As a new Ice Age imperils the world, a lunatic fringe of the environmental movement has taken control of the U.S. government.
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
When outsiders like myself think of California, we normally think of the most rabidly pro-alarmist, anti freedom state in America, a sea of climate alarmist orthodoxy, tempered by the occasional voice of skepticism.
But some of California’s most prominent fiction authors, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn, were poking fun at global warming dogma way back in the early 90s. Their satirical science fiction book, “Fallen Angels”, written in 1991, depicts a world in the grip of a new ice age, triggered by green initiatives to reduce CO2 emissions, with radical green governments trying to pin the blame for crashing global temperatures on high technology and “air stealing” space colonists – the remnants of American and Russian space efforts.
Many, perhaps most of you have probably not heard of “Fallen Angels” – it never achieved the prominence of better known stories such as the Ringworld series, the Known Space series, Lucifer’s Hammer, Footfall, and many other Niven and Pournelle science fiction classics. But for me Fallen Angels planted a seed of skepticism – towards the end of the 90s, when a rising tide of voices claimed climate consensus, and predicted imminent doom, I remembered reading “Fallen Angels”, and wondered whether the anti science green dystopia they satirised was actually coming to pass. My doubt caused me to dig a little deeper, and helped me to see past the climate lies of the alarmists.
Perhaps other authors are out there, wondering if now is the time to take the plunge, to satirise that which must not be questioned. My suggestion – it didn’t do Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn’s career any harm. Author Scott Adams (Dilbert) still publishes a lot of cartoons, despite his occasional nods towards climate skepticism (e.g. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/20/dilbert-becomes-skeptical-of-climate-change-disaster/ ).
And who knows – if the lunatic fringe of the climate alarmist movement is sufficiently outraged by your effort, you could sell a lot of books.
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Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction_novel)
The book is available on Amazon, here.
Keith, thanks for the good wishes for XCOR (Jeff, Dan, Aleta & I started it up in ’99 after RR canned us all). We had the Ez-Rocket at the Playboy Manse for the Arthur Clarke 2001 celebration, but I bowed out to let some of the other folks have a chance to go. I kinda kick myself for that one, that was a bit too noble of me…
That Playboy Mansion gala was an extraordinary night. It’s a great pity that there is so little documentation of the event. As you know, but for others, it included the first life-size satellite-transmitted live hologram (so that Arthur Clarke could attend virtually from Sri Lanka). He was visibly choked up on the stage at several points, from the outpouring of respect and tributes.
There was a lot of positive talk about the Ez-Rocket, and I’m sure that many got some shots of the gorillas from 2001: A Space Odyssey hamming it up (apeing it up?) around the craft.
November 2001 was so soon after the September 2001 attacks, and my Space Frontier Foundation friends were gravely concerned about the effects as well as the appropriateness. It worked out. Attendance was full … at $1,000 per plate. “Dinner in the tent in the Mansion’s back yard” sounds modest, but the tent held 600 people in tuxedoed finery (well, the apes came au natural). The evening was superb.
A lot of SF author luminaries were there, as well as astronauts and scientists and directors, and SF-oriented actors from James Cameron to Patrick Stewart. Stewart, as MC for the evening, was constantly chastened on his schedule by HAL 9000 (as was everyone else). At one point Stewart stormed off the stage to have it out with the voice of HAL who was playing his part rather too well. Morgan Freeman read from his draft screenplay for Rendezvous with Rama, which has sadly not come to fruition yet.
This was ten years after the publication of the excellent (and very funny) Fallen Angels, but I had been fortunate enough to meet several of the characters in it before the book was written. I’d never been a part of the fandom, per se, (it was from this book that I learned that the plural of “fan” is “fen”) but you can’t be involved with L5 Society and OASIS without bumping into the most fascinating of people as well as the leaders who would help humanity realize its dream of moving into space.
Thanks for being one of those leaders!
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
For another take on an environmentalist dystopia, try Keith Mano’s novel, The Bridge.
Doug Jones says:
June 22, 2013 at 9:05 pm
“….I kinda kick myself for that one, that was a bit too noble of me…”
———
noble prize ??
@Mike D. in AB:
I’ll try Sheffield, thank you.
It’s not that I think that Niven and Pournelle are formulaic or predictable, no.
Wordy, repetitive (one could feel that they inflate the word count — more money, less content), and a bit too vulgar to my taste, yes.
