If we're in systems 2 or 3, there's a bottleneck based on how many people and/or smart systems can jaunt, compared with system 1, where everyone and their maiden aunt (but not their pet cats) can jaunt. This makes a huge difference in how stuff moves.
The problem with jaunting is that it's ultimately weight limited to whatever you can land successfully on the ground. In practice, this means the biggest vehicle that can jaunt to land on an unexplored timeline is probably a hovercraft (not an airship).
So it is NOT some kind of inherent limit in "timeline physics" that says you can only have some number 'X' of ARMBAND machines that can move stuff among timelines.
It's only a "limit" because of the number of ARMBAND machines they've been able to manufacture, not an inherent limit in "timeline physics" like in nuclear physics where Atomic Numbers over !04 appear to have half lives of hours or minutes ... and much higher numbers don't appear to be able to exist at all.
As for mining gold, Sierran gold deposits weren't from veins, they were placer deposits in ancient and modern river deposits. In the California gold rush, gold was found by demolishing mountain slopes with hydraulic cannons (search on "monitor") and washing the resulting sediment through separation apparatus before dumping it in the Sacramento. So do we know where the richest stuff would be in another timeline that had randomly different erosional patterns? Probably not.
I think you missed my point. Searching other timelines for gold is a waste of time, BUT if you ARE going to do it anyway ... you aren't going to be panning for it.
Those hydraulic cannons ARE mechanized extraction. Exactly what I was referring to.
And randomly different erosional patterns notwithstanding, if you're looking for gold, the FIRST PLACE you're going to look for it is the "AltX-Sierra Nevada foothills" along the banks of the "AltX-South Fork American River". It's only if you DON'T find it there that you start looking somewhere else.
For any mineral resource you want to extract from a new timeline, the FIRST PLACE you look is somewhere you know from your home timeline where that mineral resource existed in readily accessible abundance, even if it has been mined out on your home timeline.
You don't go to "AltX-New York State" looking for oil, you go to "AltX-Texas".
]]>How does "ARMBAND technology" limit "the number of craft that can move stuff among timelines?"
Because there exists only a limited number of ARMBAND devices, and each one is only good for a limited number of jaunts. They seem to wear out eventually, although I don't remember whether there's an exact explanation for this in the books.
By the time of Invisible Sun the ~USA are able to genetically engineer the needed tissue, so they no longer need a steady supply of captured Clan members. But they're still not anywhere near something that could be called "mass production". However, it's possible that they'll get there some day, and jaunting may become a recreational activity for the masses.
So, it's a supply chain or resource extraction limitation, rather than a limitation imposed by the physics of world walking. How many ARMBAND machines can you build and how many times can you use one before it wears out and you have to replace it? [rhetorical question]
That's really what I was getting at. The prior comment seemed to imply there was some inherent limit of the amount of ARMBAND traffic that could occur during any one instant in time.
]]>From the evidence we have of how it works in practice, I think we have to conclude that "can't do it if there's something in the way" is not an absolutely accurate description, but a "lies-to-children" type simplification. If it was absolute, then all jaunts at any given spot would only work one way, depending which timeline had a fractionally higher or lower ground surface at that spot, and to get back again you'd have to either jump in the air or wander about experimenting until you found a spot where the difference was the other way round. (And if the two timelines were exactly identical then you wouldn't be able to go either way, because your own weight would deflect the ground minutely so your current side would always be a tiny bit lower.)
As it is we see the principle working in gross but failing if you ask sufficiently nit-picky questions, like: Why is the ground an obstruction but the air isn't; it's still matter? Why isn't it a problem to jaunt from clear air to air with raindrops falling through it? How does someone manage to jaunt equally well in either direction between timelines where the same spot, though happening to be at the same level in both, is paved in one and grassed in the other; why doesn't the grass get in the way going in that direction? Etc.
