Babylon;
World War Z. Each story destroyed the fragile fabric of modern life in its own way, but all presented me with the question that makes post-apocalyptic fiction so alluring: if the niceties and nuances, the comforts and conventions of modern living were suddenly stripped away, who would we be, really?
No book made me wonder this more than
The Postman (a fantastic book not to be judged by the unfortunate movie adaptation starring that wrecker of post-apocalyptic books, Kevin Costner). In it, a humble civil servant finds meaning post-end-of-civilization through carrying out the seemingly simple task of delivering the mail. There is an evil warlord, and somewhere along the way we find out what the warlord used to be in the before times. Our times. He was an insurance salesman. I imagined a warlord somewhere in me too, beneath the couch potato with a penchant for avoiding the planks and 15-minute high-intensity interval training video I keep promising myself I’ll do.
Transfer Orbit
Waking the Leviathan
The story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to blockbuster TV series
, before Syfy debuted its adaptation of the series in December. I’m reprinting it now with some minor edits.
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Image: Alcon
It’s March 2015, and I am standing on the bridge of a starship. The crew work stations look worn, the walls are covered with warning signs, and the grated floor looks like something designed to be functional. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that I was standing on a real ship, hurtling through space. Instead, I am on the set of a new television series, a location that, until now, only existed in words on a page.
There are many reasons one might have reservations about Robert Heinlein’s 1966
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress the peculiar stats, the reliance on a nigh-all powerful AI on the rebels’ side, the inexplicable moment where the narrator creepily objectifies a dead tween as she is violently killed but for me, Heinlein’s use of kinetic weapons ranks especially high on my list.
I know a lot of you are too young to know what I am talking about the book is, after all, ancient beyond measure so a quick explanation: in the novel, the rebels commandeer a linear accelerator to lob cargo pods full of rocks to the Earth. The shock and awe inspired by the orbital bombardment helps to sway the Earth into granting the Moon its independence.
But what if we had three hands? Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle s 1974 book, The Mote in God’s Eye, features an alien species with three arms. It has two “normal” hands and a stronger, but less dexterous one called the “gripping hand.” The gripping hand was their most powerful alternative. This book comes to mind when I think about what s in store for 2021: • On one hand, we have some extraordinarily good reasons for optimism. • On the other hand are several potentially severe problems. • On the far stronger gripping hand, the coronavirus could continue to overwhelm everything else. Viruses spread until something stops them. We now have some vaccines to deprive the virus of new hosts. If enough of us get vaccinated, it will have nowhere to go and recede to manageable levels.
January 17, 2021 | The Grip Tightens
John Mauldin John Mauldin is a renowned financial expert, a
New York Times best-selling author, and a pioneering online commentator. Each week, over 1 million readers turn to Mauldin for his penetrating view on Wall Street, global markets, and economic history.
This is part two of my 2021 forecast series. I began last week (you can read it here) discussing a three-handed alien race envisioned by science fiction writers Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. They had two regular hands and a third “gripping hand,” which though less dexterous, was far stronger. My analogy was that the COVID-19 vaccine has us in the Gripping Hand. Any forecast for 2021 must first consider this decidedly “known unknown.”