re: financial prosecutions -- I wish we'd seen some of those, too. One of many early signs of our rot.
re: Constitutional Convention -- I can't see one ending without it baking a lot of current bad ideas into our country. There will be a Balanced Budget Amendment to make sure we can never have social programs. Term Limits to make lobbyists powerful. Elected judges so they'll need to wheedle money and keep an eye on their next gig. Large parts of the Bill of Rights will be gone. I doubt we'd get anything useful like electoral reforms that make third parties other than a waste. Best case I can think of, the results are bad enough that, like our old Articles of Confederation, we assemble again a decade later having given things serious thought.
]]>1) He's joking. It's pretty and compelling but there isn't really any hocus-pocus going on. I like this answer. It keeps the secret world secret. 2) Laundry-Apple has some skilled ritual magicians designing things. This bothered me in the Jennifer Morgue. How does a major industrialist get that info? Why hasn't the Laundry or the Black Chamber or whoever jumped on him earlier? 3) Magic in the Laundryverse runs on careful mathematical rules. Therefore any sufficiently subtly designed object is indistinguishable from magic. The Golden Ratio is inherently appealing because it naturally produces a minor (Class 1/2?) glamour.
]]>I've recently finished "Darker Shade of Magic" which was fascinating and "Gathering of Shadows" which grated.
I'm currently reading (nonfiction): "The Information" by James Gleick, a history of how we deal with stored (and thus transmitted over distance or time) information.
"The Poison King" by Adrienne Mayor, an attempt at a biography of Mithrades, an important and clever rival to Rome.
(fiction) "Kingfisher" by Patricia McKillip. Hard to describe. It's a grail quest, with its knights and sorceresses living in a modern world.
Deryni books by Katherine Kurtz. I saw a retrospective on her (I think at Tor) and picked up some paperbacks at a used book store. I'll see how it goes.
]]>I'm impressed that their archeology is good enough that they can tell the ideology of the folks who destroyed previous iterations of the universe. How did the group mind universes end? Could this be group mind universes attempt to survive that end? (A bit like Benford's "The Hydrogen Wall.")
My own answer is to ask if they'll allow a long sign up period so those who don't enroll can see what happens to those who do. It isn't perfect, especially with the implied "or else", but it lets us keep some agency in whats happening.
]]>I can't give you a good source, but Penn&Teller explain a trick in a short story where the hero convinces aliens not to destroy us with a piece of string*.
*Spoiler: Gurer jnf ab fgevat.
]]>What are some good space operas told by minor players? Most of the ones I'm currently thinking about focus on the people making the big choices.
]]>More broadly, myths always imply an ancient history now lost.
As a side note, I strongly recommend Adrienne Mayor's "Fossil Legends of the First Americans." It covers the explanations various groups came up with to explain the remains and impressions they found, how close they came to a modern understanding of species in deep time, and how 1940s paleontology worked to remove references to them as part of becoming a serious scientific discipline.
]]>Cliche for the list: The first AI comes along. It is immediately smarter than humans and capable of defeating all computer security, knowing everything available, and controlling other machines. It doesn't happen too often in Space Opera -- but when it does, it bugs me.
A more modern-plausible take on psychic abilities could involve cybernetic implants (computer talks to your brain) and broadcasting devices. Breq's (from Ancillary Justice) abilities to get extremely deep reads on people and know things that happened when she was not present are explained by sensors, considerable practice, and teleawareness. The effects are similar to mind reading and remote projection.
]]>The resulting society would likely be fairly conservative; approaches that work would be well distributed but getting new ones would be difficult. And it would rely extremely heavily on institutional memory. If one way of doing things does displace an older one, after a few centuries there will be a lot of puzzlement over why a painting shows people making things in a particular way.
I'm not sure how well this works for more abstract things. Could a collection of images of events and symbols referencing common allegories explain a law and the arguments that justified its adoption? I think so, but a shorthand for things in the oral culture in a picture can become a shorthand on its own and then become a written language. At some point this breaks the rules.
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