to China and India. Any Empire as it rises tries to project its power, eventually through military adventurism, and ends up being superceded by other rising powers who haven't wasted their money on enormous defence budgets. He basically points to a cyclical sense of history, with the cycles getting shorter.

One to two decades isn't enough for a cycle, but try fifty. America falls, China rises, sure, but what else? Predictions of Soviet power into the middle of the 21st century may now seem ridiculous, but replace Soviet with New Russian and you get the same picture from the end of the 20th *and* the 19th centuries.

What matters are resources and population. America will fall, but rise again in another form. China will rise, but encounter the same problems establishing any kind of hegemony. Russia will hack out a new empire with threats and bluster. Europe will wring its hands and edge towards a stronger central government in response.

I think there's plenty to write about.

Posted by: AH | September 28, 2008 11:18 PM

I think it’s doubly difficult to predict events in the future because most of us are still in the dark about many things regarding one of the principle, if not the principle player in the near future - China. I think one of the key unknown factors, or to put it in Rumsfeldian terms ‘Known Unknowns’, is the role of religion. Although the CCP has traditionally portrayed China as a largely atheistic nation with some residual remnants of religion still remaining here and there, this is certainly not the case. In fact there has been a massive rise in China over the past few years of various forms of religions which can be described as having a millenialist outlook; these include varieties, including indigenous types, of Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christianity, as well as Indigenous syncretistic New Religious movements operating outside the officially sanctioned religious authorities. What freaks out the CCP, who as Charlie points out is led largely by Technocrats, is that they have no idea about a) how many people follow these underground faiths or indeed who; and b) what they want or what they will do. The final point is especially alarming to the bureaucrats in Beijing since rebellions in China have often taken on a mystical or religious character from the Yellow Turban Rebellion during the Han dynasty, which had a Daoist character, to the Taiping rebellion during the Qing where tens of millions were suspected killed and the rebels led by a man claiming to be Jesus’ brother. This is one the reasons the CCP is so paranoid about the Falun Gong.

Posted by: Chandu the Magician | September 28, 2008 11:33 PM

wkwillis @ 59: I think Skip was including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security as "Welfare" programs, they do make up a large portion of the debt. However, they're funded through separate taxes so funds saved there won't automatically decrease the debt.

But a lot is spent on other programs, whether good or bad is up to the reader. For instance, $28 billion on Food Stamps, another $28 billion to HUD, $67 billion for HHS, $56 billion for ED, plus more mixed into other departments.

Then there's state level funding, which varies by state. I can believe that Alabama would have low funding, that's the attitude in that part of the country. They've always been poor but proud.

Posted by: Andrew G. | September 28, 2008 11:44 PM

"9% mortgages in default? Where did that figure come from? Everything I've seen says that they're running 5--6% right now."

It's even less than that, if you only count actual defaults. When this started becoming apparent, the much-less-than-1% actual default rate among house owners (not homeowners) was increasing to almost 1% - now slightly higher. To get a scarier number, they included people who had one or more late payments in the last year or so (the majority of them will catch up in that time). That pushes the number up to about 3% in a normal year. With the "massive" increase due to subprimes (with added defaults consisting mostly of folks who bought one or more extra houses as investments and couldn't turn them around fast enough), the normal default rate is a bit higher than 1%, and the "default or late" rate pushes 6%. Note that late payments are a lot higher, but the actual default rate is still very low compared to the number of existing home loans.

This is secured credit, remember? Even when payments default and the house is foreclosed on, the house actually still exists, even though it may not be worth as much as the loan papers should indicate due to local housing market crashes.

That's why that "$700 billion" number is so funny - it's a huge amount they basically pulled out of thin air, in case most of the buyers with payment issues manage to default and the houses burn to the ground this year after the defaults, instead of being sold to lower-level bidders for 80% to 110%of appraised value.

(Yes, there are quite a few markets in the US where prices are increasing. Funny how that works, isn't it?)

Posted by: cirby | September 28, 2008 11:54 PM

Before we write AMerica's obituary, let’s have some historical perspective shall we?

1. As Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government in the world, except for all the others”. We will always elect crooks and incompetents whether it’s Bush or His Honor, the former Mayor of our Detroit. Our Founding Fathers in their infinite wisdom assumed (correctly) that all politicians will always be scoundrels. Lord Acton had it backwards, power doesn't corrupt so much as corupt people want power. So they set up a system designed to minimize the damage these bastards can inflict on our country. It’s worked pretty well so far. So there is only so much damage even the worst president/congress can do.

2. You want political corruption? Then try some of the good old fashion city machines like Tammany Hall in New York, Mayor Curly in Boston (who was elected by the good people of Bean Town as he was being hauled off to the Federal penitentiary). The Daley Machine of Cooke County or even Chicago in the 1920s (which was pretty much run by Capone and the mob.

3. Speaking of mobs and criminals, the Mafia is a ghost of its former self. When Sammy “the Bull” Gravante (don’t you just love Mob nick names?) voluntarily came out of the witness protection program after bringing down the last big mobster, John “the Teflon Don” Gotti (again, with the nick names) he said he wasn’t worried about getting wacked. He said the Mob didn’t have that kind of muscle anymore, and he's right.

4. Speaking of ghosts, the KKK used to be a shadow government in most Southern and more than a few northern states, committing murders and lynchings well into the 1960s. The Klan is now a joke.

5. On a related note, northerners and Southerners haven’t killed each other in large numbers since 1865.

6. And Blacks have been allowed to vote in large numbers since my childhood. One of the m cold be our next president.

7. If anyone wants to pine for the so called “good old days” I have a cure: watch some episodes of AMC’s excellent “Mad Men” about how normal and common place racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism were back when we were kids back in the early 1960s. Nobody thought such attitudes were wrong and they would be baffled by our modern attitudes towards gender, race and religion. They’d have an aneurism if they knew a Black man had a real shot at becoming president.

8. Oh, did I mention that a Black man could be our next president?

9. Communism has fallen.

10.Fascism, Nazism and Imperialism were defeated.

11. You think American rights have been eroded? Remember that FDR put Japanese Americans into concentration camps for the “crime” of being Japanese. That hasn’t happened to any Muslim-Americans. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil war. Copper heads and other Southern sympathizers rotted in military prisons for the duration of the war without access to legal counsel. That hasn’t happened to any American.

12. Air and water pollution are much lower than they used to be in the 20th century, mostly due to government regulation. NOx and Sox emissions have fallen dramatically. Another cure for the good old days: The health and aesthetic problems created by horse drawn carriages inflicted cities of all sizes. At the turn of the (last) century, Milwaukee had a human population of 350,000 and a horse population of 12,500 that produced 13 tons of manure daily. The 15,000 horses of Rochester, New York produced enough manure each year to create a pile 175 feet high covering an entire acre. Aside from the odor, manure was a breeding ground for illnesses and the disease vectors that carried them. Now imagine what it was like in major cities such as New York, Chicago or London. In fact, the Times of London predicted in 1894 that if their present manure creation trends continued, then every street in London would be buried in 9 feet of manure by 1950.

13. All types of crime rates have fallen dramatically. When I lived on the east coast in the mid-1980s, New York was a war zone and Times Square was a cesspool. I took my family there on vacation last summer and it is now like Disneyland.

14. Mankind has never been wealthier and never have there been so few people living in poverty or in slavery. Yeah slavery still exists, but it is small time and driven into the shadows. It used to be the normal means of organizing labor.

15. No, the planet will not be over populated and become a cross between Calcutta and “Soylent Green”. Birth rates have fallen world wide (even among Mormons, Hispanics and Muslims) as women are no longer kept bare foot and pregnant (except in a few cultures). Even Mexican birth rates are falling - so no, our grandkids won’t be speaking Spanish (and Hispanics inter marry with Anglos at a faster rate than Greek and Italian immigrants of a century ago). Europe will not be swamped by fanatical Muslim hordes (the Algerian and Iranian birth rates are now lower than that of France). Japan, unfortunately, probably will be overrun by robots as their birth rates fall.

16. As a result of falling birth rates, the world population should peak at about 9 billion (give or take a billion) by 2050 and then either slowly or rapidly decline (depending on the assumptions you build into your demographic model). That creates its own problems, like a population top heavy in old geezers and pensioners who consume a lot of resources (like medical care) without creating wealth. Any potential American rival has far worse demographics and econoic consequences. But compared to an ecological collapse, these economic problems are a day at the beach.

17. Did I mention that most of mankind no longer treats women like chattel?

18. The threat of nuclear annihilation is (mostly) gone.

American and the World have never been in better shape. People living in the past "Golden Age" would kill to have our problems.

Posted by: dan | September 29, 2008 12:18 AM

Mr. Stross, you mention Kennedy's book. But I have to ask, what "imperial overstretch"? As a portion of GDP the highest peacetime budget in American history was under liberal icon John F. Kennedy. As a percent of GDP our current defense budget, including the war in Iraq, is a much lighter burden.

Like any other tool American military power has its limitations. But what it is not is a major drain on American resources. You may not like comparisons with past GDP but there seems no other metric by which to make apples-to-apples comparisons across time. By comparison with the height of the Cold War we are maintaining empire on the cheap, the cost of Iraq notwithstanding. “Imperial over stretch” is nowhere apparent.

We dominate the globe without breaking a sweat.