However, I had a guilty pleasure of reading most of their books, which is to say that I was interested enough in many of their ideas, and found their novels entertaining enough.
Inferno would qualify as good literature even in my rarefied circle of one.
“[…]their novels are much too wordy, hastily written and sketchy, their protagonists and their language are too tied up in the oversexed, drug-poisoned ambiance of 1960s, theirs is not really a food for thought but a chewing gum for passing time.”
Well, I guess we got told, didn’t we?
Don’t tell the guy about the 40,000 words Mr. Heinlein made them lop off the front of Mote, or how Dad’s best solo work (in my not so humble opinion) is also his shortest, most heartfelt and least political.
Well, as long as he paid for his copies, he helped put me through college, so there’s that.
(Language tied up in the 60’s? That’s a new one. Wow.)
Considering that they attempted to create new church canon with Inferno, I don’t know whether to be amused or just baffled at the charge of disposability. So It Goes.
Dad’s best solo work
Which would you say that is?
For the record, I couldn’t afford to attend the Playboy Mansion gig. That was Rich, again.
Mike “Inferno would qualify as good literature even in my rarefied circle of one.”
If the goal had been to expose the evils of Christian doctrine, perhaps, but I doubt it was.
CRS, DrPH says:
June 22, 2013 at 2:52 pm
BTW, has anyone noticed that the Arctic sea ice extent is not playing according to script?
————————————————————————————————————–
I would bet that most of us who frequent this ‘pub’, are keeping track of that line. I wonder if Las Vegas has a line on that? Could be interesting.
I remember reading ‘Footfall’ and thoroughly enjoyed it.
@alex Pournelle:
The fact that I found most of Niven & Pournelle books entertaining (and recommended them to others, including my teenage son) should be considered a compliment, I think.
Most of the books out there (including so-called “science fiction”) are simply not readable at all. Very few of them reach the level of Jack Vance, whose stories will be popular for centuries to come — one of the reasons being that his language is not tied up with any contemporary fashion or jargon.
Sorry if my way of expressing my opinion offended your filial feelings, but my opinion, based on reading practically all of Niven & Pournelle books, stays firm and unflinching. Few fleeting sarcasms sound very unconvincing in comparison.
Read and enjoyed the mote and ringworld way back in the 70’s even State of Fear, however the novels that changed my mind about global warming were the “Empire of Man” series by David Weber and John Ringo when the AGW end game was spelled out.
As for Agenda 21, it gets a few mentions in John Ringo’s military science fiction (Posleen wars series).
A brutal series, with too many home truths.
Alexander Feht
It’s not that I think that Niven and Pournelle are formulaic or predictable, no.
Wordy, repetitive (one could feel that they inflate the word count — more money, less content), and a bit too vulgar to my taste, yes.
I like something Stephen King said in the foreword to “Four Past Midnight” – he said a lot of fans wrote to him, saying they loved 3 of the stories, but they didn’t like the fourth one. His point was, the fans all chose a different story which they didn’t like – choices were evenly scattered across all four stories. Different people like different stories.
If you’re going to read from the sampler of Fallen Angels, go directly to Chapter 7: “Black Powder and Alcohol,” in which the authors have a gathering of science fiction fen discussing the knowledge base regarding solar physics and the genuine drivers of terrestrial climate change at the time of the novel’s publication.
The characters in that chapter, by the way, are thinly-disguised versions of real science fiction fen, and the dialogue is very much a reflection of how SF fen at conventions and other gatherings – even in California – were discussing the great preposterous “Man-Made Global Warming” hokum in the late ’80s.
Skeptics, almost every one of us.
go directly to Chapter 7: “Black Powder and Alcohol,”
Gregory Lutenist was based on George Harper, and an article he wrote for ANALOG SF&F (Oct 86) entitled “A Little More Pollution, Please”
In “The Legacy of Heorot”, Niven and Pournelle were trying to answer the question
“What comes after mammals?”. Science fiction author Poul Anderson once asked editor John Campbell this question, and Campbell replied, “man”.
Anderson stated that men are mammals. There are fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals here on earth. What new class of creatures could have evolved on other planets?
After reading Robert Bakker’s books, I’d say, birds and dinosaurs, but Campbell’s answer was
a creature than can, release a chemical supercharger into its blood that does to it what nitrous oxide does to internal combustion engines – enable short excess energy bursts. That’s what was introduced in “Heorot”, a new class of creatures smarter than, and able to make use of more energy, than mammals.
