Review: The Last Republic

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The Last Republic

The alternate history of the beginnings of a war between a US and an independent, Iran-allied Utah/Deseret, The Last Republic is one of those books that is only distinguishable by its premise. It would be a medium-grade techno-thriller if it involved real places. Granted, given the comparative scarcity of technothrillers today, that would be praiseworthy (mildly), but it doesn’t, of course.

The bizarre alternate history, which is very much a soft AH (Iraq with a surviving Saddam is similar to real life Saudi Arabia in terms of relationship with the US, both sides use historical F-16s, etc…), is what makes this stand out. Still, I just don’t think the author took advantage of it as much as he could. Could that have made it worse? