Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion
This topic is about
The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination
Mad Scientists Guide discussion
>
"We Interrupt This Broadcast" by Mary Robinette Kowal
date
newest »
newest »
I'm not a big fan of Kowal. On those occasions when she writes science fiction, it's always "soft" SF. I don't mind soft SF, but I think Kowal has a tendency towards full-on treacle. (e.g., "Lady Astronaut of Mars".) This story is no exception on either score.
Alternate history where Dewey won over Truman. A Pentagon scientist (the mandatory mad scientist) is planning some unauthorized modifications to an American satellite launch, since that satellite is carrying a nuclear weapon to be used as a orbital bombardment threat. Opposed to the planned American hegemony, he plans to use the nuke to drop an asteroid on Washington, DC, in the theory that that will bring the world closer together.
(His logic is a little like that of the old Outer Limits episode where scientists create an alien to give the people of Earth a common enemy. Harking back to the previous story in this anthology, "Rocks Fall," it certainly ups the stakes on the idea of killing a few people now to save many more later, given that in this case "few" it is probably in the millions.)
Does Kowal really expect the reader to feel sorry for her mad scientist mass murderer team up at the end? See my previous remarks on treacle.
Asides:
One of the things Kowal usually avoids in her rare forays into sci-fi is worrying about actual science. (No orbital launcher is capable of sending the payload to escape velocity; it's all about fuel & weight. She might as well assert someone hacked the software of a car so it would go 300mph*. This is a scifi B movie. Also the idea of calculating an asteroid deflection to such accuracy, even today, is absurd, much less with a 1401.)
It's also interesting when an author writes about a period I lived in but which is history to her. I'm not sure whether to give her partial credit for looking up a few things, or deduct points for not researching further. E.g., nobody who used an 026 called it a printer/keyboard except on an invoice from IBM; it's a "keypunch" or "cardpunch". The
Kowal's time period is messed up. If Dewey had defeated Truman, his (assumed) 2nd term (displacing Ike's 1st term) would've ended Jan 1957, almost a year before the first man-made satellite (Sputnik). And the 1401 wasn't introduced until 1959. No half credit for this sloppy research.
* I suppose you might actually be able to get a car to go 300mph if you drove it off a very high cliff. :)
Alternate history where Dewey won over Truman. A Pentagon scientist (the mandatory mad scientist) is planning some unauthorized modifications to an American satellite launch, since that satellite is carrying a nuclear weapon to be used as a orbital bombardment threat. Opposed to the planned American hegemony, he plans to use the nuke to drop an asteroid on Washington, DC, in the theory that that will bring the world closer together.
(His logic is a little like that of the old Outer Limits episode where scientists create an alien to give the people of Earth a common enemy. Harking back to the previous story in this anthology, "Rocks Fall," it certainly ups the stakes on the idea of killing a few people now to save many more later, given that in this case "few" it is probably in the millions.)
Does Kowal really expect the reader to feel sorry for her mad scientist mass murderer team up at the end? See my previous remarks on treacle.
Asides:
One of the things Kowal usually avoids in her rare forays into sci-fi is worrying about actual science. (No orbital launcher is capable of sending the payload to escape velocity; it's all about fuel & weight. She might as well assert someone hacked the software of a car so it would go 300mph*. This is a scifi B movie. Also the idea of calculating an asteroid deflection to such accuracy, even today, is absurd, much less with a 1401.)
It's also interesting when an author writes about a period I lived in but which is history to her. I'm not sure whether to give her partial credit for looking up a few things, or deduct points for not researching further. E.g., nobody who used an 026 called it a printer/keyboard except on an invoice from IBM; it's a "keypunch" or "cardpunch". The
Kowal's time period is messed up. If Dewey had defeated Truman, his (assumed) 2nd term (displacing Ike's 1st term) would've ended Jan 1957, almost a year before the first man-made satellite (Sputnik). And the 1401 wasn't introduced until 1959. No half credit for this sloppy research.
* I suppose you might actually be able to get a car to go 300mph if you drove it off a very high cliff. :)
I was thinking about the comment about the historical innacuracies. We start with a premise that history has changed, so one could infer that the timeline with which a certain technology would be first made available could also change.However, that's a tricky line for an author to walk. You'd have to justify changing it (e.g. because X was in power he was more technology minded so put more funding towards it so it came out a couple years earlier) because otherwise it looks like you just didn't research it enough and/or simply ignored the inconvenience of the actual timeline.
Must admit reading this story reminded me of an old textbook of my father's in the basement about punchard programming. Though I develop software for a living myself, I can only date myself by saying I remember when floppy disks were actually floppy...
"We Interrupt This Broadcast" by Mary Robinette Kowal
From the scifi anthology The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination, part of our discussion of The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination anthology.