.
Philip Peake says:
June 22, 2013 at 6:04 pm
Sorry, I have to correct you.
GNU is the toolchain – userspace utilities, gcc compiler and so forth. The OS that Stallman was (and still is) working on was GNU-Mach, based on the Mach kernel and using the GNU toolchain to provide a complete OS. Mach is still being worked on and is technologically very interesting, but it hasn’t garnered the same interest as Linux because it wasn’t in a sufficiently usable state when Linus released his baby to the world.
Linux, as you presumably know, is a kernel. With very few exceptions all Linux-based OSen use the GNU toolchain and userspace utils, with various technologies laid on top for fancy user interface.
And yes, Linux has trashed Microsoft. Whilst they may dominate the home-user and business desktop computer market, they are a bit-player where it really matters in middleware, data-centre and fat servers a step below big iron. Linux-based OSes, the BSDs, Solaris and old-fashioned Unix compete in this space and it is a trillion dollar market worldwide. Linux-based OS are eating Unix alive here while MS doesn’t even get a look-in.
Then there’s the mobile space, where the biggest players are Android (linux kernel, GNU userspace, fancy user-interface), iOS (based on a BSD operating system) and Nokia’s old Symbian. Windows phone is a bit-player yet again and is not making significant gains in the market.
And don’t even bother looking at the embedded space. You don’t find an MS logo anywhere.
All of this because of the licensing scheme Linux and the GNU toolchain use, which significantly reduces the initial and ongoing costs for providers and developers alike.
Microsoft are very visible and they make a nice, steady income from their established Office-productivity and business desktop market, but they are not growing in any real sense, nor are they able to reliably enter new markets without making some huge failure-guaranteeing cock-up along the way. They’re trying to force increased revenue from a static or shrinking market by shifting to a rent-based licensing scheme (along with a lot of other folk, it has to be said). Finally, the market they rely is shrinking because of a shift in use patterns and a slow but steady nibbling-at-the-edges by Linux based OSen.
So I’d say linux is very effectively trashing Microsoft. It just doesn’t look like it because it’s all beneath the surface. Rather like termites in a house.
theofloinn says:
June 22, 2013 at 8:28 pm
how does one write a novel with three authors?
Superbly.
——————-
A Michael Flynn sighting on WUWT. Awesome!!
Jerry Pournelle story: Many years ago I had an opportunity to spend some time with him. I ran a charitable organization that had booked him as a speaker. I picked him up at the airport, and drove him around to various radio interviews and engagements. One of those engagements was a tour of a brand-spanking-new multi-disciplinary research facility at a major midwest university. He personally knew several of the researchers there, and they were all to happy to show their wares, which was very cool. However, the sniveling and brown-nosing of the administrator (a person of no small reputation himself) was comical bordering on embarrassing. “If you talk to Newt, put in a good word for us.” Sure, you betcha.
My favorite part of the whole experience was the way he would, when introduced to a woman, take and kiss her hand, and in his south Louisiana accent, drawl “a pleasure to meet you.” What a masher.
A Michael Flynn sighting on WUWT. Awesome!!
I felt a disturbance in the Force.
+ + +
Oddly, I never actually met Jerry until after Fallen Angels was written. I was living in New Jersey at the time. The whole thing was done by electronic computing machines linked by X-modem; perhaps the first transcontinental electronic SF composition. It was complicated by an incompatibility between my Apple II and N+P’s DOS-boxes, solved by the late Jim Baen who received my drafts by modem, translated them into Window-ish stuff, and sent them off again by modem to sunny California. How did people live like that?
Then I found myself in LA on a statistical consulting gig and we got together for dinner. As I was sitting down, Larry (whom I had met, twice before) turned to Jerry and said, “Mike tells funny stories.” Then he turned to me and said, “Tell funny stories.” That sort of thing is guaranteed to make the mind turn blank, let me tell you.
I believe that was the time that Jerry tried to kill me, which he did by getting behind the wheel of his new car and saying, :”Want to see what this baby will do?”
@The Ofloinn
I don’t know that this is quite true. In 1983/4, I helped set up the link between Arthur Clarke in Sri Lanka and his Hollywood editors (they probably considered themselves co-authors). But only Sir Arthur (appropriately) was credited with the resulting work — the screenplay for 2010: The Year We Made Contact. Crude modems indeed! But they worked.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
At 1101 AM on 24 June, Keith DeHavelle had remarked:
Clarke was making use of a Kaypro CP/M machine at that time. He could certainly have turned out the work as plain ASCII text files readily amenable to assimilation by any DOS box then extant.
