Table of Contents

- Beamed Energy for Space Exploration: Giant Leap or Incremental Steps?

- The Bridge of Sighs: Are We What Might Have Been?

- Notes on the Carreraverse (A Concordance, More or Less), Part 1

- Space Pirates!

Baen Books

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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Beamed Energy for Space Exploration: Giant Leap or Incremental Steps © 2020 by Les Johnson

The Bridge of Sighs: Are We What Might Have Been? © 2020 by Robert E. Furey

Notes on the Carreraverse (A Concordance, More or Less), Part 1 © 2020 by Tom Kratman

Space Pirates! © 2020 by Mark Lardas

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Beamed Energy for Space Exploration: Giant Leap or Incremental Steps?

Les Johnson

The countdown was going according to plan, which shouldn’t be unusual, but Elaine had been involved in too many space projects to believe that any countdown, no matter how well the engineers planned, could proceed to launch without a hitch on the first try. But she had to admit, this one was going very smoothly.

Elaine scanned the status displays and saw that the first twenty chipsats were deployed from the seeder ship with their 10-square feet reflective graphene sails fully unfurled. Each of the tiny chipsats weighed less than a gram, about the same as a dollar bill. Each sail was attached by three tiny buckytubes that, if all went well, would soon be pushed to the limits of what materials science could do to protect them from the hellish environment that was about to be unleashed upon them.

When the countdown clock reached zero, a series of events beginning in the Andes mountains would send the chipsats on their way to a flyby of the Alpha Centauri star system in about twenty-five years—on the scale of true interstellar travel, this was practically the next day.

She began to sweat. She knew it was nerves, because the temperature in her control room always seemed to be kept just barely warm enough to prevent ice from thawing. That, of course, was an exaggeration, but the rooms in the building always seemed cold to her no matter what the weather outside was doing. She kept a portable heater under her desk that she sometimes had to use in the middle of the summer—Atlanta air conditioning at its energy efficient finest. She was just nervous. Propelling the spacecraft from Earth orbit to Alpha Centauri was her responsibility and the last ten years of her life culminated here. Now.

Soon, the phased-array, solid-state lasers sitting atop a mountain in the Andes would tap into a huge supercapacitor battery for power, unleashing a one hundred-billion-watt continuous laser beam into space. The beam would be directed to hit the first chipsat’s sail, designed to reflect nearly all the light energy falling upon it. It had to be as close to one hundred percent reflective for two main reasons: To maximize the thrust produced by the reflected light and to prevent the sail from absorbing too much energy and vaporizing. Any light not reflected or transmitted by the sail would be absorbed by it, and that would be a problem.

The laser light would continue to impinge the sail for several minutes, accelerating it at over sixty-thousand gees until it reached the phenomenal speed of twenty percent the speed of light. After that, it would illuminate the next one and the one after, repeating the process until all were on their way. The chipsats would coast the rest of the way to Alpha Centauri where they would use their tiny onboard cameras to take high-resolution pictures of the planets there and then send the images back to Earth for analysis.

Building a fully functional spacecraft on a chip was as large a challenge as building the propulsion system. Elaine was thankful she was “only” responsible for the laser sail propulsion system. There was another team that worked on the chipsats, extracting one engineering miracle after another as the design proceeded.

Thankfully, the clock reached zero without a hitch, and the artificial intelligence started the launch process, controlling the whole system—coordinating the dance of the chipsats with the laser and sending them on their way.

Humanity was sending its first probes to the stars and Elaine was part of it. She smiled and, for a moment, felt immortal.

-----

Breakthrough Starshot

The Breakthrough Initiatives, founded by billionaire Yuri Milner, is all about giant leaps in space exploration and trying to foster the next one. Among their many initiatives is also perhaps the most audacious in recent memory, Starshot. Starshot “is a $100 million research and engineering program aiming to demonstrate proof of concept for a new technology, enabling ultra-light unmanned space flight at 20 percent of the speed of light; and to lay the foundations for a flyby mission to Alpha Centauri within a generation.”[i]

Given the distances involved, sending a spacecraft outward at twenty percent of the speed of light is a great idea since it would reduce the trip time to our nearest star from over seventy thousand years (for a spacecraft propelled by chemical rockets) to less than twenty five-years. How do they propose to achieve this feat?

Starshot is all about power beaming. An originator of the Starshot idea is Dr. Philip Lubin, a professor at The University of California in Santa Barbara. His analysis shows that a small spacecraft can be accelerated to these extremely high speeds using high energy lasers and highly reflective light sails.ii (Figure 1)

While no known laws of physics are violated in this approach, the engineering challenges are daunting:

- The spacecraft, with all its controls systems, power, communications, and scientific instruments to study the new solar system when it arrives, must weigh about a gram.

- The lasers needed to generate enough light pressure required to send the spacecraft on its way have to be many orders of magnitude larger than any available today—with output powers of hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts or more.

- The laser light needs to reflect from a sail for all this energy to be transferred to the spacecraft. (Technically it is the momentum transfer from the reflected light that propels the sail—light does not have rest mass, but it does have momentum.) The sail, while not physically large, would have to reflect nearly all the incident billions of watts of power and absorb nearly none. As of this writing, no known material can sustain this sort of energy loading and survive.

- Assuming the above three elements are developed successfully, the laser-accelerated spacecraft would then fly through the target solar system at 20 percent the speed of light since it will be unable to slow down. All scientific data will have to be taken during the fast flyby and then have the data somehow transmitted back home from across the gulf between the stars—another seemingly unsolvable (at least for now) problem.

Figure 1. In Starshot, giant lasers on Earth would illuminate a highly reflective sail in near-Earth space and use the momentum of the reflected light to send very small spaceships toward another star system at twenty percent the speed of light. (Image courtesy of Breakthrough Initiatives.)

To meet these engineering challenges, Breakthrough Initiatives is spending about $100 million dollars for research and development in all these categories and others, seeking the technologies that will be needed to achieve the giant leap that is Starshot. Will they be successful? No one knows, but it is certainly worth trying.

An early success of Starshot has nothing directly to do with the actual project at all—it is the idea of Starshot. With the prospect of getting money (“research funding” for those who are hesitant to be blunt and say they are motivated by money), many are putting forward creative ideas of how beamed energy for power and propulsion might benefit space exploration and development—even if the capabilities are far short of those required for Starshot. The prospects are . . . promising. And all, from the point of view of investment, pacing and utility are more incremental steps than “giant leaps.”

Laser Communications

Guglielmo Marconi would be proud. The Italian inventor credited with developing the world’s first radio and for broadcasting in 1901 the first transatlantic radio signal, would undoubtedly be impressed with how far we’ve come with radio and wireless technology. From television and FM radio to two-thirds of the human population having a cellular phone, his invention has been a resounding success. Equally impressive has been the application of radio to space exploration. As our robotic emissaries journey far from home in the outermost reaches of the solar system and beyond, they send their data back home to Earth using variations of the same technology Marconi invented.

But there is a problem. Radio is essentially omnidirectional, with nearly all the power used to create the signal being lost by radiating in all directions. This can be useful for a local television or radio station that wants to blanket its service area with signals to be accessed by anyone, anywhere, anytime. But when trying to communicate with a single spacecraft many millions or billions of miles from home in the near emptiness of deep space, wasting most of the energy by broadcasting in all directions is, well, wasteful. Granted, we can do better than send the radio energy off in all directions—antennas can be somewhat directional, sending a signal outward to something in one general direction and not another. At our most creative, we can narrow the broadcast beam to something under a few degrees of sky, which sounds impressive, until you consider the distance the signal has to travel and how much the beam of radio energy will spread out while crossing that distance according to the inverse square law as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2. The inverse square law describes how the intensity of light decreases with distance. Applied to laser sailing, it means that the intensity of the laser light falling on the sail drops to ¼ its initial value if the distance is doubled; 1/9 if the distance is tripled; etc. (Image courtesy of Borb)

Thanks to the inverse square law, our narrow radio beam will drop off in strength rapidly as the distance increases—double the distance and have only one fourth the initial power; quadruple the distance and the power there is 1/16 of its initial strength. For example, the radio on the most distant spacecraft yet launched, Voyager 1, has an output power of 23 Watts. The strength of the signal received at Earth from the spacecraft, now at about fourteen billion miles, is measured in attowatts, or billionths of a billionth of a watt. This is a ridiculously weak signal and very hard to detect.

With the advent of optical communications, the situation can get much better. We haven’t solved the inverse square law problem completely, but it can be managed. Instead of a wide area broadcast of radio waves, in-space optical communications systems use lasers and telescopes to efficiently communicate across astronomical distances. Lasers, as popularized, appear to be the perfect medium for transmitting information across long distances—and they are, to a point.

The concept is simple. The data is encoded in a laser beam and shot toward the receiver, either on a repeater spacecraft in deep space or on the ground. The receiver detects the tightly focused beam of light and converts the optical signal into useful data. In the ideal case, the complete energy of the transmitted beam is received and processed. This assumes, of course, that the transmitter knows exactly where the receiver will be when the light arrives. Remember that in space, everything is moving relative to everything else and the distances are so great, it can be minutes to several hours after a transmission is sent before it reaches its destination since the signal is limited to traveling at or below the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

In an ideal world, the biggest challenge would be to know exactly where you are pointing the laser and when to point it.

But we don’t live in an ideal world and there are other problems. Lasers, like all other sources of electromagnetic energy, are subject to the inverse square law. (Just because lasers operate in optical frequencies and not radio doesn’t make them exempt!) That means the light coming from the laser source immediately begins to diverge and weaken as the inverse square of the distance. But since the initial diffraction of the laser beam can be made relatively small, little or none of the energy used to transmit the beam is wasted sending electromagnetic energy in directions other than those of direct interest and within the pointing capabilities of the transmitter. So, the laser beam may spread out and provide a weaker signal, but it starts with more directed energy than its radio counterpart and is therefore able to efficiently transmit over much larger distances. Some of the beam divergence, causing a weaker signal, may be overcome by adding a telescope at the receiver—collecting photons of laser light and concentrating them onto a focal plane for counting and decoding.

Laser optical communication has been tested in deep space by NASA and is expected to be used on more and more missions in the years to come.

Space Based Solar Power from Power Beaming

Wireless power transmission is becoming commonplace. Every night, I charge my cell phone by placing it on top of a wireless charger and when I awaken the next morning, the phone is charged—no wires were ever connected to it. This type of near-field wireless power transfer uses magnetic fields and is very limited in range.

Beaming power over long distances, like from the Earth to the sail, requires very high frequency radio or light, such as masers or lasers. Laser power beaming takes advantage of recent breakthroughs in the development of high-power lasers to turn electrical power into laser light. Collimated laser beams can traverse large distances, keeping more power on the desired location or target at greater distances. (Though they are still subject to that darned inverse square law.) Using a photovoltaic cell tuned to be most efficient at the wavelength of the laser being used, one can then convert the energy in the laser beam back into electrical power for use where it is needed.

In principle, power beaming should be able to be used anywhere electrical power is abundant to send that power where it is needed.

There have been many studies over the years of how plentiful electrical power can be sent to the surface of the Earth from space-based solar arrays, providing green energy anywhere on the planet, all the time. Therefore, rather than going into too much detail, I will refer you to these sources for more information:

- The Case for Space Solar Power by John Mankins (Virginia Edition Publishing, 2014)

- Sky’s No Limit: Space-Based Solar Power, the Next Major Step in the Indo-US Strategic Partnership by Peter A. Garretson. Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi.

When thinking about space based solar power, a salient figure of merit to remember is 600 Megawatts (600 million watts). This is the amount of power generated by a typical coal fired power plant that we would want to replace with a space-based solar power station.

Beamed Power for Lunar Bases

If we are ever going to have a permanently occupied base on the Moon, then we need to solve the power problem. Keeping people alive and functioning in the harsh lunar environment, especially the harsh temperature variations between the very hot lunar day (212 degrees F) and the unbelievably cold lunar night (-279 degrees F), will require electrical power and lots of it.

During the lunar day (14 Earth days), it is conceptually simple to deploy solar arrays to generate the estimated 35 kilowatts of continuous power required by an early, permanently occupied, lunar base. Unfortunately, generating this level of power during the lunar night (also 14 Earth days) is not going to be easy. Most lunar base studies solve this problem by advocating the development of space-qualified nuclear reactors and power plants to generate the needed energy or they locate the base at the only place on the Moon that has access to continuous sunlight for power generation—the lunar south pole. If you want to have the flexibility of placing your base, hotel, or other habitat anywhere on the Moon, then you need another option. Fortunately, there is one—place a space-based solar power station in lunar orbit to beam the needed energy to the base.

