David J. Williams

(To start reading from the beginning of this essay, click HERE. And by the way, Happy 4th.)

Though the Eurasians possessed no equivalent to the Raft, their own navies didn’t lack for funding. This was in large part due to the fact that the most interesting thing about the ocean was, as ever, what was lurking beneath the surface. In fact, the seas were essentially the only place where mobile weapons/vehicles could be hidden from satellite surveillance. Such surveillance was far better than in the 20th century—when it had essentially been nonexistent—but it still remained far from perfect against a deep-running, stealthy submarine.

All the more so against a submarine capable of suddenly attaining “warp speed”: because, ultimately, the one factor above all else that guaranteed that naval items would be a priority item in the defense budgets was that the speed of 22nd century undersea warfare promised to render that of the previous century slow-motion—literally. Tapping the possibilities inherent in supercavitation technologies allowed the development of vessels that could reduce hydrodynamic drag by traveling inside superheated, self-generated bubbles of water vapor and gas—and that could thereby move at hundreds of kilometers per hour, irrevocably altering the pace at which undersea warfare would be conducted.

A critical byproduct of supercavitation was that it intensified the urgency of anti-submarine strategies, particularly in the vulnerable areas near the coast. Just as with geosynchronous orbit, technological/strategic realities drove a mutual understanding regarding the positioning of munitions here as well:  by the 2080s, the two powers had tacitly agreed to recognize the extension of territorial waters to four hundred kilometers out. Most admirals believed that even this was not enough, given the speed of hypersonic missiles and the reality of directed energy.  Accordingly, those four hundred kilometers were awash with underwater sensors, sea-bottom stations, mines, and anti-submarine submarines.  Destroyers cruised the surface and prowled around ocean-going platforms of varying size, while swarms of jet-copters patrolled the skies.

To be sure, littoral waters were an area where the U.S. (despite the positioning of the Rafts as forward attack platforms) had much more to lose than did the Eurasians, since so many of the large American launch pads were situated in relatively close proximity to the coasts.  The United States therefore poured tens of billions of dollars into its Atlantic and Pacific Walls, which extended as far south as the northern parts of South America.  Nor did Navy (and, eventually, NavCom) officers ever tire of arguing that these defense lines should be extended all the way to the Horn (a strategy that would mean absorbing the few neutral territories situated down there).  It could also be assumed (though no one ever admitted it) that both sides had positioned strongpoints at various places in the deep trenches across the world’s oceans, as these avenues represented logical points of concealment for approaching attack submarines.

In this regard, the most studied and speculated-upon undersea theater was that of the Arctic Ocean, across which the two superpowers directly faced each other at a relatively short distance.  The ice-packs may have been dwindling, but they were still much in evidence—and they would make it even more difficult for space-based and aerial recon platforms to intervene in the ever-shifting game played out by hunter and hunted in the most frigid of all waters.

One of the things that’s weird for a first-time author is to have people you’ve never even MET saying stuff about your book. Some throw rocks. Some throw roses. But every once in a while someone says something so totally on-point you feel like that they’ve read your mind. And understood exactly what you were trying to do.

Such a man is Dave Hutchinson, one of the illustrious editors of the Strange Pleasures anthologies (which are well worth checking out). On his blog, Dave writes that “if [THE MIRRORED HEAVENS] was a film it would be the loudest ever made, and it would make the most kinetic of Michael Bay’s movies look like Merchant-Ivory productions.” Be still my beating heart . . . nor does he stop there, going on to commend the book as having “a body-count that makes Neal Asher’s bloodiest book (and I’m an Asher fan) look like an average Saturday night out in Newcastle.”

Which is the single best soundbite yet.

He #$# rules.

Of course, he then accuses me of all sorts of serious stuff too:

While this is thick-ear stuff dialed up to eleven, Williams is also asking pertinent questions about memory, espionage, loyalty, the use of weapons, possibly even what it means to be human. The prose is…unsettling. Choppy. Terse. Stripped-down. A little unusual in places. The dialogue is off-kilter and occasionally very funny. The geopolitical background is nicely thought-out. There’s a point where several rugs are pulled out from under the reader which I didn’t see coming. It is enormously fucking complicated, and I lost track of who was screwing whom, and I’m going to have to read it again to get it straight in my head, which will not be a trial.  I finished The Mirrored Heavens and came out blinking into the sunlight slightly stunned. I found myself comparing it to Neal’s stuff, but really this is a different kind of horse. I can see this not being to everyone’s taste, but I liked it a lot.

