Posts Tagged ‘future of war’

Reading tonight/reappraising Star Wars: THE PHANTOM MENACE

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

I’ll be reading at Flights of Fantasy Books in Albany, NY tonight at 7 p.m. If you’re local, stop on by!

And on an unrelated note: I was watching STAR WARS Episode One again last night, and realized something about it. Which is: the first ten minutes are pretty much perfect. The Jedi diplomatic mission, the double-cross, the frenetic pursuit through the corridors of the trade federation ship . . . that stuff ROCKS. In fact, the movie continues to rock until they invade the planet and we encounter Jar-Jar. I know a lot has been said about that guy, and believe me, I’m not going to offer any incredibly insightful revisionism re his role. You’ll find no new interpretations here. In fact, I’m a staunch traditionalist on this front:  because if I’m right about the first ten minutes of PHANTOM MENACE, then Jar-Jar didn’t just wreck the movie.  He wrecked an awesome movie.

Sigh.

MIRRORED HEAVENS reading in Albany tomorrow!

Monday, July 14th, 2008

I’ll be doing a signing/reading of THE MIRRORED HEAVENS at Flights of Fantasy Books, Albany, NY tomorrow, July 15th, at 7 p.m. The folks who run it seem really cool, and I’m looking forward to meeting them. If you’re in the area, stop on by, as it’s gonna be fun. Last time I read from the spaceplane hijack scene; this time, I think it might be the maglev train chase through the Atlantic Tunnels. We shall see. The suspense builds. . .

In the meantime, I’m taking today off to hang out with my friend Jerry, who escaped the NYC ratrace a few years ago so he could chill amidst the upstate greenery. We’re gonna do some canoeing (hopefully that’s not a code for some new type of designer drug that all the cool kids have gotten into), and kick back a little. Hope everybody enjoyed the weekend. Now I’m off to extend it just a little longer . .  .

The U.S. space program . . . (yawn)

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

A front-page article in the Washington Post yesterday asserted that U.S. dominance in space is slipping, with lots of examples to prove the point: the recently launched Japanese lunar orbiter, the upcoming Chinese space walk, Israel’s nanosatellites, etc. But the article, which draws from a study undertaken by Bethesda, MD consultants Futron, is a somewhat awkward pastiche of two separate trends. On the one hand, it’s to be expected that the lead of the U.S. would decline in relative terms, as more and more nations get in on the act. It’s a little like the initial wave of industrialization: first Britain built its factories, but other nations were quick to follow suit, a development that Britain could do little about.  Indeed, more nations getting into space in a robust way is a good thing, and should be welcomed as such.

But, on the other hand . . .  the U.S. space program really is floundering, in absolute terms. Yes, the nation remains ahead of the competition, as can be seen in Futron’s space competitive index, published in The Economist. But the Shuttle gets retired in 2010, and then we’ve got a five year gap during which no American spaceship will be able to reach the International Space Station. Paying the Russians to take us there will be our only option, until the Constellation comes online five years later.

Or never.  Which is an increasing risk at this point.  We’re obviously heading into an era of ever-tighter budgets, and NASA’s programs tend to be one of the first things to get cut.  All the more so given that the U.S. public could give two shits about what happens after the Shuttle.  Or, for that matter, the Shuttle itself.  Hell, the only way it can make the news anymore is as flaming wreckage.

Which is what makes the post-Shuttle plans such a total pull-your-hair-out-while-you-bash-your-head-into-a-wall missed opportunity.  NASA had a big chance to get people’s attention again, and all they could come up with is something that looks to the average American suspiciously like a repeat of Apollo (only more expensive, with both earth AND lunar orbit rendezvous).  They’d have been far better advised to head to Mars, or start mining asteroids . . . or anything besides something that everybody in this country knows Tom Hanks has already done.  As Bob Mahoney argued so cogently in The Space Review earlier in the year, when it comes to PR, NASA really blew it.  Again.

But not everybody has lost the plot.  While NASA lurches toward the budget axe, the Pentagon keeps on trucking.  Because one of the areas where the U.S. still remains unchallenged in space is with regards to military hardware:  we’ve got as many satellites in orbit as all other nations combined.  Without those sats, the ultra-precise weaponry of the U.S. war machine would be reduced to near-uselessness.  And if anyone ever gets into a position to challenge those sats .  . .

And that, as I’ve argued before (and as the Post article implicitly underscores), is likely to be the dynamic that ultimately shifts this whole equation.  Ultimately, the only REAL reason America ever came up with for getting into space in a serious way is because the other guy was doing it.  Sputnik got us off our butts in the 1950s/60s, and I suspect that something similar is going to happen again.  Put it this way:  the Moon will be a LOT more interesting to the American public when the Chinese start walking around on it.  Which won’t happen for a while yet.  But there’s an awful lot that they and others can get up to in the meantime.

The publishing gauntlet

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

I’m guest-blogging over at Bantam Spectra’s Facebook page for the next few weeks. Spectra told me there’s a lot of aspiring authors over there, so I figured I’d start things off with a post about How To Get Your Novel Published. You can click HERE for the whole thing; it’s (obviously) all just my opinion—or rather, represents my potentially idiosyncratic experience in getting published—but I sure wish someone had told me something similar back in 2006 when I was first gearing up for a tilt at the publishing windmill. Perhaps there’s a way for me to email this back in time to that struggling, desperate fool who didn’t understand critical things like (a) the REAL solution to the “can’t get publisher without an agent/can’t get agent without a publisher” paradox, or (b) what all the query-letter advice books overlook, or (c) the actual key to success . .  .though I guess given how things turned out, it’s a bit of a moot point now. Fortunately.