Using an orbiting space based solar power station to generate electrical power and beam it to a base sited anywhere on the Moon is a near-term option that should be considered. The technology to collect sunlight, generate greater than the estimated 35 kilowatts of required power, and beam it to the surface of the Moon using microwaves or lasers is available today. Furthermore, since the amount of needed power is relatively low compared to that required for a terrestrial space-based solar power station (thirty-five thousand watts versus six hundred million), such a station can be built and launched to a suitable lunar orbit by one flight of NASA’s Space Launch System or a multiple commercial rockets.iii

Having a lunar space-based solar power station providing continuous, “green” power to astronauts on the Moon could be a steppingstone, or proof of principle, toward developing much larger systems for use at Earth.

Beamed Power for Robotic Exploration

We humans are pretty good at powering our robotic spacecraft near the sun. The size, efficiency, and overall capability of solar photovoltaic cells to generate electrical power from sunlight continue to increase, allowing missions to carry more powerful instruments or more capable propulsion systems, many of which use highly efficient solar electric propulsion.

Solar electric propulsion (SEP) is a type of space propulsion that takes electrical power to accelerate a propellant using electrical and/or magnetic fields. Unlike chemical systems, SEP systems require very little mass to accelerate their spacecraft. The propellant is accelerated to speeds ten to twenty times faster than from a chemical rocket and therefore the overall system is many times more mass efficient. NASA, the European Space Agency, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, and others routinely use SEP systems for missions in the inner solar system and out to Jupiter (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Electric propulsion is real and has been used on multiple space missions. Shown here is an electric thruster being tested at the NASA Glenn Research Center. Yes, when operating, some electric thrusters have that science-fictional blue glow . . . (Image courtesy of NASA.)

Beyond Jupiter, SEP systems aren’t nearly so useful because of the rapid loss in sunlight falling on the solar panels to provide power for the spacecraft. This is due to that pesky inverse square law which says that a spacecraft solar panel operating at Jupiter will produce only 4 percent the power it would at Earth. (Jupiter is approximately five times further from the sun than the Earth; 1/5^2 = 1/25 = 4 percent the power generated at Earth from a spacecraft’s solar panels operating there.)

Engineers and scientists are today building very large, lightweight solar sailsiv that can be scaled in size to be several hundred square feet in area—allowing them to be covered in solar cells might allow these large solar collectors to generate a lot of power in the inner solar system and barely enough power in the outer solar system where sunlight is dim. If, however, a near-Earth-based laser illuminates the array in deep space, it is possible that far more power could be beamed to and used by the target spacecraft, providing both power and solar electric propulsion.

In a future envisioned by visionary Dr. John Brophy at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a multi-hundred-megawatt laser would be used to transmit power to a spacecraft that converts the beamed energy back into electrical power for use by an electric propulsion system, accelerating the craft to speeds sufficient to reach nearby interstellar space within a human lifetime—up to five times faster than Voyager.[v] (Unfortunately, this is still woefully short of what we need to reach another star—but it would be a step!)

Once we have this capability, it would be a relatively simple step to extend its use to rapidly and efficiently propel spacecraft, mostly uncrewed, throughout the solar system. A steady stream of supplies aboard laser-beamed energy cargo ships using highly efficient electric propulsion systems might traverse the routes between Earth and Mars. Robotic mining ships could be sent throughout the asteroid belt prospecting for whatever materials our future solar system-wide civilization might need. As on Earth, abundant, low-cost power is a key ingredient to successful economic growth—why should this be any different in deep space?

Giant Leap or Incremental Steps?

Progress in space exploration and development used to come in “giant leaps.” Neil Armstrong’s “one giant leap for mankind” is perhaps the most well-known leap. As Armstrong stepped on the Moon for the first time, he was the living fulfillment of a decade-long endeavor that took us from barely being able send someone into space all the way to sending multiple people to the Moon and back again. In 1977 the Voyager spacecraft were launched, taking us on a leap that gave us our first closeup looks at Jupiter and the planets beyond. Since then, we’ve achieved significant milestones of exploration and science, but, sadly, they’ve come at a much slower pace and few, if any, have achieved the status of being a giant leap. And that might not be a bad thing.

Giant leaps tend to be expensive and take many years to develop, fly, and achieve their goals—leaving them open to the vagaries of politics, changes in the economy, and the whims of those who fund them. So, what about the alternative? Is the incremental approach better or at least more sustainable?

Consider Telstar. In 1962, NASA launched Telstar 1, the world’s first real telecommunications satellite. In its meager seven-month life, it broadcast the first live television images between the United States and Europe, showing the benefit of space for providing global communications. While the high-visibility Space Race raged on, private companies began developing more and more sophisticated communications satellites and began launching them into space. Today, space-based telecommunications networks from many countries and companies span the globe and form the basis of a greater than $240B annual economy.vi This is hugely significant, yet almost no one can tell you much about it, how it got there, or when the tipping point was reached at which space-based communications became an integral part of the global economy—demonstrating space development incrementalism at its finest.

The same may be said of the robotic exploration of Mars. We launched the twin Viking landers to Mars in the mid-1970s and, by all measures, they were hugely successful in achieving their scientific objectives. Yet we didn’t go back to the surface of Mars for over 20 years. In 1996 the much-smaller Pathfinder rover launched for the red planet and ushered in a new era of smaller, and ever-more-capable rovers and orbiters being dispatched to Mars, resulting in our current “fleet” of more than six active Mars spacecraft. We are launching a new mission to Mars at a rate of approximately one every two years, a trend that is likely to continue—and is yet another example of successful space incrementalism.

Thus, it may be better to take the incremental approach to space development, with each achievement building upon the successes of those that came before, so that a truly usable new space capability can be not only developed and used but sustained.

Beamed energy for spacecraft propulsion and power might just be the technological path that provides a growing infrastructure for the space exploration and development that many have envisioned since the dawn of the space age. As space science, exploration, development, and settlement advocates, we should applaud grand efforts like Starshot and wish them success. But the incrementalists among us are likely to be the primary benefactors of their efforts. If Starshot is only ten percent successful, then the technologies developed and proven will dramatically expand our capabilities in space and begin to give us the solar system wide civilization that may be a necessary next step before we are truly ready to travel to the stars.

[i] https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/about

ii A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight, Philip Lubin, JBIS, Vol. 69, pp.40-72, 2016

iii Orbital Space Solar Power Option for a Lunar Village, Les Johnson, IAA Symposium on the Future of Space Exploration, 2017

iv https://www.nasa.gov/content/nea-scout

[v] A Breakthrough Propulsion Architecture for Interstellar Precursor Missions: NASA NIAC Phase I Final Report, Brophy, John, James Polk, Leon Alkalai, Bill Nesmith, Jonathan Grandidier, and Philip Lubin, 2018

vi According to the Survey of Current Business, the Journal of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the global space economy in 2018 was $414.8B, of which 58 percent was consumer services—primarily telecommunications related. https://apps.bea.gov/scb/2019/12-december/1219-commercial-space.htm

* * *

Les Johnson is a husband, father, NASA physicist, and author. Publishers Weekly noted that “The spirit of Arthur C. Clarke and his contemporaries is alive and well . . .” when describing his 2018 novel, Mission to Methone. His 2018 non-fiction book (with co-author, Joe Meany, Graphene: The Superstrong, Superthin, and Superversatile Material That Will Revolutionize the World was reviewed in the journal Nature, excerpted in American Scientist and on Salon.com. His latest anthology, Stellaris: People of the Stars, coedited with Robert Hampson, was released by Baen Books in 2019. You may learn more about Les on his website: www.lesjohnsonauthor.com

The Bridge of Sighs: Are We What Might Have Been?

Robert E. Furey

Nick Bostrom's trilemma and Simulation Argument

1) "The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero", or

2) "The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero", or

3) "The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.”

An Existential Conundrum

A short while ago someone suggested that I might be virtual, a computer-generated being inhabiting a computer-generated universe. This guy was from Oxford, so I figured I’d have to give the idea a little thought. And after a little thought I decided he was wrong. And that was after only a little thought.

Before we continue it’s probably a good idea to make sure we’re all starting from the same point. What is the argument implying that you, me, and everyone else you have ever known are virtual beings in a virtual world? Without getting lost in the void between the Simulation Argument’s trilemma, and the Simulation Hypothesis which states that we are virtual, the take-home message is that since all civilizations will eventually run what Nick Bostrom calls Ancestor Simulations, we are most likely living in one now. The reasoning is simple. Simulations are perfect models of the real world; the inhabitants will eventually discover how to run their own simulations. Those simulations, in turn, will learn to build their own as well. Soon, in a Ponzi scheme of each individual simulation building many simulations, the number of sentient creatures that are living their lives inside a simulation will far outnumber those that are in physical reality. Therefore, probability has its thumb pressing the virtual side of the balance and therefore most beings are such, you are most likely such.

The reason why I quickly concluded he was wrong came down to one mind-bogglingly simplistic fact. To me, a fact that all of the logical square dancing could not do-si-do around. I took my epiphany with cheer—I don’t want to be virtual—and decided to share my relief with a few people who could appreciate the simplicity of my argument.

When I approached others with my insight the responses were both mixed and of a kind. For example, I spoke with a brain physiologist, an autodidact, and an astrophysicist. From the first, I heard that the complexity of chemical interactions in the brain could not be modeled, and from the second that consciousness existed in the random quantum effects skittering along dendrites. Since we know chemical reactions can be modeled, I dismissed the “it’s too hard” argument simply as a matter of scale. As for random quantum effects, I discounted that one given a lack of meaningful evidence. It’s a pretty guess, but little more than that. Later, when I asked the astrophysicist, the first response was a dismissive “pshaw” which led to a more elaborate, “Because! Don’t waste your time.”

None of my consultants even got to my own reason, which in my mind was by far the Occam’s razoriest of them all (with the possible exception of “Pshaw. Because!”). My issue with the Simulation Argument is a simple one, an infinite and expanding regress of Matryoshka virtualities would require an infinite amount of computer bandwidth and processing power. And infinity just cannot be. Voila. I am real.

Nick Bostrom addressed the possibility of an infinite universe and the ramifications of such a thing on his Simulation Argument. His retort to an “infinite universe” problem is limited to the effect on ratios of real, or physical, creatures and simulated ones. In an infinite universe there would be an infinite number of both physical and virtual creatures and so numbers get whacked fairly quickly. No longer can we postulate a preponderance of virtual folks in the face of infinity. If the universe is infinite, then your probability of being virtual falls to fifty percent.

To me, the problem of infinity was not in the ratio demographics of its denizens, but in the limitless requirements of computing power necessary for an infinity of nested infinities. The infinite universe problem effects numbers and muddies the water for the Simulation Argument for denizen ratios, but exacerbates the problem for bandwidth, or at least seems to almost to the point of eliminating the possibility of a simulation framework entirely. I will not consider the possibility of an infinite universe since it is incompatible with our current understanding of the world and would alone eliminate the need for any further discussion.

Since writing an essay needs to be more than a few words hooked into one short phrase hinging on a single word, “infinity,” I needed to get a better grip on how computer power is used. After some time, and then after a little more time, I collected and quietly processed the accessible information available before leaning back in my brown leather office chair and muttering a long, drawn-out, “Well, fuck me.” Because guess what, I’m not so sure you and I aren’t virtual after all.

First of all, we need to look at the building blocks of what would be, when snapped together like a box full of jigsaw puzzle pieces, an ancestor simulation as Dr. Bostrom defines it. What we need to see are the makings of a world with some minimum level of complexity such that the denizens to be found therein have things to do. And to be sure, some level of autonomy and free will, or what would be the purpose of launching a “What if?” simulation in the first place? But listen, here is what we are doing.

Just to be clear, no one is developing ancestor simulations right now. At least no one has openly announced anything like that. What we are doing is working on a myriad of other projects that could be coupled one to the other into a larger model with the emergent properties needed to launch a meaningful ancestor simulation. Not all of the efforts are directed ones, some of the preparation is random.

As I pen these words, I am sitting in the Plaza de Colón at the foot of a statue honoring Christopher Columbus, shadowed by the ramparts of Castillo San Cristobal. This is a busy place of heavy tourist traffic, each and every one equipped with smartphones and digital cameras uplinked to the cloud. A steady stream of photos and video flows away to wirelessly linked bins of visual and auditory information. The Plaza de Colón, and probably much of Old San Juan, has been recorded for sights and sounds from so many points and moments that most of San Juan could be reliably reproduced in virtual. What has not been directly recorded could be extrapolated without any meaningful alteration to the city’s gestalt.

Already, even if yet fractured, San Juan exists in shards around the internet. Currently, I’m background in a few tourists’ photographs and exist as a passing bit of information in someone else’s panoramic video sweep as I scribble into my field notebook. My conversations at the base of the statue have been folded in with the drone of background noise, as is every other person’s here, just waiting to be extracted from the general hum and bustle. For a hundred years, a thousand years, these data will rest scattered through cyberspace awaiting something with enough need or interest to pull together a dynamic image of early 21st century San Juan.