And I can die now. My life is complete. If any artsy girls with dyed red hair are out there wearing powered armor, feel free to come on over and zap me.

Just got word from Bantam that they’ll be releasing THE MIRRORED HEAVENS as a mass-market paperback next spring! Which is, of course, fab news. And which will give those folks who haven’t read the book one last chance before the sequel hits bookshelves. Best of all, the mass-market edition will feature some “bonus material”: in all likelihood, character dossiers and excerpts from the glossary. (And it’ll have to be excerpts because the original glossary I wrote was about 20 pages long, and is unlikely to see the light of day, even on the website. Sigh.)

Meanwhile the trade-paperback version of the book continues to plow ahead, appearing on i09 last week in a very cool profile. Actually, to be precise: it was my interview in Rescued by Nerds that was being featured on io9. Special thanks to Mike and the whole team over at RBN; not only does their blog have the best name ever, but I was able to get in all sorts of cool soundbites, including Who Would Win If the Book’s Mechs Were to Go At It, Why Chapters Are So Boring, and Why Powered Armor Is Akin to Beef Stew.

All of which makes utter sense in context.

I think.

Further out in space, the Americans held a considerable advantage: until the Zurich Treaty, they enjoyed a monopoly on the Earth’s only natural satellite. They also controlled L2 (the libration point behind the Moon), L1 (situated just in front of the Moon), as well as L5, at sixty degrees angle to the Moon. The Eurasians, by contrast, only controlled a single libration point, that of L4 (by virtue of the Russians having placed a “research station” there shortly after Olenkov came to power), and—in the wake of Zurich—a quarter of the Moon (though by 2110, the extent to which they had consolidated their foothold here was open to question).

Yet the actual significance of such dispositions was open to debate. Certainly the Americans had aggressively deployed resources to the Moon. Furthermore, in the years preceding Zurich, the hindmost libration point figured increasingly in their plans as the site of a reserve fleet that could cover their Lunar assets. But some prominent figures in the U.S. military (none of them in SpaceCom, it should be noted) argued that the Moon was a dangerous diversion. They pointed out that, since it took even the fastest spacecraft two days to cross from the Earth into the Moon’s orbit, any attention devoted to Earth Beyond was by definition a waste of resources. Even the utility of the Moon as a directed-energy weapons platform seemed problematic to such strategists: why put them there when you could simply deploy them closer to Earth?

This private stance aligned with the Eurasians’ public one. For, denied most of the key points in the Cislunar regions, Russia and China instead concentrated their efforts on areas closer to home—or so they claimed. While the ongoing war of words between the two superpowers lies beyond the scope of this inquiry, it is worth noting that the Eurasian rhetoric made much of the American near-monopoly on the Moon and nearby points. Even after Zurich, the press in Moscow and Beijing accused the United States of seeking to conquer the Solar System, or—with perhaps less hyperbole—of harnessing the resources of the Moon in order to dominate the Earth.

Yet, such rhetoric aside, there was much evidence to believe that, in reality, the Eurasian military viewed Cislunar space as crucial. And not just because of the resource issue. Helium-3 and off-Earth minerals were important, yes—but the really critical thing about Cislunar space was that it represented the high ground in the invisible topography of the Earth-Moon system. The amount of energy required to get material to the Cislunar was far greater than the amount of energy required to get material to Earth from the Cislunar. And the policy of Olenkov in this regard—to build up L4 as one of the greatest fortresses of all time—was thus matched by his successors: even post-Zurich, they studded their own slice of the Moon with bases. Yet what kind of combat might transpire on the Lunar surface—or among the libration points—remained unclear.