I think we have to assume that a jaunting object does have some limited ability to shove matter out of the way on the other side, but only to the extent of somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of its own mass. That would account for the observed result that jaunting can be blocked by such partial obstructions as a length of rope or the corner of a table, but not by such lesser ones as raindrops, grass, or the ground level being a couple of millimetres different. (In the final case of course the "shoving out of the way" is more noticeably applied to the jaunter than to the obstruction, but it's one of those "I fall down and hit the ground/The ground falls up and hits me" situations really.)
How this limitation takes effect is unclear, but it's unlikely to be a straight conservation of energy thing. A minor difference in gravitational potential would very likely be counterbalanced by a minor gain or loss of heat - similar to chemical reactions which are endothermic but nevertheless go by themselves because it's entropically favourable and pinch the energy they need by making things cold. You would never notice this: a couple of millimetres height change would correspond to a temperature change of around 0.000005K for a mass of water or something soggy enough to be considered as water, like a human.
It feels more like some kind of interference effect, and its severity may be to some extent implementation-dependent: one of those things where the design embodies some idealised assumption to make it tractable, and there is enough tolerance and slop in the system that it also works in real situations as long as reality doesn't differ from the ideal by too much. (Then if "not too much" isn't enough to stop people complaining, over time the same principle is applied to deal with the error terms, recursively etc.)
We are told in very vague terms that the jaunting mechanism performs some process of bringing the jaunter into "correspondence" with the other side. It could very well be functioning along the same kind of lines as SCORPION STARE, a mechanised instantiation of the standard cat-based quantum magical principle that goes "you set up a quantum view of the thing in which there are exactly two states it can be in, the state it's in and the state you want it to be in, and they are equally likely; because of quantum, that means it's actually in both states at the same time and isn't in one or the other until you look to see; therefore if you look at it properly you can see it being in whichever state you're looking for it being in, and that means it is in that state". In the jaunting case the two states are the corresponding jaunter-shaped volumes of space from the two identical timelines distinguished only by the jaunter being in this one or that one. By the quantum cat magic principle this means the jaunter is half in both at the same time and there is no barrier keeping them on one side or the other.
If, contrary to that idealisation, in reality the other timeline has grass and the jaunter's current one doesn't, this introduces an additional difference between the two states - whether the grass is standing up, or squashed down - which is not represented in the quantum view. This skews the real probabilities away from exactly half-and-half and towards the side of the jaunter staying where they are, so the cancellation of the barrier is incomplete. But it still shrinks it small enough for there to be a very high probability of tunnelling past it during the period of time when the fluence is on.
The displaced-matter condition - grass squashed down, here - is of course not actually a single discrete state, but a superposition of a whole bundle of states with extremely trivial differences in the matter of the exact manner in which each blade is bent. This "fuzz" interferes with the simple two-discrete-states model the magic is using and greatly amplifies the probability-skewing effect. As the grass gets longer, the number of possible trivial differences increases (more ways to bend a longer blade), the interference gets worse, and eventually the barrier cancellation is so poor that there is negligible chance of tunnelling past it while the fluence is on. Because the rate of increase of complexity is basically factorial, "eventually" comes on very abruptly, and from the user's point of view it looks like a binary barrier as well-defined as a cliff.
The jaunting mechanism is implemented as little blobs of quantum nanogoop the same sort of size as mitochondria and distributed with similar density, operating at around 310K. Clearly the computational capacity available is pretty small. But it's enough to handle a great enough level of divergence to make the thing practically useful, and it can do so with an acceptably small energy consumption for intracellular use.
With a larger computational capacity you could handle greater levels of divergence, for instance being able to jaunt into and squash out of the way grass higher than your head. But the chances are that the extremely rapid growth in complexity means that this sort of processing power would be totally impossible to either install or find the power for in an intracellular configuration.
This is probably also why, if you want to set up a barrier-cancellation that is persistent and is valid for any matter that happens to be around, you need to keep a pet black hole as a matter-energy converter to power it.
Where is the heatsink for that thing? There are temptations in this theory towards the idea of using it to build a device to cheat thermodynamics and not need one... but it wouldn't work; it's only an unusually complicated Maxwell's demon, and the computational entropy increase would outweigh the gain.
I think you can work from that point to an absolute best-case theoretical maximum figure for how long the grass could possibly be while still handling the computation on intracellular machinery (of ideally perfect efficiency) that wouldn't instantly cook anyone who tried to actually jaunt with it. But not at this time of night.
]]>OTOH, I realize that 1:1 3 dimensional mapping between timelines with centuries of different history is an integral part of many of the stories. And also, this is a fantasy.
]]>Answering it anyway :) Since they don't actually understand how it works, they're developing it by a clone-and-hack method, and are still not really all that far beyond getting "hello world" to work. As far as I understand it, the magic parts are currently being produced by maintaining some delicate and slow-growing cell cultures in highly regulated conditions and cutting bits off the edges every now and then. So an obvious next step would be to get the same material reproducing in some more robust and faster-growing kind of cells that can be cultured in less demanding conditions. Take that far enough and you could build the production and replacement of magic parts right into the machine itself: make it reproduce in yeast and you could have the machine keep going indefinitely with just a drop of sugary water every now and then. Although they wouldn't want to if they have any sense.
A more practical approach would be to get the structure analysed in sufficient detail to be able to reproduce a working version of it using integrated circuit fabrication techniques. They'd be laughing then.
]]>"How many ARMBAND machines can you build and how many times can you use one before it wears out and you have to replace it? [rhetorical question]"
Answering it anyway :) Since they don't actually understand how it works, they're developing it by a clone-and-hack method, and are still not really all that far beyond getting "hello world" to work. As far as I understand it, the magic parts are currently being produced by maintaining some delicate and slow-growing cell cultures in highly regulated conditions and cutting bits off the edges every now and then. So an obvious next step would be to get the same material reproducing in some more robust and faster-growing kind of cells that can be cultured in less demanding conditions. Take that far enough and you could build the production and replacement of magic parts right into the machine itself: make it reproduce in yeast and you could have the machine keep going indefinitely with just a drop of sugary water every now and then. Although they wouldn't want to if they have any sense.
A more practical approach would be to get the structure analysed in sufficient detail to be able to reproduce a working version of it using integrated circuit fabrication techniques. They'd be laughing then."
Yeah, but it's NOT a structural limit of the universe that only X number of ARMBAND machines can be operational at one time as the comment seemed to imply.
It's a technology-logistical limitation, not a limitation imposed by the "physics" of world walking. You can use as many ARMBAND machines as you can produce.
]]>When this post dropped, I realised I hadn't read any of the Next Gen/Empire Games stories and I found my trade paperbacks of the original set were going mouldy on the bookcase. So I bought ebooks of the omnibus editions and started a binge read of the entire series from the very start, culminating in finishing Invisible Sun last weekend.
Wow. Consuming the entire series in one sitting (at a daily rate of at least 30 minutes but more usually an hour or two per night) was an experience and a half. It really was like binge watching a Netflix season!
The compendium edits of the first books definitely helped, I remember being somewhat frustrated with the sheer amount of recap material in the second and third books, so the edit and updates certainly make all of the first part hang together much more fluidly.
Overall, we go from portal and medieval fantasy through cold war spy thriller and wind up in hard sci-fi with answers to the Fermi paradox of the most unpleasant variety. There is no way anything like this has any right to hang together and feel consistent... and yet it does.
The strength and consistency of Miriam's character was one of the keys to that sense of unity; her ability to think rings around her opponents doesn't always save her, in fact it leads to hubris and the worst of her calamities. Although she is not the central character of Empire Games, sure remains the linchpin on which the story hangs.
Are there gaps and gaffs that only a single read through would reveal? Of course there are, but none that disrupt the overall narrative structure. That Paulie fades in and out of the story so often and so suddenly is the closest i'd come to a criticism of any that I spotted, I did feel she deserved a sub plot of her own earlier in the series to give her a bit more screen time.
But that's kinda my only nit pick in an epic that is as long as War and Peace and The Lord of the Rings back to back. I've never got past the first few chapters of W&P, but I've read LotR several times including as a short-term binge, like this. Doing Merchant Princes as a binge read was every bit as satisfying as LotR, it may not have the sheer breadth of immersive and all encompassing background but it has pace, intrigue and novelty which are in turn relentless, fascinating and insightful.