But hey.  What are you still doing here anyway?  Go check out the post!

Weekend round-up

Monday, July 7th, 2008

The bad news first. Some punk(s) has/have stolen several laptops right out of Clarion West’s 08 residential house. Thanks to the generosity of the Seattle/Clarion West community, replacement laptops have been secured for the summer, but that still leaves students facing the need to ultimately buy new laptops (to say nothing of the mental stress incurred in losing critical files/data). If you’re able to donate or contribute in any way, contact Leslie or Neile at infoATClariontWestDOTorg.

On a happier note, I’ve sent in to Bantam “exclusive bonus material” for the mass-market paperback version of THE MIRRORED HEAVENS. The mass-market will thus represent the first time any excerpts from my glossary will have seen the light of day, but what I’m really excited about are the “character dossiers.” These consist of files on (a) the agents, (b) the handlers, and (c) the Inner Cabinet (i.e, the rulers of the United States):  they’re written from a senior Praetorian perspective, and they shed new (and, I think, interesting) light on the book’s events.  They also point the way toward the sequel, but that’s another story . . .

Space-Centric Warfare, Part Five: Underwater Combat

Friday, July 4th, 2008

(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.

Space-Centric Warfare, Part Four: Naval Combat

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

(For Part One of this essay, click HERE.)

All of the attention upon space left the leaders of the non-space services scrambling to assert the significance of their own theaters (though they hedged their bets by building up their own space-based presences). They experienced mixed success in this regard. Perhaps the fiercest such debate centered on the role that the sea would play. Unsurprisingly, the navies of both sides argued that Neptune’s arena would be a crucial one, and they mounted a wide range of arguments to support their claim.

The experience of the U.S. Navy in developing and making its case is particularly instructive. Its officers contended that since all the nations across the three Eastern continents were either neutral or Eurasian vassals, attacks launched from the oceans were the most immediate route, save from space itself, to deploy U.S. munitions without warning into the East’s defenses.  Indeed, at the core of the Navy’s calculations was an attempt to replicate a key component of its strategy during the First Cold War:  namely, encircling Russia and China with a series of bases capable of projecting force into their homelands.

The question, though, was the nature of that force.  The dominant naval platform of the 20th century, the aircraft carrier, had become obsolete long before the full resurgence of the Eurasian powers.  Carriers were simply too vulnerable to waves of torpedoes and ever-faster cruise missiles.  An increasing proportion of the force in any one carrier group had to be dedicated solely to protecting the carrier—yet such precautions failed (in spectacular fashion) against more than one “rogue state” in the first two decades of the 21st century.

The solution to all this was as radical as it was expensive:  since a maneuvering boat was essentially motionless relative to onrushing hypersonic missiles, why bother trying to build any evasive capability into a capital ship at all?  Why not make it motionless?  Thus was conceived the Raft (also called the Floating Fortress, in homage to Orwell): several kilometers along each side, racked with weaponry, and boasting full-length runways, as well as space launch facilities. content_military_04floating.jpg In the eyes of their designers, two factors made the Rafts a survivable proposition:  first, most of their weapons could be utilized for defensive purposes against oncoming missiles (e.g., the craft possessed a myriad smaller lasers that could be trained directly upon such incoming targets) and, second, a Raft was so large that even a direct hit was unlikely to be fatal.  When possible, Rafts were placed on or near the equator to maximize their space-launch potential.

It can safely be asserted that the construction of such behemoths laid to rest any notions that the U.S. navy was run by hidebound reactionaries wedded to the capital ships of a previous generation—but how they would perform were they to be put to the test remained to be seen.

NEXT:  UNDERWATER WARFARE

The loudest movie never made

Monday, June 30th, 2008

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.

Flunking the Fed

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Grim day yesterday, as oil rose into the stratosphere and stocks took it on the nose. Just to put things in perspective, we are now on track for the worst June on Wall Street since the Great Depression. What’s really scary here is that it’s not just oil prices that are driving this; the market was also reacting to clear signals that the credit crisis (which bankers were so eager to assure us was now behind us) remains in its early stages. Worse, Fed chairman Bernanke is clearly floundering amidst the crisis that Greenspan spent his entire career postponing. Barclays Capital warned its clients yesterday that central banks have flunked their “first major test in 30 years”, and that their pumping of money into the economy has given them “zero credibility . . .and the Fed has negative credibility, if that’s even possible.”

Harsh words.  Maybe too harsh, given that it’s not just the Fed’s fault.  The stupidity of the much-vaunted stimulus packages passed by Congress and signed by the Prez this past spring is now manifest: at best that stimulus had no impact; at worst, it persuaded just a few more debt-stricken consumers to stagger to their local Circuit City for a TV they couldn’t afford.  We’ve been sleepwalking for so long; what’s ten more minutes after you’ve already hit the snooze button fifty times?  But unfortunately the scene now is like that at Arthur Dent’s house in Hitchhiker’s Guide:  the bulldozer is right outside the window, and it’s about to come crashing through.  Royal Bank of Scotland just issued a warning that the “chickens are about to come home to roost”, and that by September the markets will be in full, devastating retreat.  It’s hard to see how that scenario can be avoided now.

Meaning that the Fed will be confronted with the dilemma they’ve been so desperate to avoid for so long.  Raising interest rates offers the only hope of stemming the runaway inflation that rising oil and commodity prices are threatening to unleash.  But the impact on the long-deluded American consumer will be nothing short of catastrophic . .  and that’s a word that I fear we’re going to hear a lot more of in the weeks and months to come.

Going to market

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

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.