But these data from San Juan are random and raw. Other data of interest to us here are generated, nonrandomized and purposefully sought after. Simulations in their own right, even if they are but pieces of what might become a larger, more complex reflection of “reality” eventually with enough verisimilitude to become an ancestor simulation.

Out of MIT and a group of physicists led by Mark Vogelsberger bursts “Illustris.” Illustris is a whole universe simulation modeling a little over 1.2 million cubic megaparsecs of space over 99% of the universe’s history. Vogelsberger’s team included everything we think we know about the evolution of the cosmos, plugged it all into a supercomputer, and let it run.

What emerged was something that looked remarkably like our own skies in both visible and dark matter. The resolution on Illustris is such that relatively small structures, such as galaxies, can be observed in detail. The types of galaxies produced in the model parallel the observed galaxies in space around us. Illustris also matches the larger structures found in galaxy clusters and their distribution. Big Bang nucleosynthesis has left us with a distribution of primordial hydrogen and helium, and heavier elements produced in the hearts of dying giant stars; this too is reproduced in Vogelsberger’s modeled universe.

Vogelsberger ascribes the astonishing degree to which Illustris matches the Big Bang Universe we live into the data we have collected and better algorithms to model the interactions. He also stated that to run the simulation on the best desktop computer we have would require two millennia to complete. The simulation that produced the ultimately static model took several months on 8000 processors. Even still, this was no small feat to run a program that tracked more than 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution over more than 1.2 million cubic megaparsecs in just a handful of months.

Even with the amazing accomplishment, the limits of computing power are exposed. Right? When you look up in the sky you see homogeneity and isotropy at work ensuring that wherever you point your telescopes you will see the same sorts of things arranged in the same sorts of ways. So in that way, the universe can trick us into thinking it’s more complex than it is just by repeating itself. We all know someone that does that, don’t we?

So even with repetition, the processors ran hot for months. Imagine if the scale encoded by Illustris included systems of individual planets with weather and terrain, ecosystems, populations of complicated organisms or even individual creatures. How long would the 8000 processors have had to run then? How many processors to make all that happen in a few months. How many processors running with embedded simulations of their own?

Building a simulation of the history of the universe is an astounding feat. But the granular level is much too large for simulating creatures like us. Arguably all the blink of human history could have been encompassed within the scope of Illustris’ run, but on that scale who could see it? Scale is a problem.

Of course, we can look at the world piece by piece. Meteorologists and climatologists have been modeling complicated systems for a very long time. Even something so deceptively simple-sounding as moving around bodies of air at different temperatures creates complicated models. The error in these models is often higher than Illustris’ results. Just try to plan for an outdoor wedding and see if it wouldn’t have been easier to locate an abundance of primordial hydrogen instead.

The complicated nature of global weather systems has not discouraged those interested in modeling from building better algorithms. And as if it wasn’t difficult enough to predict rain, researchers out of Microsoft have run with an idea first voiced in the village of Madingley, UK. The Madingley Model, as it has been christened, is the first global “General Ecosystem Model.” It is designed to model all life on the Earth. The model is designed around whole ecosystem behavior looking at variables for autotrophic and heterotrophic organisms, birth and death rates, dispersal and dispersion, metabolism, and of course reproduction.

Like Illustris, Madingley is able to discern things within its wheelhouse from such details as life spans of certain organisms up to herd responses to broad-scale environmental change. As powerful as Madingley has proven itself to be in showing the way the world is, the use of its clout goes beyond this.

The Madingley Model is used as a “what if” platform, a way to see how things would be if conditions were different. For example, we could look at the Colorado River as if they had decided to go ahead and build what would have been called the “Hoover Dam.” How would the Colorado River valley have been changed by such a megaproject? Madingley can run alternative simulations to predict future outcomes and assist in decision making. We are getting somewhat closer to Bostrom’s model here.

How much trouble would there be in taking one of these constructed worlds built by the Madingley Model and adding it to an algorithm-driven orrery of similarly modeled worlds? With our Illustris modeled cosmos in hand, we could point to an appropriate sun among the billion trillion stars and integrate our orrery and world therein to spin under its own private sky. But in a world where populations are modeled, just who looks up? To construct all that virtual cosmik debris without observers, well, that’s a lot of wasted sky.

Introducing OpenWorm. Caenorhabditis elegans is a tiny, soil living nematode. A lot is known about this little roundworm. So much so in fact that it could be considered the first “white mouse” developed for computer modeling. The worm C. elegans is the first metazoan to have its entire genome sequenced and is unique in being the only organism to have its entire nervous system mapped. Not only are these tiny nematodes primitive and simple, but they also display a curious lack of diversity in cell number. Adult males always have 1031 cells. These aspects of the biology of C. elegans are just what the groups working with OpenWorm are exploiting.

One trick in building models is to reduce the variables to include only those that are important to the functions being modeled. Those variables that serve no purpose save confusing things are eliminated until only something useful remains. C. elegans provided us with a solution to understanding whole animals and just so happens to be the perfect candidate for the first virtual creature given its simple and well-mapped ontology and morphology. Even now, virtual C. elegans crawls through its virtual petri dish constrained by the known functions of its 1031 virtual somatic cells, including its fully-mapped virtual nervous system.

The OpenWorm group is building a creature not from organic molecules but from algorithms. The European Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) group has been working on a somewhat more ambitious Human Brain Project. They aren’t there yet but scaling up shouldn’t be an unreasonable avenue of pursuit. They have taken the first small steps towards a “whole brain emulation,” a thinking human-level simulacrum, that could, in turn, be allowed to interact with others of its kind, collected on a Madingley Model planet set to spin around a star evolved in an Illustris generated universe. Virtual beings striding like lords across a virtual landscape they inhabit and treat as their own.

It’s as if there were a seamless continuum from mind to universe. There isn’t of course. The separation requires your wetware to run a unique simulation that approximates the world in an optimal manner such that you can move through data sources in an efficiently optimal way without constantly bonking your head on a cabinet door or misplacing your sandwich.

The universe is separated from us by a half-inch of bone. Through a few small apertures, nerves snake from data collectors on the outside to the central processor on the inside. In a very real way, we collect data about the world and through a Platonic allegory process. We reconstruct a virtual environment in our minds close enough to the outside world at large to allow us to function without stepping off a precipice or breaking our noses on a wall.

What this means is that each and every one of us is running a real-time simulation based on almost simultaneous data collection and rendering in the most suitable fashion for us to optimize our passage through the world around us. And don’t forget, there are seven billion or so humans generating simulations running right this moment.

But there are more than humans. How many organisms are on the planet? I won’t even pretend to toss out a meaningful number. Suffice it to say that there are a lot, an awful lot. Every one of them is running its own simulation honed to the data optimized for each organism. This represents a great deal, a mind-bogglingly large amount, of computing power. But we knew all that. Remember how intrigued you were by the Wizard’s words? “Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain.” And every brain, every single one, is hosting a simulation.

To reiterate, your brain is running an imperfect yet optimized dynamic world image that you are in turn aware of based on data accumulated from the surroundings. We have already agreed to that. These data are limited by your biological senses, and machine-augmented senses in certain cases. These data are then used to build a real-time model of the outside world that you move around in. Your model is more or less correct, given the limitations, as evidenced by your ability to interact successfully with the world. But what happens when the inputs are off? In the case of fatigue, you miss a lot and so have holes in your simulation, sometimes important holes. Or perhaps you’re chasing a roadrunner and make the mistake of allowing him time to paint a detour tunnel on the side of a mountain. Even if you don’t chase roadrunners, you certainly have had to expend the occasional doubletake to a trompe-l’œil. That momentary disturbance you feel when the algorithms in your head are rebooting your private simulation.

We are still bothered by memory constraints

One place we might look to see how a simulation could contend with memory constraints would be examining the tricks of the computer gaming industry. Many computer games could easily be seen as fledgling full-world simulations. Many of the larger games are inhabited with thousands of players who come and go, seeing to the business of living in whatever simulation any given game projects. But it’s the NPCs that are of interest because at some level they keep going about their business even when you are not there. You’re a guest, they live there. Whether or not they take a form you recognize may be a question for philosophers, but that they remain when you leave is incontrovertible. My argument would be that the world continues in a simplified form because it can, and the clever programmers have seen to it that without a need to feed complexity to visitors the simulation runs essentials only. Like hearing noises behind a closed door.

Events occurring on the other side of a door do not need to be rendered or in some cases even decided before a player looks inside. Once a player does look then the game’s reality is forced to make a decision and new information is included in the gamer’s simulation. The increased bandwidth is only applied during necessity.

I am now standing in line for coffee at a kiosk in Detroit Metro Airport. There is a ledge running along one side of the concourse under which line all the shops and cafes and food stands in this concourse. There must be a windowed wall up there because the sun is streaming in and lighting the far side of the walkway. When a rumbling sound grew louder above me, and a long shadow streaked across the far wall, I knew there must be train tracks up there. My wetware built simulation inserted a train into itself from a limited Platonic allegory of shadows on the wall. There was probably something up there. I’m fairly sure there was a train up there. I’m certain there was a train up there. There was a train.

My personal simulation had a train in it without any information other than sound and shadow. All of the data for color, construction material, shape and volume, all unneeded. The universe I built saved on some bandwidth. The secondary qualities of sound and shadow on the wall substituted all the information needed to build in the “knowledge” for the primary qualities of mass and motion of a physical train. Clever, clever universe.

The Properties of Walls

Quantum theory tells us, among other things, that reality waits for an observer to be present to make a choice. Once someone is watching, the wave collapses and chooses which slit to pass through. A wall can delay choices unless or until needed. You could walk along the hallway of a five-star hotel and every hotel room door you pass would have a story behind it. You don’t process that hidden information unless you open the doors. You don’t need to know, and you save resources by not bothering to find out.

Walls serve as a form for matter to exist in. Walls hold up the roof. Walls also block data flow from one area to the next, thus reducing rendering time and required computation. Walls reduce the strain on our individual simulations. If we would include data flow characteristics to our definition of what a wall is, we could not be consciously aware of the data flow properties of walls. But it should be noted that information flow characteristics would be included not just in objects, but also in space-time. Go sit in Plaza de Colón in Old San Juan or catch a connecting flight through Detroit and remember more details in these two unique events than of all the 127 pleasant mornings in between.

These are pieces waiting to click together from disparate places in the noosphere (all the minds and interpersonal relationships, connected or stored), and like millions of data bits across the cloud coming together to rebuild San Juan. Of course, when San Juan rises from the data bin it too will find a place in the simulation.

One Dan Vanderkam is currently using images from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s to rebuild a map of fin-de-siècle New York City. Perhaps this could evolve into just another template for an ancestor simulation, or maybe an upload vacation spot—which would be another topic entirely. Just remember, no Irish allowed.

Still trying to retain my own physicality, one consoling factor I clutched at remained how dangerous it is to think of something as unique or special. Our position in a simulation universe is on the bottom rung. If we are simulated, then we are somewhat notable simply by virtue of being the latest. Which would position us in a special place, not as unique as original programmers to be sure, but special, nevertheless.

Then by the logic of the original argument, we are most probably a simulation and not the progenitor. If we are the end in a string of nested simulations, we occupy a somewhat less special place of being one of a multitude of simulations in an end game. So if simulations are common we are most likely simulated. Also, if simulations building simulations of their own are common, we should be building them. We aren’t. But once we launch our first real simulation, not only are we no longer the lowest rung in the simulation Ponzi scheme, we also know without a doubt that ancestor simulations exist.

There is a warning, and admonition against even asking this question. Many have said that once simulated beings realize they are simulated they lose their value. These simulations would be unceremoniously unplugged, rebooted, overwritten, or some other apocalyptic outcome handed out to simulated beings that are too clever by half.

If the plug were pulled on us for “discovering” our condition as virtual beings, then any of the upline matryoshka simulations would be under the same threat. Given that they have not been shut off—because if their platform would have been terminated so would we have been—the same logic that predicts the majority of self-aware creatures are virtual, would also support the idea that terminating simulations is rare.

Finally, a bit of indulgence if I may. However the universe is built, one thing is certain, we function based on the laws of the universe we exist within. We are an emergent portion of the universe that has awoken and finds its gaze turned inward. There is nothing that we do that the universe does not permit. We are the universe trying to understand itself.

We are the universe in microcosm, extrapolated from a reality writ large to the unique simulations running in our individual wetware. It is as already established above, these imperfect simulations run on the data provided and are constructed within parameters set by the laws of space and time. Remember that the argument is that there are more virtual people in the universe than there are physical ones. The people have no idea, indeed no way of knowing, if they are physical or not. The physical people might seem to be existing in a privileged position, but once they have initiated their own simulations, they have no way of knowing that they are physical. The result, there are more virtual people in the picture than physical. What is the weakness here?