I mean, it wasn’t as if he’d been using a – blecch! Apple ][, right?
@Tucci78
Well, I was interested in the Lisa around that time — but could not justify the $10,000 price tag. (I wound up getting a Molecular as the main office rig. My staff were always amused that you could shut off the entire multi-user system by typing “down” but could not later type “up.”)
As for this project, indeed, it was a Kaypro bought (I was told) from one of my clients at the time, a computer store in Los Angeles called Pathfinder. Long gone, of course. But sadly, so is Sir Arthur.
I’m glad we could do the 2001 tribute in 2001, while he was still with us. But I had been deeply saddened at Robert Heinlein’s passing, and raise a glass now to toast the fact that extraordinary world-builders such as Niven, Pournelle and Flynn are still with us. They’ve inspired my own modest efforts in that direction.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
At 9:00 PM on 24 June, Keith DeHavelle had written of the early ’80s:
That’s 1980s dollars, too – which kinda oughtta give some idea of why I’ve always maintained a hard hatred of Apple. Beaucoup more bucks for capabilities that at the time cranked along for most users just fine under CP/M on a Zilog Z-80 chip originally designed for running stoplights at traffic intersections.
And doing it much less expensively.
Regarding Arthur C. Clarke, well…. I’d never interacted with him beyond reading his stuff, but I’m not quite so fond of the guy’s output owing to the political dispositions manifesting in his fiction.
Ingenious gadget guy on the nuts-and-bolts side, but insufficiently perceptive – and therefore vigilantly critical – as regards the bureaucratic imperative, and when the gosh-wow-ness of the gadgetry fades with time, what you’re left with in any work of speculative fiction is the human story, with all the reflections of the author’s worldview regarding affairs among people.
I couldn’t agree more. Also must note, sadly, that Jack Vance died on May 26th, still unrecognized as one of the greats of 20th-century literature, but that will surely change. RIP.
http://jackvance.com
/Mr Lynn
***
Alex Pournelle says:
June 22, 2013 at 11:35 pm
or how Dad’s best solo work (in my not so humble opinion) is also his shortest, most heartfelt and least political.
***
Which one was that?
Read & enjoyed most of your dad’s work…
Tucci78 That discussion may very well be authentic for science fiction fen, just don’t mistake it as being relevant for what scientists thought at the time.
Regarding my discussion of how Chapter 7 of Fallen Angels had reflected the attitude of most SF fen in the late 1980s with regard to the AGW hoax, at 8:39 AM on 23 June, Thomas had commented:
Define “scientists,” please. In my experience, the scientists who had honestly and scrupulously considered the CO2 “forcing” mechanism upon which the warmist charlatans were caterwauling their predictions of catastrophe had come to the conclusion that this yammer was nothing more than purest hokum.
I got my first information on this subject in 1981, by way of correspondence with Petr Beckmann, who was then publishing the newsletter Access to Energy, and through Dr. Beckmann I was introduced to numerous scientists – real scientists – who scoffed at the blithering idiocy of what their professional societies would come later to uncritically accept as “orthodoxy” on the subjects of the global climate and man’s ability to significantly affect it.
The plain fact of the matter is that academic “Big Science” research is utterly dependent upon government grants-in-aid, and when it became clear that the politicians were not funding anyone who didn’t kowtow to this preposterous “man-made global warming” bogosity, the policy among the scientific organizations – not scientists themselves – surrendered to the corruption.
Have a look at Ian McEwan’s Solar http://www.amazon.com/Solar-Ian-McEwan/dp/B006QS132Y. Great satire
Starswarm is my Dad’s favorite solo work.
Tucci78, Beckmann was an excellent man, a delightful instructor, and a terrible punster. He taught my introductory circuit analysis course waaaay back in the dark ages, ’78 or ’79. Shamelessly sucking up, I brought a copy of _The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear_ to class and casually laid it down on my desk. He saw it and said, “Hmmm, good book.”
At 11:31 AM on 23 June, Doug Jones had written:
1977 or ’78 was about when I’d first read The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, and became a subscriber to Access to Energy. Personal correspondence followed not long thereafter, and I recall Dr. Beckmann sounding me from time to time for some clarification on the various aspects of his medical conditions.
