Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Reading
Marshal Zeringue blogs on books, and he has two separate posts up on what I'm reading at the moment.
From blog posts that snagged on my fur this week:
God after Newton: In fact, though it is rarely discussed in history books, the influence of the conservation of momentum on theological practice is fairly evident.
War and love, man: One thing that stands out is how many of these people were enjoying themselves - the transition from ordinary routine, Catholic morality or Protestant propriety, to intrigue, violence, and nervous hedonism was clearly a liberation for a lot of people. In many ways, it was yet another version of the 1968 generation; just conditioned by history to be a peculiarly horrible one.
Telling it like it is: Any ostensibly “political” text that makes reference to “the ‘zine I used to publish” or “my old punk rock band” is almost guaranteed to parade the author’s stupidity and ignorance, and indeed, this text does not disappoint.
Where the 'protest babes' of Beirut went. (Via.)
Coming Attractions
A few years ago, I got a commission to write a short story for an anthology called The Cthulhuian Singularity. The idea for the anthology was sparked by Charles Stross's story 'A Colder War', which mashed Singularity memes with Lovecraftian horror. That story was to be included in the anthology - the rest were to be original explorations of a similar theme. So I went ahead and wrote 'The Vorkuta Event', a story quite unlike anything I'd written before or have written since. I found it remarkable how adopting a voice - in this case a mannered, lettered, slightly archaic voice - and a technique (the story within a story, both narrators being less than reliable) made the story flow easily, almost inevitably, as if some strange force had taken possession of my fingers.
For various unspeakable reasons that man was not meant to know, the publication of this anthology has dragged like a shoggoth's tail. I'm delighted to report that the shoggoth now has a firecracker under its ass, and the eldritch volume is expected to burst on an uncomprehending world late this year or early next, when the stars are right. You can reserve your copy by buying it here.
I also have (fairly short) short stories in Seeds of Change (forthcoming August 2008) and The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three (forthcoming 2009).
The rifles of Rome
In her study of this machine there are two things Rihll accomplishes of particular note (apart from producing a fully up-to-date synthesis of the whole of catapult history that reflects all the new developments in the field that few careful observers may already have known about from otherwise scattered reading). First, she establishes beyond doubt that catapult technology advanced considerably and importantly during the early Roman Empire (something that had often been denied), including the best case yet that they developed the metal-framed inswinger catapult, greatly magnifying power output (and leaving many modern reconstructions obsolete). Secondly, she also establishes beyond doubt the widespread use of small hand-held torsion catapults. In other words, the ancient equivalent of rifles (examples with three-foot stocks, for example, being commonplace), and even handguns (with models as small as nine or ten inches in total length).And yes, the Romans did use lead bullets.
The latter is perhaps the most astonishing. Expert observers will already have heard of growing evidence of Roman advances, but might have missed entirely the evidence of small catapults--yet as Rihll reveals, the evidence is surprisingly vast, if you know where to look for it, and what to look for. These weapons were apparently abundantly supplied in the Roman legions, and were so powerful that a typical stone-throwing smallarm could penetrate a human body with a lead bullet at a hundred yards [...]
Wonders of the market
Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St James’s office trying to understand the credit crisis that had erupted over the previous four months. I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm – around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt – for the insurance to be paid out.You can insure against the revolution? Who knew? The rest of the article is less intriguing, though if you've always wanted to know what a ‘single-factor Gaussian copula’ is, here's your chance.
I asked one investment banker what might cause half of North America’s top corporations to default. No ordinary economic recession or natural disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it: no hurricane, for example, and not even ‘the big one’, a catastrophic earthquake devastating California. All he could think of was ‘a revolutionary Marxist government in Washington’. That’s not a likely scenario, yet the cost of insuring against it had shot up ten-fold. Normally one can buy $10 million of end-of-the-world insurance for between two and three thousand dollars a year. By early last November, the prices quoted were between twenty and thirty thousand, and even then it was difficult to buy in quantity – at least, said the banker, ‘not from anyone you trusted’.