The weakest part of the argument comes from the necessity of virtual people. Anything that can be dismissed with a “pshaw” and “Because! Don’t waste your time.” Probably deserves another look. So look.

Above you will find the jig-sawed pieces of a super snappy virtual world scattered all over the surface of our technology’s shifting adaptive landscape. Since it’s all about computer simulations we can turn a myopic eye to the question and naively see only Moore’s Law and quantum computing and Machine Masters of Jeopardy. We forget that there are already nested simulations. I live inside my head, you live inside yours. We all live in our individual simulations but, as it turns out, not all of us are alone.

Barry Dainton, a philosopher at the University of Liverpool, has suggested modifying Bostrom’s trilemma by substituting “neural ancestor simulations” for Bostrom’s more general “ancestor simulations. A neural ancestor simulation could be anything from a literal brain in a vat, to “far-future humans with induced high-fidelity hallucinations that they are their own distant ancestors.” Every philosophical school of thought can get behind the idea that sufficiently sophisticated neural ancestor simulation would be indistinguishable from non-simulated experiences.

Let’s look to the world we know for an analogy. So here’s my stretch. Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) is a thing. Estimates of its occurrence range from 1–3% of the global population, a general population of some 7 billion people. That means that there are between 70,000,000 and 210,000,000 isolated biological computers running MPD as part of their simulations. While psychologists define anyone with at least one alternate personality as MPD, research has identified individuals with 10s, 100s, and even 1000s of alternates. These alternates have their own memories, their own personalities, and are usually unaware of each other. So let’s do some back of the envelop numbers.

We would have anywhere from 70,000,000 individual brains with two personalities to 210,000,000 with 2,000 personalities. So globally we have anywhere from 70,000,000 to 420,000,000,000 alternate personalities, counting those beyond each brain's first persona. Since these alternates are parasitic, we could think of them as virtual. So while we can say that an extremely small, non-zero percentage of people are virtual on the one end, estimates of up to 60 alternates for every individual on the planet are within the parameters of the current understanding of MPD.

So at least a number of people that you can talk to are alternates. And by some estimates, most people in the world are alternates, in other words, virtual and running on nested simulations. Let me repeat that, most people in the world are virtual. Most. Just like the Simulation Hypothesis predicts. Albeit in a little different, yet oddly analogous way.

On a visit to Piazza San Marco in Venice you might wander past the tower where Galileo first viewed the moons of Jupiter (thus complicating the simulation forevermore) to the docks along the Grand Canal. To the left is the Ducal Palace and behind that the prison. Connecting the rear of the palace and the prison is a short, enclosed bridge spanning a narrow canal. The windows overlooking the Grand Canal afforded prisoners their very last view of the outside world before incarceration. They had only to sigh at the loss. If you are virtual, the world you thought you knew is forever gone.

To be clear, Bostrom is not the first to suggest we live in a virtual world, even if he is the first to call it as such. Philosophy has plenty of room to discuss such a thing. Maybe have even a short conversation with Descartes’ Evil Demon for some insight. Of if you maintain a theological bent, an all-powerful god could have created the world this morning with a full and complete history already in place that included both sauropod fossils and the lingering taste of your morning coffee.

So perhaps now you understand why I am not settled on any question concerning whether or not you and I are virtual. The remaining doubt is not a little bothersome to me. I wish I could see how I might have felt this moment if I had never considered this question at all. And now that I think about it, there just might be a way to find out.

* * *

“Jim Baen would have enjoyed this one a lot,” commented Baen Publisher Toni Weisskopf on this essay by Rob Furey. Dr. Rob Furey is a biologist by training whose work was centered around social aspects of spider behavior, but with broad interest in areas of astronomy, physics, geology and forensics. Furey won numerous awards for innovative teaching from both academic and business groups and has worked closely with the Dauphin County Coroner's office as a sworn deputy. He is a professor in Integrative Sciences at Harrisburg University, and serves as assistant provost there. Complimentary activities include director of the environmental education center at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, guide and science adviser to a Partridge Films film crew in Equatorial West Africa, and science essays in Aeon Magazine and on Baen.com. He is a graduate science fiction workshop Clarion West, and his fiction has appeared in many anthologies.

Notes on the Carreraverse (A Concordance, More or Less), Part 1

Tom Kratman

This is a three-part series on the world-building behind Tom Kratman’s Carerraverse, presented with Kratman’s inimitable, deadpan style. Days of Burning, Days of Wrath is now out from Baen Books and chronicles a climactic storyline finale within Kratman’s best-selling Carerra military science fiction series.

The complete “Notes on the Carreraverse” series of essays can be found here.

A. The story of the story

The Carreraverse actually began with a conversation between myself and an old friend, call him “Ken”[1], while we were both assigned to the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion. I can’t recall, at this late date, whether that was in Saudi Arabia or on Fort Bragg, though I think it was the former.

Though an infantry officer, like myself, Ken had been assigned as a civil affairs officer[2] to the Rangers jumping into Rio Hato, in Panama, during our invasion before Christmas, 1989. Not everybody jumped, though, one plane—a C130, his—had to make what I gather was officially a crash landing on the airstrip after taking fairly heavy anti-aircraft fire right through the belly of the plane.

Unassing the plane, he accompanied a group of Rangers moving to establish a roadblock. This is where it gets icky. It seems that a young mother, in a car with her roughly eighteen-month-old baby, got confused by the fighting and the air support and, instead of driving away from it drove into it. Note, here, that there had been reports of drive by attacks already in the vicinity of Panama City and the Canal, so the Rangers were primed to expect that. Then, too, what kind of idiot who doesn’t intend mischief drives toward the fighting, right?

They colanderized the car, the woman, and the baby. War crime? No, it was just one of those things. Unfortunate, yes, but the amount of risk soldiers can be expected to take from suspiciously hostile acting vehicles is quite limited. Ken took it pretty hard, I thought, but it wasn’t his fault.

At this point, I need to give a little excursus on the United States Army and the rest of the Armed Forces. Engrave this in your mind; they cannot, generally, and will not admit to a mistake. Democracy and a free—ignorant as dirt, but free—press demand that there be no mistakes. Some first sergeant at West Point is forcing an enlisted women to blow him nightly as part of a mythical “first sergeant’s article 15”?[3] Is he court-martialed? Sent to play rock hockey at Leavenworth as he should have been? Not a chance; he’s moved out quietly and let get away scot free, with a better NCO and human being then being brought in to undo the damage, because that kind of thing would reflect badly on West Point, hence on the Army. Has the Army bought a boner—the M561 Gama Goat—of a six-wheel drive tactical vehicle that is the very Platonic essence of mechanical shit? Is it a vehicle that is career death for the poor bastard officers that get stuck as motor officers to units with the sonsabitches? No matter; the Army cannot admit the system made that grievous an error, so the Goat must remain.[4] A similar tale could be told of the essentially worthless Improved Tow Vehicle.[5]

And then there was Pentomic, and son of Pentomic, the Brigade Combat Team, which were and are such appallingly bad, idiotic, misconceived, stupid, moronic . . . never mind, suffice to say that the Army wouldn’t and won’t admit the damage done by general officer fantasies and ignorance, then or now.[6] So, over the course of the next fifteen or twenty years they’ll change everything back to what it was, one piece of damaged crap at a time, until everyone hopefully forgets what a grievous mistake both Pentomic and the Brigade Combat Team were and are.

And this is where I come back into the story. My wife is Panamanian. I had a brother-in-law and two cousins-in-law on the other side during the invasion. “What would have happened,” I asked myself, “if, instead of being some unknown poor Panamanian girl and her kid who were shot to bits, it had been an Army officer’s wife and kids?”

My answer to that question? Like blowjob-demanding first sergeants, idiotic purchases, and insane organizational fantasies, the deaths would have been swept under the rug and, quite likely, evidence planted purporting to show they’d been taken by the Panama Defense Forces and murdered by them.[7] Anything, but admit in public to a bad, career threatening mistake.

And if the officer in question had found out and gone for justice? Same thing; sweep it under the rug. Maybe try to bribe him. But admit to the mistake? Not if at all avoidable.[8]

And so I wrote that book while I was in law school and in the early practice of law, a more than half-million word novel concerning one man’s revenge against not only the former comrade who murdered—he believes it had to have been murder, else why plant the evidence with the PDF? Yes, I might know better but Carrera does not—but against the army that forgot loyalty was a two-way street. It was, in many ways, an even better story than the Carreraverse you know. But events intervened.

The intervening event was 9/11 and the war on “le Rif,” Radical Islamic Fundamentalism.[9] Once that happened, what the country needed was not a morality play on loyalty nor even an excursus on how we might overplay our hand badly someday. It needed more in the way of instruction on the war that was upcoming . . . rather, the wars that are upcoming because the assault of Transnational Progressivism is more threatening by far than some Arabs hijacking planes and knocking down buildings.

I was able to save about sixty or sixty-five percent of the original book, which, after additions, then being too large to bind, you saw as A Desert Called Peace and Carnifex.

The origins of the third volume, The Amazon Legion, I’ve already related in the essay, "The Amazon’s Right Breast." All the other volumes are continuations of the initial story based on and demanded by the peculiar circumstances of the planet Terra Nova, its politics, and the influence of United Earth.

B. Shape of the planet:

Speaking of Terra Nova, why does it look so much like Earth?

It’s a fair question. I mean, sure, we should all be wary of mirror image planets after so many of them showed up in the original Star Trek, for no better purpose than a threadbare attempt as nagging us with some bludgeoning moral point or other.

In fact, originally it wasn’t going to. Indeed, I had no intention of mentioning it at all, except in the broadest, most general terms. Really, except for Balboa, the shape of the place hardly mattered one way or the other. And then someone sent me an article, the title was something to the effect of “We’re all Panamanians.” It seems that the rise of the Isthmus of Panama had a massive effect on our weather, hence of the evolution of animal life on Earth. This got me to thinking: “Hmmm . . . so Terra Nova is obviously an animal sanctuary or hunting preserve, but probably the former. It was set up by aliens, the Noahs, to whom preserving endangered species is something of a mission in life. But to preserve those species, they have to thrive and breed. Both of those demand a compatible environment and that demands compatible weather. Weather, in turn, demands a pretty similar geography, so that the surface of the planet will be unevenly heated, approximately in the same manner and degree as it is on Earth.”

As you can see, at that point I was pretty much stuck with something that looked a lot like, if not exactly like, Earth. I could fudge it a little on the theory that the nearly all powerful Noahs could predict weather patterns and set up something to suit that was close, but not exactly the same.

As for the political shape of the planet, go back to the interludes in A Desert Called Peace and Carnifex, and particularly the Cheng Ho Disaster, et seq., as covered in the interludes to A Desert Called Peace and by Vivienne Raper in her story, from The Wars of Liberation, "The Long Dark Goodnight."

There was a moral there, concerning the future, in what followed the Cheng Ho Disaster and the pattern of emigration, and what happened to Old Earth. We’re very wrapped up, the last thirty or forty years, in the prospect of unwanted cultural (and for a few assholes, genetic) change as a result of immigration. That’s about half the issue, and yet all the half-witted can see. The other part of it is who leaves. From neighborhoods to nations, who leaves is as important as who comes in, when talking about culture change.

C. What countries colonized which parts of Terra Nova?

In Twain’s words, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Most of the colonies-turned-nations make no difference to the story at all. Of the ones that appear in the story and matter, with a little backstory where fairly implied:

The United States got, or took, the southern area of the second largest continent. This was not set up as a unitary colony. Instead, in order to entice out the various “extremist” groups and viewpoints, they were allowed to set up their own colonies far enough from each other to imagine they’d founded their own little slice of Heaven. Thus, for example, the polygamists could go and found their own New Deseret or whatever turned their fancy. What turned those separate colonies into a superpower was the series of wars mentioned in the books, in passing, as the “Formation Wars.” It was these that created the “Federated States.”

Spain colonized Castilia.

France colonized Gaul, then Gaul colonized a goodly chunk of the rest of Terra Nova, for a while.

Great Britain colonized Anglia, which further colonized a good deal of what the Gauls didn’t. Again, this was only for a while.

The Irish colonized Hibernia. They never really knew what they wanted but were always willing to fight to the death for it.

The Italians colonized Tuscany.

The Dutch Colonized Haarlem.

The Japanese colonized Yamato.

The Somalis colonized Xamar, which was just as much of a dump as Somalia is.

The Argentines colonized La Plata.

The Colombians colonized Santander.

The Indians got Bharat, but I seem to recall mentioning that it split up into different contending states. India’s a pretty artificial construct. I’m frankly amazed it’s held together, here on Earth, as long as it has and gives the appearance of holding together into the future. Give the Brits their due; when they cobble something together it tends to stay cobbled together.

Israel colonized Zion. They originally had no colony, but the Saudis arranged to give them a chunk of theirs to get as many Jews as possible off of Earth. See comment, above, on the importance of who leaves.

The Cubans colonized Cienfuegos.