NEXT: NAVAL WARFARE

Some fascinating glimpses across the last several days into the heart of the U.S. war effort in Iraq: the gigantic, permanent bases from which we maintain our precarious hold on the cities. “Permanent” is, of course, a loaded word. They’ve been called that in legislation and in funding, but the Iraqis are (understandably) starting to get a little nervous about their implications.

As should everybody else. It’s funny to see the candidates debate how long we’re going to be remaining in Iraq when all the evidence points to that decision already having been made. Consider the facts, touched on by Fabius Maximus and laid bare in this expose from Tom Engelhart: there are 106 bases (of all sizes) in Iraq right now, and the largest of these, Camp Anaconda, boasts an air base so huge it’s comparable to Heathrow in volume of traffic. Supposedly those 106 bases are being consolidated into what the Pentagon has referred to as “enduring” bases. There’s a great map of the biggest ones here. God only knows if they’ll last for the entirety of McCain’s hundred years, but it certainly looks like they’re designed to. Much to the delight of the contractors hired to build them.

Which may be insane from the perspective of the U.S. budget. But it certainly fits in with the overall direction of our Iraq adventure. It doesn’t even matter if we lose the cities:  we’re not planning on leaving. Not in the age of peak oil. Not with Iran capable of filling any power vacuum we leave behind. The politicians squabble, and the public yawns, but the military understands the underlying logic, and makes its plans accordingly.

” . . my concern goes to the development of humans as special weapons. Here is a virtually unlimited field which a few powers are now developing.” –Paul Muad’dib in DUNE MESSIAH

One of the aspects of THE MIRRORED HEAVENS that’s gotten a fair amount of attention is how spymasters rewrite their agents’ memories (a dynamic that’s made all the more complex by two of those agents believing themselves to have once been romantically linked). In that sense, the book ended up being a cross between James Bond and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: people looked at me like I was crazy—or at least, I seem to *recall* them looking at me like I was crazy—but my agent (er, literary not espionage) smelt opportunity, and here we are as a result of her astuteness.

At any rate, turns out the Pentagon is on the memory trail, too. Wired’s Danger Room reported earlier this week on how the U.S. military believes itself to be locked in a “brain race”, in which the victory will go to the side that manages to produce the most enhanced soldiers. To be sure, the Pentagon has been adamant that its goal here is simply one of helping the troops to “be all they can be.” So, for example, eliminating the need for sleep=worthy stretch goal. Increasing alertness to razor-sharp precision=worthy stretch goal. So far, so good.

But, as Wired notes, the documents (available here) also reveal more ambitious goals. And more specific anxieties. The brain-computer interface is one such focus: some of this involves tapping the subconscious in battlefield situations, some of it focuses on investigating the advantages that a more seamless man-machine interface might yield. This wouldn’t just mean stuff like thought-controlled MiG jets piloted by Clint Eastwood, which is obviously what we all want to see, but also (though the report doesn’t mention it), implants that essentially enable telepathy. The latter of which appears in THE MIRRORED HEAVENS on a more-or-less routine basis.

And then there’s the possibility to fuck with memory, either via an interface or via drugs. The report is very carefully worded: this is yet one more thing that our nefarious adversaries might get up to at some point, and thus more thing we’ll have to watch very closely, blahblahblah. But anyone who’s studied the CIA’s track record with MK-ULTRA (which centered around the effort to use LSD as a mind-control agent), knows that governments love this kind of stuff the way pigs love shit. Indeed, the report goes on to talk (in the context of a brain-computer interface) about the potential for “remote guidance or control of a human being.” They don’t specifically link this to memory, but it doesn’t take much to draw the connection.

To be clear: none of this is right around the corner. But all of it raises critical questions. For now, I’ll content myself with just one. We’re rapidly approaching the point where certain types of soldiers will be way more than just “professional soldiers.” They’ll be engineered. (And we haven’t even started talking about the can of worms that genetics might open.) Are such soldiers ever going to be capable of re-entering society in a civilian role? Will they simply become part of the growing legion of private mercenaries that now support our public-funded armies? Or will they never leave in the first place? Maybe they won’t want to.

Maybe the idea will never occur to them.

