Starswarm

View 706 Tuesday, December 20, 2011

My novel STARSWARM is now available as an eBook on Amazon and elsewhere. The eBook edition contains the Introduction that was in the hardbound print edition but was dropped in later paperback and quality paperback editions. The introduction has some memorabilia about Mr. Heinlein and my mad friend Dan Mac Lean on how the book came to be written. Starswarm is usually classed as a ‘juvenile’, and it was certainly written to appeal to that market, but I followed Robert Heinlein’s rules on ‘juveniles’ when I wrote it: no sex scenes, and as Robert used to say, a juvenile has young protagonists and you can put in more science and explanations of what’s going on in juvenile works; which is to say it’s a good story, and has always appealed to adults as well as to the 10 – 15 year olds it was sort of written for. It has long been one of my favorite books, and I found when I proofread the eBook edition, it holds up quite well on the science including computers. It takes place on a frontier planet and the technology is quite reasonable for such a place. Obviously when an author reviews his own book the recommendation is predictable: Recommended. Also available for Nook. (That may still be in process).

The news media report an uptick in President Obama’s popularity. The payroll tax cut and the Keystone pipeline issues are said to be a part of that, although I am not sure why this makes the President more popular.

I find that the Keystone Pipeline issue is not well understood, and I’ll do a short explanation of it as I understand it when I get back from my walk. Meanwhile Thomas Sowell, who is on my short list of people I pay attention to, has endorsed Newt Gingrich in a short essay on the importance of the upcoming election. He begins with statements I certainly agree with:

If Newt Gingrich were being nominated for sainthood, many of us would vote very differently from the way we would vote if he were being nominated for a political office.

What the media call Gingrich’s “baggage” concerns largely his personal life and the fact that he made a lot of money running a consulting firm after he left Congress. This kind of stuff makes lots of talking points that we will no doubt hear, again and again, over the next weeks and months.

More on all of this when I get back from my walk.

Everyone is speculating about North Korea, which means that no one knows. That includes the US Department of State. One State department official has said that Kim Jong Un’s uncle, Jang Sung Taek, who is married to Kim Jong Il’s younger sister, will be the temporary ruler while Kim Jon Un learns the dictator business. The aunt and uncle were prominently at the public ceremony of homage to Kim Jon Il’s body. There was no sign of Kim Jong Un’s two brothers, one of whom lives in Macao.

Assuming that North Korea is organized and governed much as Stalin’s Russia is, there will be three power structures: Party, Army, and State Security or secret police. They cooperate, but there is rivalry: after the death of Stalin the Army and the Party cooperated to prevent Beria from assuming control of the government, and it was a very near thing, decided when Beria fumbled in an attempt to draw an automatic pistol during a meeting of the Presidium at which Khrushchev accused Beria of being a career hack with no devotion to the Party, and two colonels loyal to Marshal Zhukov came into the meeting room and seized the chief of the secret police. The official story has Beria tried, convicted, and executed in the following weeks, but there is evidence that Beria was shot in the corridor just outside the Presidium Chambers. Beria’s NKVD loyalists were guarding the Kremlin but he had not brought them into the meeting. Apparently North Korea’s story will not be quite that dramatic.

There are no reliable reports of dissent within the Military or the Party. Even less is known about the North Korean secret police. Surely there are technocrats who understand the cost of the dictatorship and the excessive military spending, and the need for economic reforms, but the only sources of information the west has are dissenters, and none of them has ever told a story of any kind of dissent, organized or not. North Korea remains a hermit state, but it seems extraordinarily stable, a refutation to theory of the inevitability of revolt and reform.

Meanwhile, there are reports that a dozen demonstrators have been killed in Cairo as the street mob demands that the military step down and turn over power to someone else. The Army claims that it has not killed anyone. It is not clear who is in charge of the security forces.

We live in interesting times.