Stuck On The Drawing Board: Unbuilt British Commercial Aircraft Since 1945
Passenger planes made in Britain followed an almost exactly stereotypical British pattern: At first bold and trend-setting, then fell behind due to both luck and skill, finally becoming just an international cog. The could have beens and never weres of this are shown in Richard Payne’s Stuck on the Drawing Board.
This is a fun, if niche, book for aviation enthusiasts. The big problem from the nature of the planes it describes. For passenger planes that are all essentially just tubes with different capacities, VTOLs and odd shapes are the absolute most different you’re going to get.
But this isn’t the book’s fault, and you’re left with a fun look at what could have happened before the 707 and its successors crushed any hope of a full-scale British aviation industry.
So time for one of the biggest internet controversies surrounding the Warhammer 40k fandom. Note that I said “internet controversies”, not “controversies”. This post therefore might be controversial itself. Oh well.
This has to do with Female Space Marines. In-game, for basically all of 40ks solidified existence, the gene-seed that produces the super-space-knights who serve as the mascots of the setting only works with men. Games Workshop has been extremely strict and clear with this. Some online advocates have opposed this and wanted a change.
I’m pretty firmly in the the “no female space marines” category, and not just because my Imperial Guard doesn’t have this problem in the slightest.
“No female repre”-I’m sorry, she can’t hear you over the sound of her supertank’s engine.
I think one of my reasons is because a Space Marine has become a very specific thing. I would even argue that if you asked a layperson unfamiliar with the setting to describe one, you’d end up with either a Sister of Battle or a female Tempestus Scion (neither of which has any issue). Those can and do exist without any issue. Female techpriestesses can and do exist without issue, if you like someone so covered in augumentations that their initial number of chromosomes becomes irrelevant. Female Eldar and Tau can and do exist…
In fact, this is the diversity argument I have. If female space marines were adopted, they’d actually make the setting significantly less diverse. It means (even) more of the already pushed setting mascots and (even) less of the factions where this isn’t an issue.
(As for diversity in the setting overall, I have three big takes:
It’s still a pulpy sci-fantasy kitchen sink. Like Catachans are not anthropologist-approved examples of life in an inhumanly harsh jungle, they’re 80s action stars en masse. This is the least hard sci-fi setting imaginable.
Diversity means something a lot different in 41st millennium terms than it does in 2nd millennium ones.
SISTERS DO NOT JUST HAVE WHITE HAIR AND BLACK ARMOR, THEY HAVE AN ENTIRE RAINBOW OF COLORS IN THEIR MANY ORDERS, GW PLEASE REMEMBER THIS. )
For pretty much my entire Stable Diffusion use, I’ve been using the A1111 web interface. Now Forge, a newer and faster/more efficient version of it, is out. I’ve installed it. The problem is moving over, both literally (ie all my extensions/models) and metaphorically.
William Kinsolving’s 1983 novel Raven is an aviation pop epic about one Buck Faulkner and his family. Faulkner starts his aviation company in the 1930s, which starts with a 21 seat airliner and moves up. Like many other traditional pop epics of the time, we get a mixture of semi-spicy personal drama and big picture discussion about airline orders.
This is no technothriller and Kinsolving is clearly just modeling the planes on famous existing ones. However, (and this sounds like faint praise), he at least knows the basics. This is no Ian Slater. Some of the names may be a little goofy, but that’s it.
As for the novel itself, it’s a good 51% book. It’s not the absolute greatest, but as a brief time passer, it works. Plus it manages to avoid at least some of the pitfalls of authors writing about technology, so it has that in its favor.
Nuclear Safeguards, Security, and Nonproliferation
Every so often I get a textbook that is not really the best to conventionally review at all, much less amongst cheap thrillers. Nuclear Safeguards, Security, and Nonproliferation is one of those books. I feel a little guilty reviewing it because the target audience is scientists and the like who know the math, physics, and engineering subject matter a loooooooooooooooooooooot more than an armchair enthusiast like myself. So yeah, a lot of this goes over my head. And that’s fine.
If the “Type 1 Academese” was understandable and inevitable, the “Type 2” is a legit point of criticism. Despite the fact that anyone who’s read a single piece on the modern history of South Africa would instantly grasp why the post-apartheid government gave up the nuclear weapons, the book explains this in a long and pretentious way. Where I think this is more than a stylistic issue is how it wouldn’t be easy to get its points across to a non-scientist, whereas other similarly dense works on the same topic are still more understandable.
I love Warhammer 40k and have some connection to mysteries, so getting Chris Wraight’s Warhammer Crime novel Bloodlines was obvious. Then I started reading it and felt disappointed. Now as a mystery novel, it’s 51% all right. If this was a contemporary or original sci-fi mystery, I wouldn’t think much more of it.