The Poles got Jagiellonia.

Vietnam colonized Cochin.

Canada got another frozen wasteland, Secordia, named for Canadian heroine Laura Secord, and seemed happy enough with it. Quebec was set up as a politically separate colony—New Quebec—because, after all, they’re pains in the ass, while Anglophone Canadians have had just about enough.

Balboa, of course, was settled by Panamanians.

All the European-based colonies were awarded by the European Union, which used this as a dumping ground for anyone either useless or against the EU project.

The Chinese settled Ming Zhong Guo, or New Middle Kingdom. That “Ming,” New, is important. Even so, of course, no one ever names their colony “New” anything, perish the thought. And I was not born in Boston, which is named for Boston, England, which is in New England, which is named for Old England. There is no New South Wales in Australia. There is no New Carlisle, in Quebec. All are figments of the imagination; so it’s been tacitly claimed.[10]

The Russians settled Volga.

The Germans got Sachsen.

Iraq was awarded what became Sumer, another patch of miserable desert with a couple of nice rivers running through it.

The various peoples of Afghanistan took possession of various chunks of Pashtia, and proceeded to carry their feuds from Earth along with them.

The Chileans settled Valparaiso.

The Saudis took a chunk of desert, less what they gave to get more Jews to emigrate.

The Turks colonized Kemal.

Honduras got what became Lempira.

San Vicente was settled from El Salvador.

Nicaragua settled Cordoba.

The Egyptians settled what would become the Misrani Arab Republic.

New Zealand settled Wellington.

Hordaland was settled by Norwegians.

The Danes settled Cimbria.

Australia got nothing, since the world detests the way it has generally supported the United States in its wars, and since it isn’t part of any of the supranationals below the UN through which the new planet was parceled up. Instead, the United States allowed Aussies to move to its colonies. Hence the name of the city, Gaganddie, the result of an early settlement nearly exterminating itself by sampling the fruits of the Tranzitree, the Bolshiberry, and the Progressivine; nobody but Aussies could come up with a name like that . . . well . . . okay . . . them and me.

Is there a code for these? Yes, there is, or, rather, several of them.

In the first place, the place names not only served as mnemonics for me, while writing, but—see below on the different ways to read the series—keys for the reader. Thus, for example, there is a place overlooking the Panama Canal, Cerro Paraiso, or Paradise Hill, that is inversely echoed in A Desert Called Peace, as Hell Hill. The State of Shelby, in the Federated States, isn’t a cognate for Mississippi, nor even Shelby, Mississippi, but for Tennessee, where the novelist and historian Shelby Foote lived. Yes, this, too, is an echo to the kinds of motives for the various groups on settlers in the area; it is a strong hint that anyone who would name their home after Shelby Foote is likely a very much unreconstructed neo-Confederate, hence naturally neither welcome nor happy on increasingly cosmopolitan Earth

For the most part, the national country names fall into the following six categories. though some fit more than one category, the one I give refers to my initial motivation in naming them:

1.  Those named for larger or smaller places on Earth, within the borders of the polities that sent out the colony: Wellington, San Vicente, Valparaiso, Cienfuegos, (arguably) Yamato, Xamar, Pashtia, Haarlem, Sachsen, Cochin (for Cochinchina), and Tuscany.

2.  Those named for significant rivers in the originating countries on Earth: Volga,

3.  Taking a leaf from The Princess Bride, those named for the prevailing currency in their country, on Earth: Balboa, Lempira.

4.  Those named for their earlier Latin names, perhaps modernized in some cases: Gaul, Hibernia, Lusitania (if I ever mentioned it), Anglia.

5.  Those named for national heroes: Santander, Kemal, Secordia. Jagiellonia (though that’s actually named for a dynasty).

6.  Those that kept an old name, possibly with “New” added, which sounded sufficiently strange to western ears that I felt it could be left alone: Misrani Arab Republic, Ming Zhong Guo, Bharat.

D. Different ways to read the series:

I get a fair amount of feedback from fans that they find new things in the books every time they reread them. There is, in fact, a pretty good reason for that. What good reason? I wrote them in layers, so to speak, to be read in any of about seven different ways. Yes, there are a lot of different ways to read the series.

In the first and most obvious place, it can be read as a straight science fiction story—different planet, strange flora and fauna, some of which matter and some of which do not, spaceships, somewhat different technology, lesser tech in some areas, and more advanced tech in others, an Earth somewhat to very politically different from the one we know today, that kind of thing—where revenge is a core component.

Another way to read it is as a roman a clef, a novel with a key. If the reader does this, it also becomes a kind of alternate history commentary on the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, or, more broadly, the war against Radical Fundamentalist Islam, le RIF. That way can further be read as a broad and fairly detailed critique of where and how we screwed up and what we should have done differently. (Disbanding the Iraqi Army? Trying to institute democracy in a place like that or Afghanistan? More or less overnight? Jesus . . . just Jesus.) Naturally, it can’t help, under that reading, being a fairly severe criticism of Neo-Con thinking, which is appallingly bad, arrogant and ignorant, both, where it is not even a contradiction in terms.[11]

It can be read as a romance because, after all, what could be more romantic than someone waging what amounts to a private world war to avenge the murder of his woman?

The reader can also look at it, if he or she is willing to twist their minds a bit, as an allegory of us, today, fighting against the rather unpleasant future in store for our descendants if we do not get control of, and destroy, the Tranzi—Transnational Progressive—apparatus and dream. Yes, if you want to read it that way, the setting of ninety-nine percent of the story, the planet named—with deliberate lack of originality—Terra Nova, is us, today, while Earth, “Old Earth,” in the story, is them tomorrow.

One could read it as a series of fictional essays on political and military reform. In terms of the latter, in particular, since I am a huge fan of the political system in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, I thought to put some philosophical meat on the bare bones of the that system, but to do so in a place, Balboa, were our style of federalism is basically impossible.

In terms of military reform essays, The Amazon Legion, too, as further explained in the accompanying piece, "The Amazon’s Right Breast," is absolutely an essay, in that case on how to turn women into ground combatants, as compared with current (despicable, vile, rotten, stupid, doctrinaire, and evil) efforts which are largely about how not to do so.

That’s not the whole of the reform essay aspect, though. Note the tacit criticisms of high tech. See the illustrations of a high tech-low tech mix. Note the reserve system which, as the United States, food and energy independent, now, disengages from the world and our unwise, entangling alliances,[12] we might find useful. Note the different kinds of organizations on display depending on the mission: expansion, counter-insurgency, or mid-intensity (they call it high intensity now). Note the entire operation and philosophy of Obras Zorilleras.[13]

Note the method of selections for officers and senior non-coms.

Finally, I intended it to be a one stop shop for a course in Art of War: Administration, Organization, Intelligence, Leadership, both innate and as developed, Training, Tactics and Techniques, Doctrine, Operations, Strategy, Logistics, Psychological Operations, use of the arts, etc., in several different forms of war, from low intensity to high. Can any eight novels, one anthology, and three essays hope to do that? To do it completely? No; war is the art that subsumes all other arts and sciences. Eight thousand volumes cannot cover it all. But eight can get the reader to thinking, at least. The series probably does about as much as one could hope for in that line.

E. Shape of the Balboan Armed Force / the Legions

I covered a good deal of this, sometimes directly and sometimes only by implication, in the essay "Principles of Organization for War." Nonetheless, it might be of interest to the reader to understand the standard corps of Carrera’s force, and the general deployment for the final battles. This is mostly from memory, so if I make a minor mistake somewhere . . .

Every corps consists of three legions or legions and brigades, which are roughly equivalent to divisions or, for brigades, rather less than divisions. The First Corps, Mechanized, has only two maneuver divisions but also a full legion of artillery, which is further staffed to be able to control the fires of a large number of additional tercios (regiments) and brigades of artillery. Second and Third Corps had two maneuver divisions each, plus an additional brigade of infantry. Fourth Corps, which is intended to fight a static battle to keep the port of Cristobal out of enemy hands, also has two legions and a brigade. Fifth Corps, which is intended to defend the Fortress of Isla Real and the coast east, and west of the capital, have only two maneuver divisions. In the case of Fifth Corps, one of those divisions is largely sham, having been composed of troops still in their initial entry training and situated as far back from the front as possible. Sixth Corps has almost no regular troops, just its own headquarters, the Tercio Amazona, a good deal of the 14th Special Operations Tercio, 44th Tercio de Indios, Tercio Gorgidas (the gays), and the reinforced Fifth Mountain Tercio. Almost all the rest are discharged and retired veterans, to the tune of several score thousand.

It is mentioned in the series that the last thing an about to be discharged veteran does before discharge is to attend a course in guerilla warfare, taught by, among others, Colonel Nguyen and his wife, Madame Nguyen.

Every corps gets, in addition, a Legion or a Brigade of combat support forces. These generally consist of tercios of Engineers, Air Defense Artillery, Military Police, Reconnaissance, and Artillery, tube and rocket, both. First Corps, however, the heavy corps, has only a brigade of combat support, because its artillery is in the Tenth Artillery Legion. Fifth Corps also has only a brigade, because it owns the Twelfth Coast Artillery Brigade.

There is a Headquarters and Support formation, sometimes a legion, sometimes a brigade, for each of the corps as well, with all the tercios and cohorts required to administer, control, support, maintain, etc., their corps.

There are number of combat, combat support, and headquarters and support formations at national level. The primary ones, here, are the 16th Legion (Jan Sobieski), which is the air force for Balboa, the 17th (Don John) Naval, and the 18th Air Defense Legions. There is, further, a brigade of engineers, the 19th, and the 52ndDeception Tercio, whose primary mission is dirty tricks, confusion, obfuscation, and the like.

A more numerate breakdown would look like this:

C means cadet

Tng Inf

Legions and Brigades 6 Mech, 13 inf, 14 Inf, and 15 Inf, are "second formations." In peace they appear part of the staffs of 1 Mech, 2 Inf, 3 Inf, and 4 Marine. One tercio of the parent legion goes with them.

Tercios 10,11, and 12, are normally part of legions 5,7, and 9. Upon full mob they are moved to 8th and 11 Inf.

Tercios 40-44 are composites with extra emphasis on keeping nationalities that do not like each other apart, forex, no Valparaisans (Chilean descent) with de la Platans or Limanes (too much bad blood).

Tercios with "c" after number are cadet tercios, reinforced with scouts. 37th Tercio is a composite formed from the "cazador clubs" of the 6 regular cadet tercios.

Legions and Brigades are both flag officer positions, brigades are smaller and have less in the way of combined arms. Some are arms pure.

This chart does not include CSS and HQ tercios and higher formations.

VIth Corps has control of all partisan forces in areas overrun by outsiders. It is reinforced with five independent tercios, 5th Mountain (reinf), 14 Caz, 35th Gorgidas, 36th Amazona, and 44th Indio.

F. How does Carrera command the legions:

We usually say “Command and Control” as if it were a single word. In fact command and control are not just different, but opposite.

Command exists when what the commander wants to happen does happen, with little further input necessary from the commander than something to the effect of, “This is what I want to happen.” Control exists, conversely, when what the commander wants to happen happens only because he is directing events in considerable detail. There’s no particular shortage of good controllers in the militaries of the world, but there is a serious dearth of good commanders.

That said, perfect command probably never existed, any more than perfect control does. There will almost always be something even the best commander must control and something even the most fanatical controller must give over to command. And that said, command in almost always superior to control, not least because it allows a greater span of influence than control does.

Carrera commands the legions through various organs and agencies, as well as through his subordinates. The major organs he uses for this are the Estado Mayor, Centipede, the Balboan national training center, Cazador School, the initial entry training establishment, on the Isla Real, the higher level military schooling, also on the Isla Real, his Inspector General, Professor Ruiz’s information, which includes publications, Obras Zorilleras, subordinate commanders.

Among the higher level schooling are Officer Candidate and Centurion Candidate Schools, which ensure that leaders meet certain minimal standards (actually, they’re pretty high standards) before being commissioned or made into centurions. It would, one supposes, be sacrilege to admit it, but one of the reasons armies tend to fall back on control, rather than allowing command, is that their officer and senior NCO selection system just cannot guarantee a good enough product. Look at the U.S. Army’s percent of commissioned officers these days. Twenty Percent? Dear God, twenty percent. And you think most of those have what it takes to be real officers? Leaders of men? Yeah, right. Worse, when you have that many, command tours are short enough to ensure that anyone in command can put on a show long enough to get by.

Conversely, the Legions keep officer strength down to three percent, including air and naval, and have very stringent filters in place to weed out the unfit. This gives people Carrera can rely on, which allows him to command rather than control. The same might be said for the centurion corps, which is the senior NCO corps and somewhat larger than the officer corps.