Starting close to home: or rather, Homeworld. Which was the videogame I worked on back when the idea of writing a novel had yet to even occur to me. The folks at Relic News did a little sleuthing a couple weeks back and realized that I was the same guy who received co-writing and story concept credits on what went on to win PC Magazine’s Game of the Year for 1999; earlier this week, a more comprehensive article appeared in gaming blog The Big Download, in large part as a result of their efforts, I’m told. Thanks guys!

Moving into the news: the Louisiana Senate has passed a bill which essentially acts as a trojan horse for creationist teachings. (Thanks to the inimitable Pharyngula for the tip.) The thing that always boggles my mind about this kind of thing is that believing in Christianity doesn’t automatically entail believing that the Earth was created five thousand years ago. Nor does it mean that one has to subscribe to a world in which dinosaur bones are all part of some elaborate scheme to test our faith.

Because otherwise faith in the next world will inexorably undermine our position in this one. The New Scientist reported last week on the speech of Nobel laureate David Baltimore at the first World Science Festival, who commented on the damage that creationism is doing to the U.S.’s international scientific stature. There’s no doubt this fear is totally warranted; there’s also no doubt that this issue is very much THE issue in the culture wars now underway. Virtually everything else admits of compromise; this one does not. This is at the heart of what kind of nation we’re going to be in the 21st century.

‘Nuff said for now.

Adolf Hitler always understood that his primary enemy was the United States. Ultimately, the Nazi plan was to harness the resources of Europe—and in particular those of European Russia—under the aegis of a new superstate, with Germany at its core. England and France would get the hell out of the way, or be roadkill. And then the full industrial might of the Third Reich could be turned against America.

An idea that gets all the scarier when you consider what was on the drawing boards. Inevitably, as the conflict with England and Russia deepened, Germany channeled its bomber production into tactical bombers. But behind the scenes, plans for some true behemoths were underway.

The most favored design among the Nazi planners is shown here. You’re looking at the Junkers 390, a six-engined monstrosity capable of flying all the way to New York and then returning to Berlin for a round of schnapps. In fact, there are (admittedly unconfirmed) reports that this thing did exactly that in 1944 on a dry run, turning back even as its crew saw the lights of Manhattan emerging over the horizon. No prizes for guessing what kind of bombing run they were training for: by that point in the war, with the Reich collapsing around Hitler’s ears, there was really only one reason to try to hit New York, and that was with an atomic weapon. Fortunately, the German atomic program was way behind by that point, so it all came to naught.

But the Ju-390 was just the tip of the iceberg. The ultimate goal was to build a strategic bomber that had jets. The strongest contender was a Horten flying wing: it’s NOT the craft shown here, which was an earlier design. The Horten XVIIIB would have had twice the wingspan of the thing you’re looking at now. Had Hitler knocked Russia out of the war, we’d have been facing a whole fleet of these.

And we’d have been up against bona fide SPACECRAFT as well. I’m not even referring to whatever the successors to the V2 rocket would have been. I’m talking about the Sanger spaceplane, which was intended to be put on the back of a rocket sled. Once the sled accelerated to a sufficient speed, the spaceplane would have been launched off the back of it. It would have gone suborbital, bombed New York, and then, instead of turning around, continued on into the Pacific where a German (or Japanese) U-boat would have picked up both crew and vehicle.

None of these planes was ever put to the test in a live bombing run. But all of them became fodder for the Russians and the Americans at the end of the war, as the race to capture German scientists intensified and the allies fell out among themselves and a new competition took shape. One that we should be thankful for. Who would we rather have faced in the late 1940s, an exhausted Soviet Union or a Nazi Germany that was busy consolidating its hold over Europe and turning its eyes over the Atlantic? In a sense, the big might-have-been of World War II is that, had it taken a different direction, it might have led to the first space war.

And speaking of space wars, I’m planning on publishing in its entirety my essay NOTES TOWARD A THEORY OF SPACE-CENTRIC WARFARE, written from the perspective of the year 2110. I’ve already posted the first part HERE, and intend to serialize the rest across the next few days/weeks. So watch this space.

Today I want to talk about mechs.