The problem is that it doesn’t take advantage of its setting. Now I’m not expecting or demanding an Ultramarine and an Ork on every corner, but this just never felt like a Warhammer 40k novel. It felt like a basic post-Blade Runner dark sci-fi city mystery only with more skulls and 40k terminology. Which didn’t make the book bad but did feel it wasted its potential.
Airplane manufacturing is a very tough process. Barring some strange point of divergence, it’s hard to avoid large airplane builders sorting out into a few giants. Yet airlines are another story altogether. It’s interesting how in the “Goldilocks businesses”, airplane builders and airlines fall on opposite disadvantageous ends.
For the manufacturers, it’s the “too many barriers to entry, thus you end up with a oligopoly” issue. For the airlines, where existing planes and even crews are just a few lease deals away, it’s the “too few barriers to entry, which leads to too many participants chasing too small a market”. In many cases both of these are unavoidable. (Novels, sadly, were the latter even before the rise of internet self-publishing).
What this means is that it’s incredibly easy to change the fates of the airlines, and even easier with a point of divergence after the large and successful deregulation of the late 1970s.
The name High Disaster is fitting for the 22nd (!) Penetrator novel. By now co-author Chet Cunningham had clearly gotten sick of the series. That was the first problem, though someone as prolific as him could have just powered through a contract potboiler. The second and worse problem is that the ‘kill the mobster’ plot had played out and the ‘kill the terrorist’ plot had not yet become big.
So most men’s adventure novels in that period simply ended, with the oil crises not exactly helping things either. Yet the Penetrator kept going like a large caliber tank shell penetrating through a BMD-1. You ended up with things like High Disaster, where the threat/villain is (without spoiling anything) not exactly overwhelming, and the big gimmick is…. wildfires. In the American West. Which is kind of like rain and floods in Southeast Asia.
To appreciate the highs of a genre, you need to see the lows. And that is the only reason I’d recommend this book.
The Hitman series of stealth video games involves super-clone assassin Agent 47 hitting various men (and women). The games are centered around disguises. 47 can be a master of disguise despite being a bald near-albino with a barcode tattoo on his head who’s tall enough to be a viable basketball player. It’s just video game logic. Anyway, Hitman Absolution is regarded as one of the worst in the series, albeit in a way that spawned the absolute best let’s play series I’ve ever watched:
There’s far more focus on story in this game, which would be interesting if it was good, but it isn’t. So let me explain just one series of events:
47 goes to “South Dakota” (the Danish IO Interactive devs do not know what South Dakota is and have apparently mistaken it with Texas). He’s there to pursue a genetically modified girl/hitwoman-to-be who’s been kidnapped.
47 on the streets of the South Dakota town kills several anachronistic greasers who are the friends of the man who kidnapped her. The connection is incredibly tenuous.
47 counter-kidnaps the kidnapper and kills him.
47 goes through an amazingly precarious entrance in an Uncharted/Splinter Cell hybrid that’s nothing like previous Hitman games. He goes this way to get to a supervillain lair.
47 kills three mad scientists in the supervillain lair, only one of which has the most tangential connection to the kidnapped girl.
47 leaves the lair and kills the giant hulking man who doubles as a luchador MMA fighter. While up to the player, he potentially disguises as the man’s opponent, beats him in a semi-fair cage fight to death, and then like every true master of disguise, takes off his mask in front of a large crowd.
47 stays at a hotel and fights off a group of hitwomen dressed as latex fetish nuns.
Finally, in an actually sensible plot plan, 47 finds the girl is in the hands of the sheriff and goes to the courthouse/prison/whatever to find her. In this part of the mission you can disguise yourself as a judge and beat people with a gavel.
This cannot last for master assassin 47 is (out of player control) surprised and captured by a creepy ineffectual sheriff. Instead of killing them the antagonists leave him tied to a chair like every good supervillain.
47 then escapes (SPOILER ALERT) and battles/sneaks through a wave of stormtroopers sent by the assassin agency. He pursues the sheriff, who has been wounded by said stormtroopers, to a church and finishes him off.
Finally 47 leaves “South Dakota” for the final showdown. And thus ends the arc. Somewhere Jon Land is going “uh, I think that’s too absurd”.
All this is punctuated by some of the worst cinematography ever, long after most games had figured out the basics. This gets to the point where one of the lets players reasonably called a cutscene in it the worst ever. What makes this strange is that publisher Square Enix basically invented the use of cinema in games. Or at least perfected it.
As for the actual game, it is a strange combination of cargo culted stealth movement through levels, occasional platforming, and a simplified, often made too easy version of the Hitman formula. It’s not unplayable or broken, but if you want Hitman, either the earlier Blood Money or the later remakes are vastly superior.
You might have notice me slowing down. This is because I’m in the final stretch of A Period of Cheating and want to devote more writing energy to working on that. So March may be sparse in terms of content.
Fuldapocalypse Fiction 