This is key, while there are a few things he keeps very close to his chest and controls tightly, in general he does not try for tight control. The process generally runs: He expresses his will to his subordinate commanders and staff. Professor Ruiz’s organization publicizes that will. Cazador School and the twin candidate schools provide people who can be relied on to execute that will. The Centipede, since most of Carrera’s will concerns training the force, checks that this is being done, even as the IG looks, systemically, to the issues and problems interfering with that will.

He does, as shown in a couple of places, spot check to make sure that his organs of command are following and advancing his will, of course. Sometimes they are not and then he controls them very tightly and unpleasantly for a while.

G. Questions and Answers:

What happened to the United States, on Old Earth:

The United States went under to the UN a little more slowly than the rest, but they went under all the same. Remember that line on how important emigration is to cultural change? Enough unassimilated and inassimilable foreigners came in as to make the United States less comfortable for many Americans. They left in dribs and drabs. As more Americans left, the laws and culture changed more, driving still more to leave. Once there was a consensus for knuckling under to the UN, still more left, sooner, younger, and faster.

Currently, however, the area of the former United States is a mix of reverted to barbarism (In other words, not under Consensus control) and glaciated. So much for Global Warming.

What was the name of the last Pope on Earth, the one who was burnt at the stake at the Ara Pacis, the Altar of Peace, in Rome:

I have no idea, but I am pretty sure it wasn’t Francis, since this Francis is, and anyone in the future who takes his name is likely to be, a Tranzi through and through.

Where did the idea of awarding medals to brave foreigners, who fought against the legions, and putting on trial for treason foreigners who try to help Balboa but who are citizens of countries Balboa is at war with come from:

Mark Twain, actually. He wrote the following passage concerning something he saw while visiting New Zealand:

A couple of curious war-monuments here at Wanganui. One is in honor of white men “who fell in defence of law and order against fanaticism and barbarism.” Fanaticism. We Americans are English in blood, English in speech, English in religion, English in the essentials of our governmental system, English in the essentials of our civilization; and so, let us hope, for the honor of the blend, for the honor of the blood, for the honor of the race, that that word got there through lack of heedfulness, and will not be suffered to remain. If you carve it at Thermopylae, or where Winkelried died, or upon Bunker Hill monument, and read it again “who fell in defence of law and order against fanaticism” you will perceive what the word means, and how mischosen it is. Patriotism is Patriotism. Calling it Fanaticism cannot degrade it; nothing can degrade it. Even though it be a political mistake, and a thousand times a political mistake, that does not affect it; it is honorable—always honorable, always noble—and privileged to hold its head up and look the nations in the face. It is right to praise these brave white men who fell in the Maori war—they deserve it; but the presence of that word detracts from the dignity of their cause and their deeds, and makes them appear to have spilt their blood in a conflict with ignoble men, men not worthy of that costly sacrifice. But the men were worthy. It was no shame to fight them. They fought for their homes, they fought for their country; they bravely fought and bravely fell; and it would take nothing from the honor of the brave Englishmen who lie under the monument, but add to it, to say that they died in defense of English laws and English homes against men worthy of the sacrifice—the Maori patriots.

The other monument cannot be rectified. Except with dynamite. It is a mistake all through, and a strangely thoughtless one. It is a monument erected by white men to Maoris who fell fighting with the whites and against their own people, in the Maori war. “Sacred to the memory of the brave men who fell on the 14th of May, 1864,” etc. On one side are the names of about twenty Maoris. It is not a fancy of mine; the monument exists. I saw it. It is an object-lesson to the rising generation. It invites to treachery, disloyalty, unpatriotism. Its lesson, in frank terms is, “Desert your flag, slay your people, burn their homes, shame your nationality—we honor such.”[14]

Moreover, from a strictly PSYOP point of view, it is rather clever, no?

Why did you repeat parts of The Amazon Legion in other books, or vice versa:

The Amazon Legion was a parallel story. Without giving dates, which may or may not have meant anything to the reader, repeating a few brief sections from another POV allowed the reader to place the story in chronological context. Oddly, a few people objected to this, and a couple of them outright lied. I will continue to write for the intelligent and honest, nonetheless.

What order should the books be read in:

Leaving aside the anthology:

A Desert Called Peace

Carnifex

The Lotus Eaters

The Amazon Legion (though those last two can be switched, too)

Come and Take Them

The Rods and the Axe

A Pillar of Fire by Night

Days of Burning, Days of Wrath

The essays can be read at any time.

What is the Neo-Azteca recipe for chile:

Do you really want to know? Well, in that case, first, buy a young and tender slave girl or pre-pubescent boy, then sharpen your obsidian sacrificial knife . . .

Why is Terra Nova’s history, post colonization, so similar to ours:

Because, as mentioned, while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme.

In other words, we have a geography very similar to ours. We have a set of national boundaries fairly similar to ours. We have settlement by groups extremely similar to ours of an earlier time. We have them starting from a technological base about where we were three to five hundred years ago. So why wouldn’t their history rhyme with ours?

Why was there no region for Australia to settle:

There were three reasons. One is that there was no continent-sized island set up by the Noahs. We don’t know why this may be, but we may well speculate that the indigenous animals of Australia were not endangered because human beings hadn’t yet shown up to drive them to extinction, so the Noahs didn’t bother raising an island. Or perhaps they just thought marsupials deserved to die. Or got lazy. Or had their funding cut. Take your pick.

However, we do know the reasons they didn’t get anything. There were two of these. One was that Australia was a faithful—well, relatively faithful—ally of the United States, hence was much detested in Tranzi circles, while there was no “supranational” organization to which Australia belonged to apportion some part of that supranational’s area to Oz.

What happened to the other staff from the first book:

Some were killed or crippled in action. Some went home. Some stayed on staff or were put in command. More broadly speaking, though, Carrera wanted his senior commanders to be mostly Balboan, so that they could carry on the culture and values of the legions into the unseen future.

Will you ever write Historia y Filosofia Moral:

If I live long enough, maybe.

Who keeps all this stuff straight:

Modean Moon, God bless ‘er.

And my personal favorite, isn’t Carrera just a Marty Stu / Mary Sue:

There are a couple of problems with this notion. One is that those making the claim don’t actually know what a Marty Stu / Mary Sue is. No, dummies, it’s not a stand in for the author, or, rather, it’s not the fact of being a stand in that makes a character a Sue or Stu. Instead, a Mary Sue or Marty Stu is a character with amazing abilities, all of which are unearned, coming from nothing. Conversely, when you first meet Carrera, he’s studying his calling, in a library that indicates a lifetime of study and a good deal of prior practice. He was likely born with some talent, but it’s the study and practice that makes him what he is.

Secondly, he’s a composite. Am I in that composite? Sure, I taught the boy everything he knows, after all. But that doesn’t mean I taught him everything I know.

Finally, Marty Stus are too perfect; they never make mistakes. There are quite a number of mistakes Carrera makes in the series, plus a couple of idiotic things—there’s a place for luck in war, after all—that he gets away with.

However, if some idiotic and thoroughly dishonest transvestite wants to believe it, what that hell; I don’t really care if I’m living rent free in s/h/it’s head.

Okay, so if Carrera isn’t you, who is he?

That would be telling.

Oh, please?

Oh, all right.

To a large extent, as mentioned, he’s a composite, but there is one fictional character who was extremely important to Carrera’s outlook, values, and personality. You wouldn’t believe . . .

The short version is that Carrera is the anti-Jack Ryan. You see, unlike some fictional character, and quite despite my name, I am East Coast Irish, South Boston, Massachusetts, to be exact. Moreover, unlike some fictional characters, I really am a graduate of Boston College and a former infantry officer. When that goody-two-shoes Jack Ryan interfered with the President righteously nuking an Iranian city in reprisal for their attempt at spreading a plague among us, Clancy pretty much lost me. But when Jack Ryan had in his hands the power to pistol whip to death the IRA motherfucker who machine gunned his wife and little girl, and didn’t do so? That was the last straw. Thereafter, whenever I had a moral quandary for Carrera I simply asked, “What would Jack Ryan do?” and then had Carrera do the opposite.

As an aside, and not concerning who Carrera is but what he is, there’s another factor in there, one that makes Carrera almost unique among modern fictional protagonists. He’s not a whiney bitch. He understands, to paraphrase Napoleon, that if a man can’t look with equanimity upon a battlefield strewn with the dead and maimed bodies of forty-thousand boys, he probably needs to find another line of work. Yes, yes, I know that, modernly, nobody is supposed to be like that in fiction. But when they’re not? That’s when fiction doesn’t make sense and real life does.

H. Technological innovations and odd procurements of the story:

There is a theme, so to speak, to Carrera’s selections and direction for research and development, as well as procurement. Every program and system he pushes is geared to one of three things, mitigating enemy strengths and enhancing Balboan strengths, mitigating Balboan weaknesses or exploiting enemy weaknesses, and the geography of the theater of war, to include the enemy continent.

Moreover, not everything that could have been done was done, since every program was a potential warning sign to keep the enemy from walking into his naval and land artillery ambushes. For example, the Meg Class subs are short ranged. Why not outfit a freighter to tow them to attack the Tauran Union and the Zhong in their home waters? Because the benefit wasn’t worth the risk of exposing early just how capable they were, within their range, nor what numbers they were in, nor how long Balboa had been getting ready for this particular war, which might have warned one or the other, hence both, off, to wage some other kind of war for which Carrera could neither prepare nor prevail.

[1]Ken and I are living proof that it is, indeed, a small world. We were in the same company in the 101st Airborne, in 1976, but he was just reporting in as I was leaving. We didn’t actually meet, but passed each other in a corridor. Then we were lieutenants together, in 3rd Battalion, 5th Infantry, in Panama. We didn’t serve in the same company there, but switched jobs at the beginning of 1983. After that, we were in different but overlapping classes at the Infantry Officer Advanced Course, at Fort Benning, in 1984. And then we ended up in the same battalion, the 96th, for the First Gulf War.

[2] Civil Affairs is a branch in the Reserves, like Infantry, Armor, Artillery, or what have you, but only a functional area for the Regulars. Functional area? Think: Secondary MOS.

[3] Non-judicial punishment. Only commanders can give non-judicial punishment. And blowjobs are not on the list of authorized punishments for them, either.

[4] We eventually got rid of the Goat, but to do so—this is my firm belief—the Army had to present a new and improved, do-anything vehicle, the Hummer. Sadly, we had to give up our beloved M151 Jeeps to make the lie stick.

[5] So I’ll tell one part of it. In 1987, after giving up command of my rifle company, I took over the HHC. While doing the inventory, the battalion commander asked me to set up and run some live fires for the battalion’s platoons. Actually, he asked me to set up and run one, but I came back with a plan to run four, for every platoons in the battalion. One of these was a deliberate attack, supported by self-propelled air defense (Vulcans) and ITVs. The TOW missile, which the ITV fired, was a very expensive round, so, rather than waste them, the sights had to be verified by higher level maintenance. They came out, checked everything, and verified that the sight was fine. As line of departure time neared, the ITV raised its hammer head . . . and a piece of the sight fell out. Yes, really.

[6] But if you don’t want to “never mind,” go find my essay on the principles of organization and see for yourself.

[7] I say this with great confidence.

[8] At this point I am sure my reader is shaking his head at the wickedness of military man. Just stop right there; you’re the one who has demanded a zero defects Army, well, you and your ancestors. You’re the one, with your ancestors, who want the troops so overloaded with equipment and armor that they’re doubly safe; they won’t get hurt themselves and will never catch up to the enemy to hurt him, either. You’ve got the Army you demanded and the one you deserve. It just so happens that it s an army that cannot admit to a mistake, because you cannot tolerate or accept a mistake.

[9] As near as I can tell, the phrase, “le Rif” or RIF, was coined by Jody Dorsett and myself on Baen’s Bar, about nineteen years ago. We thought it rather a pretty beau geste.

[10] Yes, this is a deliberate dig at an idiotic, and deeply dishonest, transvestite, who used to inhabit a particular website, and spent so long lying to the world and himself about what he was that the very notion of truth would appear to be alien to him.

[11] Neo-cons are not conservative at all. Rather, they are clean cut, suit-wearing liberals, with a vast faith in the efficacy of military power, the prospects for social engineering of foreign societies, and their own innate wonderfulness. While all of those are dubious propositions, the evidence for the last, in particular, is extremely scanty. Fortunately, their abject, miserable failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have pulled their fangs for a while. Nonetheless, as my Panamanian wife is fond of saying, “Hierbe mala nunca muere.” Weeds never die.

The Con, in Neo-con, stands for con man.

[12] I’m being charitable there; our allies are generally moochers, on moral-defense welfare. I’ll change my mind when they pay as much for their own defense and when they raise forces commensurate with their populations and economies, as we do to defend them.

[13] “Skunk Works,” for you folks who don’t understand Spanish. Yes, named for Kelly Johnson’s outfit, at Lockheed. Allow me my little jokes, please.