One of the really interesting things in science fiction is the interface between flesh and machine. And one of the most interesting things about that interface is how ambiguous it often is. Bladerunner, for example: we never know for sure whether a replicant’s core is robotic or not (or even what, precisely, the word “robot” is intended to mean). Battlestar Galactica played a similar are-they-or-aren’t-they game in its initial episodes.

And I suspect that one of the reasons for this is that, in creating such fictions, we’re skating over some pretty thin ice around our culture’s broader anxieties. We know this stuff is coming. We know there’s going to be a Web N.0 where it all gets right inside our heads. Or maybe those of our children. But we’ve got very little sense of the exact sequence events might follow. Or how the timelines might play out. It’s all just guesswork.

And, as Warren Ellis pointed out last week, it’s made even more problematic by the way in which all too many of the folks who are best equipped to speculate are content to get all misty-eyed and mystical about the Singularity (aka the “Rapture for Nerds”, though Ken McLeod has been at pains to point out that he didn’t coin the term). And before you start hurling epithets and tomatoes: sure, there’s some kind of Singularity on the horizon. I know that. Something’s brewing. That much seems clear. But it’s probably not going to be the peaches-and-cream mass-upload that so many seem to have in mind. It’ll be something far more ambiguous. It’ll hit us from the blindside like the web did. And like the web, even as it opens up new worlds, it won’t magic away anything in the real world. And we forget that at our peril.

But I was here to talk about mechs.

Look, here’s the thing: the problems I’ve been talking about admit of ambiguity. Mechs in THE MIRRORED HEAVENS don’t. More than one reader/reviewer (and god knows I love them all, so don’t take this as an ad hominem attack, ‘cos it ain’t) has used the word mech interchangeably with the word cyborg. To paraphrase Winston C., that is something up with which I cannot put. They’re different classes of concepts. While you’ll have to read the book itself to find out where I come down on the whole cyborg question, the mech issue is far more straightforward:

The word’s come down from the old man himself. Both kinds of runners hit this city tonight. The razors work the zone [i.e., the net] and the mechanics kick in the doors.

Make sense? Mechs doesn’t refer to cyborgs, nor is it a reference to anime mechas. Mechs are the men and women who call themselves mechanics: assassins. They’re black-ops operatives who specialize in physical combat while the razors with whom they’re partnered work the zone and enable their runs. And in fact, I’ve got some additional information as well, on the bottom-right of this page.

Cool? Cool. Or rather, I wish it was #$# cool. But it’s not. In fact, it’s hot as hell right now in the middle of our nation’s capital. You can tell this town was the result of a political compromise. Thanks a lot, Founding Fathers.

TOMORROW: NAZI SPACEPLANES

Taking my mind off the third day of the summer’s First Heat Wave: thanks to a very nice mention by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, the book has now soared to #1 on Amazon’s high-tech SF ranking! (Yeah, I know Amazon rankings aren’t worth obsessing over. And that this is a blink-and-you-miss-it moment anyway. And that by the time you click on this link, the book’ll probably be locked in a relentless battle for 180th place. But as of right now: here I am ahead of Gibson, Stross, Stephenson, and the whole lot of them. That ain’t no UFO, baby, it’s THE MIRRORED HEAVENS!)

But this morning I want to talk about IFOs, actually. Specifically, aircraft. Specifically, passenger aircraft. Two cool links came in this weekend from our informant Topdog. The first is a slide show of aircraft graveyards in Arizona and California. It’s as haunting as it is surreal. Especially some of the interiors, which make you wonder who sat in them and when, and all the lives and moments that passed through them. And now these planes just sit there with the sand drifting over them.

While their newer (or maybe not so new) brethren fly overhead. The second link Topdog sent over is SkyVector: online aeronautical charts! Man, this stuff is cool. You can plot in flight routes and see all the data. So if you’re gonna attach balloons to your lawn-chair and then go for a spin, this is how to do it.

You know what? I have more I want to say about aircraft, but I’ll save it. Every second I don’t hit “publish” on this blog post is a second in which Gibson and the rest of them will be putting boot-prints on my back as they reclaim first place. I’ll be back later with some thoughts on Nazi plans to bomb North America. In the meantime, if you want me, I’ll be camped out in the freezer.