Like all good stories, the series held up a mirror to the world and showed me just how dangerous the rabbit hole of authoritarianism is for the US and how close to the edge we were, and still are, dancing along it. There is a ray of light at the end of the book as the President reigns in the hawks in her agencies, compromises and finds common ground. And I can perhaps imagine a future where the enlightenment of the Commonwealth might light the way back for America. In our own timeline, those pressures that drove reprieve do not exist and though the path the story warns of may not be quite as slippery, we aren't off of it yet.
So... Should you spend a month reading the whole thing back to back in a binge? As long as you have the omnibus edits: definitely yes, consuming this body of work like this was hugely enjoyable.
]]>Evergrande technically defaulted, forcing HSBC and other international banks to write off US$197 billion
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4329732 - Nov 1, 2021
Taiwan News is old skool Propoganda / Establishment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_News
grep: "HSBC" in memo to Martin.
~
Now: working out what of that is true, and who is liable and who is pushing which agendas? Over Martin's Pay-grade.
But. There you go, we do not lie. We're just better at it than you.
]]>Great ending for a great series, I really enoyed "Invisible Sun".
I second/third the comments about the German parts - some of the scenary description (like the colour of police cars) can be explained by timeline differences, but the German soundbites should really be corrected, they are distraction to native speakers.
The book I read after "Invisible Sun" was Tchaikovskys Doors of Eden, quite interesting to see the different approaches to paratime in both books.
I just read your book, Empire Games, about a week ago.
I really enjoyed the book. But there is something I want to ask.
There is a chapter in the book where Rita jaunted into a Commonwealth railyard and took a lot of data via recording.
Afterwards, Colonel Smith and other governments officials analyzed the data and concluded that the Commonwealth's industrial set-up was such that a highly-efficient manufacturing set-up, where the workers live in public housing blocks and are ferried over to the factories (if I remember correctly, the factory in the book was manufacturing tanks). But they are ferried over by high-speed commuter trains.
May I ask what is the in-universe explanation for using commuter trains? In our world, especially in the USSR and Maoist China, it was quite common for workers to be allocated living quarters extremely close to the factories (In China, it is called Danwei and the living quarters are just right next to the factory). Why wouldn't the Commonwealth government build the workers' housing nearer to the factories or use buses instead?
]]>"I just read your book, Empire Games, about a week ago."
I really enjoyed the book. But there is something I want to ask.
There is a chapter in the book where Rita jaunted into a Commonwealth railyard and took a lot of data via recording.
Afterwards, Colonel Smith and other governments officials analyzed the data and concluded that the Commonwealth's industrial set-up was such that a highly-efficient manufacturing set-up, where the workers live in public housing blocks and are ferried over to the factories (if I remember correctly, the factory in the book was manufacturing tanks). But they are ferried over by high-speed commuter trains.
May I ask what is the in-universe explanation for using commuter trains? In our world, especially in the USSR and Maoist China, it was quite common for workers to be allocated living quarters extremely close to the factories (In China, it is called Danwei and the living quarters are just right next to the factory). Why wouldn't the Commonwealth government build the workers' housing nearer to the factories or use buses instead?
Just a SWAG, but based on the earlier books, New Britain already had the housing blocks & rail/trolley network before they started building new factories. Using existing housing & rail/trolley networks was the most efficient application of scarce resources for rapid expansion of production to war-time levels.
I expect it closely parallels how the U.K. increased war production just before and early in WW2.
]]>Also as an ex-technical writer I'm pretty sure you meant to say TB and not Tb, although even TB and GB are falling out of use now amongst IT specialists in favour of the more useful TiB (Tebibyte) and GiB (Gibibyte) - the difference being the use of base 2 rather than base 10 (1TB = 10^12, 1TiB = 2^40). Honestly when we dealt in KB and MB the differences were small enough it rarely mattered, but they get bigger as we move to GB/GiB, TB/TiB and PB/PiB.
(but you probably knew all this anyway!)
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