[14] It may be that Twain misunderstood the monument and the action it commemorated rather badly. Even so, the principle he puts forth is valid enough.

* * *

This is a three-part series on the world-building behind Tom Kratman’s Carerraverse, presented with Kratman’s inimitable, deadpan style. Days of Burning, Days of Wrath is now out from Baen Books and chronicles a climactic storyline finale within Kratman’s best-selling Carerra military science fiction series.

The complete “Notes on the Carreraverse” series of essays can be found here.

Space Pirates!

by Mark Lardas

Piracy is one of mankind’s oldest activities. Outbreaks have been recorded since ancient times and occurred as late as this century. Piracy is also one of the oldest inspirations for storytellers. The Odyssey and Argonautica may not contain Treasure Island’s plotline, but both contain piracy, or at least piratical activity.

Not all forcible deprivation of property is robbery. Consider taxes you pay. When merchant captains have ships seized by someone under governmental authority, it is not piracy. It becomes piracy only when those seizing the ships—whether oceangoing, airborne or space-going—are individuals acting on their own behalf, not under color of law.

When Sir Francis Drake, John Paul Jones, and Rafael Semmes acted as government agents, they were not pirates, however piratical their actions seemed to their victims. But John Morgan, Edward Teach and Jean Lafitte acted on their own behalf. When they did, they were pirates.

Except when strong central governments exist, piracy and trade are often indistinguishable. Where laws against robbery are unenforceable, ship’s crews take what they can, trading only for what they cannot seize. For much of history, law ended at the coastline. Anything beyond your coast was fair game. Vikings, ancient Aegean Sea rovers, Cinque Port seamen, and many other sea peoples throughout history played by these rules. These sea robbers were pirates because their actions would have been illegal had they occurred in their homeports.

Piracy hurts trade. Over the centuries, trade became more important than the immediate returns available through piracy. Governments began to restrict piracy through an elaborate system of laws and constraints. They set up methods for civilians to act as armed agents of the government by issuing letters of marque and reprisal. Eventually those approaches became unworkable, and governments eliminated extra-governmental-sanctioned use of force entirely. But, just as piracy did not go away, privateering will almost certainly return at some point in the future.

Piracy began as armed robbery at sea, starting shortly after ships existed. Air piracy emerged in the 1960s with the first wave of skyjackings. When humans move into space, piracy will become a thing there. It took sixty years from the first flight of an aircraft until air piracy emerged. Humans have been traveling in space longer than that. So where are the space pirates?

Space piracy will arise when conditions are right. Piracy requires three elements: pirates, prizes, and ports.

Pirates are men used to violence, but who are also capable of operating pirate vessels or at least forcing cooperation from those operating their target vessels. The classic pirate is a sailor or warrior trained in warfare and desperate enough to use force. Piracy often flares up after wars end. Some unemployed soldiers and sailors, lacking a demand for their skills, go into business for themselves: as highwaymen on land, and as pirates at sea.

Prizes are things worth stealing. They may be ships. They may be the cargoes of the ships. They may be ransoms collected for those aboard the ship. Prizes must have value. Pirates gamble their lives through piracy. Unless the rewards exceed that risk, they either die or eventually find careers elsewhere.

Ports are places where pirates convert prizes into plunder. The value of a ship or its cargo does not matter if you cannot sell it, even when worth millions. Sailing-era pirates once captured a ship laden with silk. They could not sell the precious silk, so they used it to make sails. Without a port to sell it, its only value was as sailcloth.

All three factors were present after the wars of the Great Age of Sail. Air piracy emerged only after hijackers had safe places to take their airplanes. After World War I, despite unemployed, desperate sailors and thousands of ships carrying cargoes, there were no ports in which to sell prizes, and so no upsurge in piracy occurred.

Today’s potential space pirate can find a better job. Ports exist today where stolen goods could be sold (think Iran or North Korea), yet no argosies of valuable cargoes are returning from space. That will change. Change may already be in the process.

Of course, space piracy already exists—in fictional form. Just as pirate stories have entertained readers since ancient times, piracy is a staple of today’s science fiction.

In his novel Space Viking, H. Beam Piper had a character observe, “Practically everything that's happened on any of the inhabited planets happened on Terra before the first spaceship." That may be because science fiction borrows from history, but it will also be because Homo Sapiens Spatium will be the descendants of Homo Sapiens Terra. People will remain people.

Some of the best historically-compatible depictions of space piracy can be found on the pages of David Weber’s Honorverse stories. Piracy is woven into the background of the Honorverse. Edward Saganami, the Manticore Navy’s greatest hero, died fighting pirates. The novel Honor Among Enemies features Honor Harrington fighting pirates. Pirates and piracy make appearances in several stories, including The Shadow of Saganami, Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington, Promised Land and The Service of the Sword. Piracy permeates the Manticore Ascendant series.

How “realistic” is Honorverse piracy? Surprisingly so, especially as measured against historical precedent. Piracy is endemic in the Silesian Confederacy, a loose coalition of planetary governments, lacking a strong central government, and pops up throughout the Verge and remote systems outside those of the major star nations.

Pirates, prizes and ports exist throughout the Honorverse. Plenty of spacefarers, male and female, are trained to war. The Honorverse produces surpluses of these individuals. There are also plenty of prizes available. A starship represents a massive capital investment, even for wealthy planets. For an impoverished world, the value of an interstellar ship could exceed the gross planetary product. The value of a ship’s cargo is literally astronomical. Otherwise, why ship it between stars? What about ports? Thousands of planets are inhabited by humans and there are hundreds of thousands of occupied habitats: everything from asteroid mining camps to amusement parks in deep space.

Because of this breadth of opportunity, Weber’s worlds have examples of virtually every brand of piracy. The pirates encountered in Silesia are reminiscent of the New World pirates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The economies of Britain’s North American colonies, short on specie and desperate for manufactured goods, were able to obtain both through the prizes pirates delivered. Colonial governors turned a blind eye on the activities of men like Edward Teach (Blackbeard), William Kidd, and “Black” Sam Bellamy, sometimes developing covert partnerships with pirates.

Similarly, systems in the Silesian Confederacy are short on capital and poor. Their planetary and star system leaders permit piracy—generally, but not always outside the territories they control—as a means of bringing hard currency and manufactured goods into their system. And to enrich the leaders. Pirates pay planetary leaders protection money and enter into partnership with local authorities. Silesian Coalition leaders keep piracy illegal even as they benefit from it. This allows them to shut down pirates who become too disruptive to trade.

Local leaders also provide pirates cover against star nations, such as Manticore, who fight piracy. In colonial North America, the British crown cracked down on pirates, sending crown ships to hunt them down, even when royal governors fostered piracy. The crown recalled governors who became too friendly to pirates. Similarly, Manticore protects its merchant marine within the Silesian Confederacy with Manticore warships, and is willing to destroy national warships of Confederation planets which too openly support pirates. Weber has similar examples of outbreaks of piracy throughout the Verge.

The only historically surprising thing about Silesian piracy is its duration. Most serious outbreaks of historical piracy last a relatively short period of time; ten to thirty years. The buccaneers of the Caribbean were active from 1650 through 1680. The Golden Age of Piracy, occurred after the War of Spanish Succession, running from 1716 to 1726. Piracy flaring up in 1816 following the Napoleonic Wars was squelched by 1830. In Silesia, piracy is endemic for at least four hundred years. The only comparable historical examples of century-long piracy on earth are the Barbary States. The Barbary pirates were openly state-sponsored, not freelance. Silesian systems openly supporting piracy in the manner of Barbary States would have been crushed by neighboring Manticore or the Andermani Empire.

The explanation is that, in the Honorverse, Silesia has misfortune of being in a piracy Goldilocks zone. Individual planets are not so rich that they seek to eliminate piracy, while other Silesian planets are so poor as to make piracy profitable. Piracy depends on trade. The Silesian Confederacy is rich enough to generate interstellar trade, yet no Silesian nation is rich enough to impose its will on its neighbors even if it wants to stop piracy. When a star nation begins acquiring wealth it becomes a target for its neighbors’ pirates. There are a lot of competing sovereignties, offering pirates a choice of shelters. This normally leads to a downward economic spiral, in which competing states eventually beggar each other through piracy. Very poor cultures cannot attract enough trade to make piracy (except on the lowest level) profitable. In the Honorverse, those star nations frequently lose the capability of maintaining interstellar spacecraft, losing the ability to even become pirates. Piracy dies away.

But the Silesian Confederation has two rich neighboring star nations, Manticore and the Andermani Empire, which seek out Silesian markets. This ensures a steady supply of potential prizes. Piracy and trade keeps Silesian planets from becoming too poor, so the cycle continues. At least until its neighbors get tired enough to put an end to the game. Rich cultures (such as nineteenth-century CE Great Britain or twentieth-century PD Manticore) make money through trade. Piracy inhibits trade, so those cultures eliminate piracy—as happens in the Honorverse in 1920 PD, when Manticore split the Silesian Coalition with the Andermani Empire.

There are other forms of piracy in the Honorverse, also with historical precedents. Following the Manchu conquest of China, surviving elements of the losing Ming government took to the sea. With no legitimate way to survive, they established floating states financed through piracy. They maintained fleets that numbered in the hundreds and lasted centuries. The Victorian Royal Navy suppressed these pirates, but some survived until shortly after World War II.

Following the overthrow of the Peoples’ Republic of Haven and its replacement with the old republic, remnants of Haven’s State Security Naval Forces attempt a similar brand of piracy. Fleeing the hangman’s noose or lifetime imprisonment, they take their ships a-roving in the Verge. They appear in several stories as individual freebooters. Others act in concert, hoping to gain enough wealth and combat strength to return to Haven and reinstitute the People’s Republic.

Where Honorverse piracy does not exist is as important as where it does. Piracy, at least under normal circumstances, does not occur within the core planets of the Solarian League, within the Republic of Haven, or inside established parts of the Star Kingdom/Empire of Manticore. This is consistent with historical precedent. These nations live on interstellar trade. Piracy reduces trade profits, and the cost of restraining piracy is far outweighed by increased trade revenue. Even the kleptocrats running the Solarian League’s bureaucracy find suppressing piracy more profitable than permitting it, at least in the League’s core planets. Protectorates are on their own, and protected only to the extent that they return revenue.

Weber’s Honorverse is not the only Baen Books series in which piracy plays an element, just one where it gets explored comprehensively. Piracy is in the background of Lois McMasters Bujold’s Vorkiosigan stories, more hinted at than the subject of stories. Rescuing hostages from pirates frames the opening of Memory, where Miles begins his transition from a military leader to an interstellar version of Lord Peter Wimsey. But piracy is a spice used sparingly by Bujold. Possibly it is because pirates offer too little challenge to Miles. Possibly this is because in Bujold’s future there is too little opportunity for large scale piracy to flourish. Its star nations, such as Barrayar and Cetaganda, tend to view pirates as good practice for their star fleets and quash them when they arise.

Someone else who often weaves piracy into his tales is David Drake. Space pirates provide background in Drake’s Royal Cinnabar Navy (RCN) series, featuring Cinnabar aristocrats Daniel Leary and Adele Mundy in a Jack Aubrey-Stephen Maturin relationship. Since the series is space opera in a society loosely based on Republican Rome and Georgian Britain, space piracy is bound to make an appearance.

Space piracy appears in the margins of that series’ universe. As might be expected, neither of the series’ two major star nations—the Republic of Cinnabar or the Alliance of Free States—tolerate piracy within their core space. Rather, it appears in regions where their power is thin, what Leary calls “the back of beyond.” Piracy remains endemic in these regions. As Drake has one of his characters reflect, “When a ship got far enough from civilized words, whether it was a pirate or a trader depended on its immediate circumstances”—much as it did on Earth throughout history.

Where piracy appears, the people live a Hobbesian nightmare. In these regions, life is a war of every man against every man, and matches Hobbes’s description of being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This is best illustrated in the two novels where piracy plays a significant role: Lieutenant Leary, Commanding and Though Hell Should Bar the Way.

In Lieutenant Leary, Commanding, Daniel Leary is sent to Strymon, a loyal, but distant Cinnabar ally. Strymon is close to a set of inhabited stellar systems known as the Selma Cluster. It is also known as the Pirate Cluster due to endemic piracy. Piracy is fostered by the primitiveness of the cluster’s planets, the poverty of its inhabitants, and the nearby interstellar trade routes, including those between Strymon and Cinnabar.

While Strymon inhibited piracy previous to Leary’s appearance, the Strymon government current when the novel starts has reduced antipiracy patrols, largely due to influence from Cinnabar shipping interests. This reduces competition for Cinnabar’s shippers. They buy immunity from the pirates, paying protection money, which regional shippers, including those from Strymon, cannot afford. More goods get shipped in Cinnabar spaceships, and fewer in Strymon bottoms, with Cinnabar shippers covering the extra costs by raising shipping rates. Strymon’s economy suffers, but not the profits of its leaders or Cinnabar interests.