The American military is a juggernaut the likes of which the world has never seen. Staffed by dedicated professionals it can and has risen to any occasion. It has taken the art and science of war to a level never before achieved. To the chagrin of those on the Left, Gen Petreaus has found the key to urban counterinsurgency warfare and the Surge has succeeded (no thanks to Rumsfeld and certain other incompetents). Al-Qaeda has been shredded and its leadership cadres decimated. It’s a shell of its former self, capable of surviving in remote caves and issuing the occasional video berating their fellow Muslims to fight the Americans.

The Iraq war is over, and we have won. I wait to see if we are competent enough to win the Iraq Peace that now follows.

American legions literally cover the globe from Bolivia to Turkmenistan (yes our reach extends that far). American fleets are so dominant that no other nation even tries to catch up with us. The last time an American fighter pilot actually shot down an enemy fighter in combat was back in the 1980s, since then every enemy air force has fled before us. We are both Pax Britannica and Pax Romana rolled into one with powers that Caesar, Genghis Khan and Alexander could only envy. Soon we will be deploying battlefield lasers and space based “rods from God” that can use kinetic energy to take out any bunker, cave or fortification anywhere with only seconds of warning time and with the explosive force of small nukes. We have already deployed a microwave “pain ray” that causes no injury at all but makes the victims feel as if they are on fire. And these are just a few of our sci-fi weapons.

So set phasers on “world domination”, Mr. Sulu.

Much has been made of America as the new “Rome”. That is true neither politically nor militarily, but it does reveal our bias towards our Western heritage. If we resemble any superpower from the past, it’s the Mongol Empire of the Great Khan. Historian Archer Jones' comparison of modern tanks and aircraft with ancient knights and horse archers is instructive. The American emphasis on airpower since WWII is analogous to Mongol horse archer tactics of the 13th century. Now we didn't exactly leave a pyramid of human skulls outside the city walls of Dresden and Hiroshima, like Tamerlane did to Samarkand, but the same principles apply. Later, SAC kept the peace during the Cold War by threatening total destruction of Russian cities. The methods and purpose of such a strategy are essentially no different then the terror tactics of Tamerlane or Genghis Khan. "Total war" aimed at civilians as well as soldiers, is not a modern invention - the Mongols were quite good at it.

The American empire (there is nothing else to honestly call it) is also more Mongol in form and not like the territorial Roman Empire with its direct rule and imperially appointed proconsuls. It is more like the Mongol hegemony that included a dozen khanates stretching from Korea to Poland, each owing allegiance to the Great Khan.

So apparently, the anti-globalization protesters have it right when they view American military power, cultural influence, economic integration as part of the vast movement called globalization. America is undeniably the chief catalyst for globalization and also the primary agent of its advancement. But given the sorry state of those nations outside Globalization's embrace, can globalization and American military hegemony credibly be considered a bad thing?

As empires go, this one ain’t bad.

The time to worry about America was back in the 1970s. Back in the 70s it really did seem that the American century was about to end three decades ahead of schedule. The fall of Saigon, Watergate, the oil crisis, the Japanese auto industry, the Iranian hostage crisis, the decay of our military, disco music, inflation and unemployment all pointed to American decline and demise. We were becoming like a guest actor on an episode of the "Love Boat" - a second rate has been. Ford was building Pintos for gosh sakes - if that doesn't indicate the sorry state of our nation nothing does. The 70s sucked.

Those predicting American decline were wrong then and they are wrong now. So don’t you be pessimistic about our financial condition. It could be worse.

Disco could still be popular

Posted by: dan | September 29, 2008 12:32 AM

My take on it is that in a best-possible-outcome, the USA could reduce military spending substantially, pull back, divert resources to reconstructing civilian infrastructure, and come out a decade or so down the line as a kind of super-Germany (a rich, industrial Federal republic with a strong economy and a high quality of life for its citizens, but relying less on force and more on soft power and international treaty organizations for its diplomatic muscle). Alas, I don't think that's the likeliest outcome by a long way ...

Posted by: Charlie Stross

God, I've been saying the same thing over here for at least five years with, a few minor differences. That's the curse of Cassandra, that all of this is all so _avoidable_. And it won't be.

Suggest anywhere that military spending be cut in half, that military service becomes more of a national service, a vast pool of labor that can be deployed on a moments notice, and you get lots, and lots, and lots of people nodding. Yes, this is what should be done, they say. I agree completely. I've been saying the same thing myself. Then after a round of mutually congratulatory back-patting 'cause we're just so darned smart, the inevitable observation is made that this will never happen. It's not so much that the country as a whole likes military spending, btw. But on this topic, a very powerful minority controls the money. No one will vote for closing a base in their home district, or for cutting a program or a weapons system which lucratively employees large numbers of skilled personnel.