Not that I was able to help much. I’m a general practitioner, not someone comparable in experience or fund of knowledge to the particular specialists attending his medical and surgical management. But he didn’t hesitate to make use of whatever resources he found among his circle of friends and acquaintances.
Back in the pre-WWW days, Dr. Beckmann ran a dial-in bulletin board system (BBS) called “Fort Freedom,” a 1989 capture of which is presently available on the Web at FortFreedom.org, and this mirror includes some (but not by any means all) of the materials he’d harvested from other correspondents regarding the preceding years of the AGW fraud. Dr. Beckmann paid a great deal more attention to this Watermelon bogosity in the interval between 1988 and his death in 1993, and if you’re familiar with his style in person, you’ll have no difficulty imagining the vitriol that surged merrily from his typewriter in the letters I’d received from him.
He despised the cadre of conniving quacks who were circle-jerking this abomination into both the formerly scientific literature and the thuggish policies of government, and in addition to those who knew of his interest in the subject sending along to him what news could be gathered, he didn’t hesitate to flip through his Rolodex to get amplification and clarification on the subject from correspondents who were experienced experts in the field of climatology.
A man of eloquence and vehemence, and a pleasure to know.
Tucci78, Petr Beckmann wasn’t a climate scientist but an electrical engineer. He may have had his ideas about climate change and how the theory of relativity was all wrong, but that was on a strict amateur basis. You are just another of the conspiracy theory bunch here, I’m afraid, and as such I guess science fiction suits you better than facts. (Nothing wrong with science fiction, but it is fiction, not something you should get your facts from).
At 11:41 AM on 23 June, Thomas perpetrates the logical fallacy argumentum ad hominem (“attack against the man”) not once but twice, posting:
In the post of mine to which Thomas is making this logic-bereft non-reply, I’d spoken of Dr. Beckmann only as the correspondent who, in 1981, had first brought to my attention the then-nascent but manifestly ludicrous pseudoscience of “man-made global warming,” and through whose good offices I later gained access to other sources of information, including the publications and other writings of scientists more than adequately qualified to critique the dubious methodologies, the absence of evidence, and the strained, staggering, unsupported conclusions to be found in the papers and assertions of the conniving “consensus” cabal who came to be exposed so spectacularly in the initial Climategate release (17 November 2009).
Thomas‘ rant about how Dr. Beckmann “wasn’t a climate scientist but an electrical engineer” (actually a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado) appears purposefully to evade the fact that one does not have to be a specialist in a particular scientific discipline in order to be able to critique the presentation of work in disparate areas of scientific inquiry, particularly in terms of adherence to – or, with regard to the warmist charlatans, deviation from – standards of sound methodology in both investigation and publication.
To draw on a couple of aphorisms, one doesn’t have to be a poultryman to tell when an egg is rotten – and one doesn’t have to eat the whole frelkin’ egg to remark on its rottenness, either.
Then there’s the attack on science fiction fen (and those of my acquaintance will doubtless be flattered no end to be termed members of “the conspiracy theory bunch here” by someone like Thomas, who is so obviously a friggin’ mundane) for their interest in a genre – a literature of ideas – which appeals to the intellect among a dedicated readership which has been averaging higher levels of scientific literacy than the ruck and muck for at least a century now.
Hm. Alex Pournelle is frequenting this discussion. I wonder how his dad – not to mention Mr. Niven and a few other SFWA members – might respond to Thomas‘ cement-headed scorn?
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle although great in concert are best as sole authors in my opinion.
Larry Niven’s Known Space series is as seminal as Robert Heinlein’s future history series and more complex and interesting. Jerry Pournelle’s Codominium series is equally far reaching and ranks with the best of Military Science Fiction i.e. David Drake, Gorden Dickinson, David Weber etc.
At 1:34 PM on 23 June, Katana had written:
I’m inclined to agree with you, having followed both writers’ careers from their initial appearances in the SF magazines (and Dr. Pournelle’s article on the Nomonhan Incident in a wargaming periodical), but they seem to do well bouncing ideas off each other, and they definitely don’t lose strength or focus when working in collaboration – as I’d originally feared they might.
Given that productivity is a blessing (“Quantity has a quality all its own”), I’d long since come to the conclusion that if working together gave Pournelle and Niven cause to crank out more fiction than would otherwise have been the case, I’d settle back and take what came.
I haven’t been disappointed yet.