It is the classic historical formula for piracy outbreaks. Conditions foster piracy while local authorities ignore its damage. It was the model followed by buccaneers of the Caribbean during the mid-1600s. The first buccaneers were impoverished: men who made a living drying beef to sell (they used frames called buccans, from which the name buccaneer came). Driven out of Hispaniola by the Spanish, they took to small boats capturing Spanish ships through boarding. They formed loose associations, led by the most powerful and successful captains like John Morgan and Francois L'Ollonais. Then they sold their captures in Jamaica and Tortuga, actions permitted by local officials profiting from the sales.

Drake follows this model in Lieutenant Leary, Commanding. There pirates operate from small 300-ton cutters, armed with baskets of rockets intended to immobilize their prey so they can be captured. Like the buccaneers, they operate under command of the most powerful and charismatic leader in loose confederations. Just like the buccaneers, they allow themselves to be recruited to fight in national wars (Cinnabar against the Alliance) and quickly abandon the alliance when it becomes unprofitable. It is a realistic depiction of the type of life the buccaneers led, and other pirates throughout the ages—from Roman-era Mediterranean pirates to the Sea Dyaks of the sixteenth- through nineteenth-century South China Sea.

Drake uses another model of piracy in Though Hell Should Bar the Way, that of the Barbary Pirates. The viewpoint character, a young Cinnabar spaceman named Roy Olfetrie, gets shanghaied off a ship commanded by Leary only to have the ship on which he was placed captured by pirates from ben Yusuf. Olfetrie has three choices: become a pirate himself, get ransomed by Cinnabar, or be sold as a slave. With no Cinnabar resident on ben Yusef and unwilling to turn his hand to piracy, Olfetrie is sold as a slave. He discovers a figurative beautiful princess, escapes with her, and takes part in a punitive raid on ben Yusuf.

Ben Yusuf has a society mirroring the Barbary States. As mentioned earlier, the Barbary Pirates were less traditional pirates than they were nation-states who made their living through piracy. They were small city-states scattered among the ports of North Africa: Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco. Their depredations were an extension of the religious wars fought in the Mediterranean between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries CE, although religion was more an excuse for piracy than a cause of it. Unlike most pirates, Barbary pirates were less interested in the cargoes they could steal than they were in collecting tribute and slaves.

Tribute came from nations that paid the Barbary States to spare their ships and ransoms paid to free the captives taken by these states. Nations with powerful navies often found it cheaper to pay an annual fee than to send a navy to deal with the pirates. The Barbary leaders carefully calibrated their demands to remain low enough that paying them off was cheaper than fighting them. As with the Selma Cluster pirates in Lieutenant Leary, Commanding, allowing Barbary pirates to prey on weaker nations’ shipping had the advantage of increasing goods shipped on the powerful nations’ vessels.

Beyond money, the Barbary pirates valued slaves. Their attitude was one of why work when through fighting you can force someone else to do your hard physical labor. That included forcing others to provide sexual pleasure. Eventually, though, the more powerful naval nations—led by the United States but imitated after the end of the Napoleonic Wars by Britain, France, and Spain—put an end to Barbary piracy.

Drake also featured a form of piracy in his Reaches trilogy. Originally published by Ace and reprinted by Baen in an omnibus edition, the three books in the series—Igniting the Reaches, Through the Breach, and Fireships—are loosely based on the exploits of Sir Francis Drake. David Drake intended it as light space opera, like the RNC series. It did not turn out that way. The stories are extremely hard-edged.

That is because Francis Drake and his times were hard-edged. Francis Drake was an outstanding and capable individual, but at his core he was a pirate. He had justification. He was a self-made man who rose from poverty to owning his own ship. Then he almost loses it—and his life—to what he viewed as Spanish treachery. He never forgave that. Francis Drake became a pirate because it was the best way for him to get revenge and get rich at the same time. He got both, as well as fame.

But piracy requires doing nasty things. Francis Drake was gentlemanly and chivalrous. After capturing Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Senora d la Concepción (better known to history as Cacafuego), he released the Spanish crew, rewarding them by allowing each common sailor to keep a fistful of silver coins—the equivalent of several years pay for a common sailor. (He could afford it. Golden Hind was so loaded with treasure cargo had to be reduced.) Yet he was ruthless when necessary, and often self-serving.

One of the delights of David Drake’s fiction is the way he weaves actual history into his tales. At the same time, he follows the logic of a historical setting with honesty as ruthless as anything done by his historical namesake. Historical pirates, even Francis Drake, and even when Francis Drake acted as an agent for his government, are essentially thieves. Theft is justifiable under extreme and limited circumstances. Pushed beyond certain limits piracy loses any nobility and becomes villainy.

In the RNC stories, the pirates are bad guys. The good guys may use them—as Leary did at Strymon—to further good ends. Then, as honor permits, they are abandoned (or abandon the good guys) once they are no longer needed. Either that, or, as in Though Hell Should Bar the Way, they are villains against which the heroes contend. In The Reaches, David Drake makes the pirates the good guys—and that required desperate circumstances, where there was no other choice than piracy. It is unsurprising that the series veered from its creator’s intention of light space opera.

Desperation of this sort drives Poul Andersen’s space piracy novel The Star Fox. In it, the Aleriona, a sentient, non-human, space-travelling race, conquer the human-inhabited planet New Europe. The Aleriona claim the inhabitants are all dead. The human World Federation of Earth, intent on peace at any price, accepts the Alerionan claim at face value. Accepting the human population has died means liberating them is impossible, and any punitive action against Aleriona is just vengeance. Earth can ignore the whole thing.

Gunnar Helm, a former Terran space naval officer, gets proof the inhabitants of New Europe are still alive and that the World Federation is ignoring this evidence. To draw attention to New Europe’s cause—and hopefully trigger a confrontation between Earth and Aleriona—Helm illegally arms a spaceship, the Fox II, and sets off as a pirate.

Helm has a letter of marque and reprisal, authorizing him on behalf of a government to seize spaceships of a power hostile to that government. Technically that makes Helm a privateer rather than a pirate. However, Andersen’s future includes the 1856 Treaty of Paris in its past. This treaty outlawed privateering. Helm’s letter is a legal fig leaf allowing him to argue what he is doing is not piracy. Helm knows he has become a pirate, but really does not care. His cause is just, which keeps him from becoming a villain.

The Star Fox is extremely realistic in its depiction of the use of letters of marque as a cover for piracy. During the 1820s, as Spanish colonies broke away from Spain, revolutionary governments issued letters of marque to owners of any armed ship who would support their cause. Pirates like the Lafitte brothers and Louis-Michel Aury accepted these commissions, but did not limit their seizures to ships owned by target nations. Possessing a letter of marque prevented the United States Navy or Royal Navy from seizing an armed ship as a pirate unless the ship was caught in the act of piracy.

The classic 1960s space piracy novel has to be H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking. Set at a point in Piper’s future history between the collapse of the Terran Federation and the rise of the Galactic Empire, it captures the Space Viking adventures of Lukas Trask.

The Space Vikings are raiders from the Sword Worlds, settled by the final holdouts of the Systems States Alliance, which rebelled against the Terran Federation. Refusing to surrender to the Federation at the collapse of the System States Alliance, its surviving naval ships departed known space and fled deep into uncharted space where they would not be found. The planets they settled are named after famous swords, many of them fictional, and they established a feudal society.

After centuries of isolation, a Sword World starship rediscovered a planet from the Terran Federation—returning to report the Old Federation had collapsed and devolved into barbarism. Like their namesakes, the Dark Age Vikings from Scandinavia, the Sword World Space Vikings make their living raiding decivilized planets of the Old Federation. It is their main industry. Much like Portugal in Earth’s Age of Exploration, so many Sword Worlders depart their homes for better opportunities that Sword World home society is getting debilitated.

The novel opens with Andre Dunnan shooting up Trask’s wedding, killing Trask’s bride and seriously wounding its hero, Lukas Trask. Dunnan then pirates the Space Viking starship his uncle (and Trask’s overlord) Duke Angus of Gram has been building to get Gram into the Space Viking business. Trask turns Space Viking to avenge his dead bride, intent on hunting down her killer. Trask finances the completion of a second ship as a means of tracking Dunnan down.

Trask is an unlikely Space Viking. At heart, Trask is a builder, not a destroyer. His first act as a Space Viking is to establish a base on Tanith, an Old Federation planet that devolved to the gunpowder and ox-cart level after the Big War. He spends the rest of the book re-civilizing Tanith. While he follows up by successfully and profitably raiding three planets, Trask then turns around and turns these planets into trading partners. He spends the rest of the novel, despite a satisfying abundance of shoot- ’em-up battles, abandoning piracy and building a civilization.

Trask’s behavior highlights an essential contradiction built into Space Viking. It is not a Viking saga recast in a science fiction setting. Nor does it really hold a parallel, except very loosely with the buccaneers of the West Indies, as a character in Piper’s story “The Edge of the Knife” imagines. Rather, it presents a highly improbable collision between technologies and societies.

The Sword World planets have tremendous technological advantages over the Old Federation planets they raid. The Sword Worlds have faster-than-light drive, nuclear power, and contragravity. The Old Federation planets they raid almost always lack at least two of those three technologies. Except for parity in military technology, Vikings and buccaneers lacked this type of technological advantage over their victims. Historically when there was the level of technological disparity seen in Space Viking, conquest and displacement resulted. Piracy and raiding occurs when the pirates are too weak to take over. The Spanish conquered the Aztecs and Incas. European settlers displaced the Indians of North America. Europeans (joined by Japan in Asia) colonized Africa, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. Robbery yielded part of the value of a territory. Conquest yielded all of it. Vikings established kingdoms in Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Normandy, and Sicily, but unless the Vikings assimilated into the population, those kingdoms did not last long due to their lack of overall technological advantage.

Some conquest occurs in Space Viking. Old Federation planets like Jagannath, Hoth, and Xochitl are ruled by Space Viking leaders. After 350 years of contact (when Space Viking begins) between the Sword Worlds and Old Federation, there should have been much more of it. If not that, much less raiding and a lot more trading. Trask demonstrates trade is a quick way to wealth. It grows the economic pie, while mere piracy is a zero-sum game. Sword World traders should have displaced Sword World raiders long before Trask arrived on the scene.

Space Viking’s historical weaknesses take little away from its entertainment value, however. Space Viking is an enormously entertaining story. Sometimes it is better to suspend your disbelief rather than spoil a good adventure tale.

The Pirates of Zan by Murray Leinster (originally published in Astounding Science Fiction as “The Pirates of Ersatz”) is another example of how a space piracy story can be historically unrealistic, yet enormously entertaining. The story’s hero, Bron Hoddan, left his home planet of Zan, a planet notorious for piracy, and becomes an electrical engineer. He becomes a good one, too good.

His brilliant innovations threaten the status quo of the stultifyingly perfect society of Walden, so he gets framed for murder. Fleeing Walden for the feudalistic planet Darth, Hoddan becomes a reluctant hero, saving maiden fair through utterly practical engineering. Then he encounters a set of swindled colonists, which he decides to help out. This, of course, requires help from his pirate relatives on Zan.

The novel is fast-paced, entertaining and funny as hell. Hoddan is an improbable combination of hapless and clever—Hank Hill mixed with MacGyver. His naiveté leads him into jams only his ingenuity can get him out of.

In The Pirates of Zan, Leinster flips everything. Most boys want to run away from home to become pirates. Bron Hoddan runs away from being a pirate to become an engineer. The pirates are the good guys, and the galactic government is devoted to disrupting the status quo on planets when things become too static, even when that stasis is pleasant.

The pirates of Zan are as realistic as the pirates of Penzance. Piracy does not pay in the Leinster universe. The pirates have to hide anything they capture and cannot use it lest the authorities execute them. So they risk their lives acquiring loot they cannot use. They would be better off abandoning piracy, and using their native cleverness to acquire wealth honestly. Moreover, they know this.

The inaccuracy does not matter. The Pirates of Zan is farce, not drama. The logical inconsistencies are what make the novel fun. And that may be the real lesson in all of this. Fiction is supposed to entertain. If a story is unentertaining, it is not worth reading. Fiction can inform as well as entertain. All of the stories I cite in this piece manage to do both. But the lessons of Space Viking and The Pirates of Zan have less to do with piracy than with the human condition.

Even in the tales written by Weber, Bujold, Drake and Andersen, where space piracy is accurately depicted, the stories are not primarily about piracy. They are about people in challenging situations, where some of those situations are created by space piracy. And they are all, first and foremost, entertaining reads.

Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, amateur historian and model-maker, lives in League City, Texas. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a BS in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, and spent most of the next thirty years as a space navigator and a software engineer on the Shuttle program. He is also the author of over 30 published books, all focusing on history, with 21 related to maritime and naval history. Find his website at marklardas.com.