This is kind of like the Settler problem in Israel, btw. The overwhelming majority of citizens oppose settlements in Gaza, but woe to any party voting to suspend them or pull them back.

Skip @24: That's a bit disingenuous, suggesting that 50% of mandatory spending is on social programs, and that they are responsible for the deficit. Cutting Social Security _will_not_ cause the deficit to drop one penny. Not even if you cut it by 90%. Otoh, looking at discretionary spending, well, only 38% of the total budget is for discretionary purposes. Twenty for military spending, eighteen for everything else. So over half of all discretionary spending is for the military. You want to cut fat, cut that.

Posted by: ScentOfViolets | September 29, 2008 12:38 AM

Your post begs the question: who could possible replace America even if we do badly stumble? Britain has America waiting in the wings and a direct threat from a militaristic Germany. But who is our potential replacement?

From the point of view of an amateur historian such as myself, what we appear to be witnessing is the capitalist equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not that the USA will dissolve like the Soviet Union or even end its pre-eminent hegemony in world affairs. Even in our current mess we are light years ahead of any conceivable rival militarily, economically, and demographically. We are the only industrial nation with healthy demographics (high birth rate and an ability to absorb immigrants into our culture that simply can’t be done by Japanese, Chinese or Europeans).

Don’t worry about Russia, their population is imploding. By mid century there will be 50 million fewer Russians, not just due to a low birth rate (mostly the result of a casual attitude towards abortion) but also because of an increase in the death rate. They are the only industrial nation that has seen a decrease in life expectancy (mostly due to alcoholism and a rate of AIDS infection that matches that of sub-Saharan Africa). Combined with an endemic corruption (the Atlantic Monthly called Russia, “Zaire with permafrost”) and Putin’s bellicosity is just empty saber rattling.

Look for Russia to wither away back to the border of Old Muscovy.

China’s one baby policy has led to a massive gender mismatch and a looming grey tide of pensioners that will either break China’s economy before it can really get rich (or the old folks will be allowed to starve in the streets). Environmentally, China is a cesspool with hazardous waste in drinking water, rivers that are open sewers, cities lacking basic sanitation, soil contaminated by heavy metals, and unhealthy air you can barely see through. The air quality concerns of the Beijing Olympics were just the tip of the ice berg. And in a generation there will be 12 Chinese boys for every 8 Chinese girls.

China is about to become a really big version of the Royal Navy.

India has similar (those less publicized) demographic and environmental problems

Europe and Japan face serious financial problems as their birth rates continue to fall and the proportion of old geezers continues to increase. They’ll survive, but you can’t have a dynamic, growing economy with a ratio of 1 worker to 1 pensioner. Japan’s labor shortage has already started, which explains their desperate development in robotics.

Europe and Japan also suck at assimilating immigrants.

We live a few hours down the freeway from one of the largest mosques in the world, located in a cornfield outside Toledo, Ohio. My kids' pediatrician is a Muslim woman from Pakistan. The newest business in town is an import/export business run by a Muslim immigrant. In America, Muslims become doctors, entrepreneurs and commuity leaders. In Europe they riot every summer and set fire to cars. Our kids visited the local mosque and muslim kids visited our catholic church as part of a "get to know you" program at both schools. British Imams have an annoying happen of preaching hatred, killing and violent jihad against the West in general and their British hosts in particular.

Demographics alone would paint a bleak future for any potential American rival. As historian Will Durant wrote, "Politicians merely make policy, demographics make history."

Posted by: dan | September 29, 2008 12:57 AM

One last point.

Who would you rather see running the world and why? What would be your preferred world order for the 21st century besides a more or less benevolent American hegemony?

Posted by: dan | September 29, 2008 12:59 AM

It could be worse. Disco could still be popular

(sound of needle being ripped off new The Juan Maclean track)

What?

Posted by: Jay Carlson | September 29, 2008 1:04 AM

OMG!!!!

Until someone mentioned it, I forgot about RAH's

description of this period as the "Crazy Years".

Except we might have a FEMALE "Nehemiah Scudder".

Makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

Posted by: D. Williams | September 29, 2008 1:10 AM

Dan # 6,

My Dad went through TWO Ford Pinto's!

And yes, we could do a lot worse than have the USA

dominating the world. Point conceded.

But with awesome power comes awesome responsibility. (LOL)

Seriously, we have to stop electing morons.

The job is just too important.

Posted by: D. Williams | September 29, 2008 1:16 AM

Skip @24, I assume you'd rather I died than survived because of Medicare and Social Security? How old are you?

PNH @60, Tom Brokaw, on today's Meet the Press, had quotes from both Paulson and Pelosi that it was done humorously.

Posted by: Marilee J. Layman | September 29, 2008 1:40 AM