Hikes, Black Ship, Nature, and the China System

View 717 Wednesday, March 21, 2012

The Secret of Black Ship Island by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes is now available on Nook and Amazon Kindle. This is a novella – a bit more than 40,000 words – set on Avalon, the first human interstellar colony, and takes place in the time between the novels The Legacy of Heorot and Beowulf’s Children. There’s a short preface by the authors, and the story will tell you why it is not an explicit part of the cultural background in Beowulf’s Children. It’s the story of a colossal generation gap, and some consequences of that. There’s also a new alien, designed by us with help from Jack Cohen. We liked it.

NOTE THAT I first posted this as The Legend of Black Ship Island, which is illustrative of the memory lapses I have come to hate but expect. It’s SECRET, and it’s still a good story. I get things right eventually, but I am not as often right the first time as I used to be. Ah. well.

And my daughter gets a favorable mention/citation in this Nature article: http://www.nature.com/news/satellites-expose-8-000-years-of-civilization-1.10257

Niven and I hiked up to the top of Mulholland today. Our first since I was laid out by whatever has kept me down since January. I made it, so I must be getting over it all, but it was pretty tough and the pollens were bad. Got a lot of good notes and scene ideas for our book. Profitable morning, very much so.

I came back from lunch to find a stockbroker alert about Chinese Credit Default Swaps experiences price anomalies after Internet rumors of a coup in Peking. I don’t really have much in stocks, and none in credit default swaps, but I do get some of the broker alerts. This is the first one like this I have seen in a while. The latest I can get on the subject is that no one knows. I remember similar rumors surfacing every few years. The People’s Liberation Army has enormous stakes in the Chinese economy, and armies have somewhat different goals, ideals, and honor systems than parties do. On the other hand the Chinese party system is systematic and thorough, and I recall few precedents for this extensive – and surprisingly well thought out – party structuring. It’s far more pervasive than anything Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin ever put in place. Stalin’s system teetered after his death, and the succession apparently depended entirely on the personal skills of some of the highest participants. The Nomenklatura began dismantling Stalin’s party system, and over time were successful; then their system gradually crumbled as the economic situation of the USSR remained static and then crumbled. China’s economic boom is said to be faltering, but that’s a slowing of growth, not an actual collapse. There is no shortage of goods in the large cities. Shops thrive, luxury goods are available to walk in customers for cash, and there is nothing like the extensive secondary economic/distribution system that marked the last decades of the Soviet Union Nomenklatura system.

Best guess is that it’s all rumor, but you can never know for sure. One reader sent me this link http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/21/inside-the-ring-436080940/ with the comment that we live in interesting times.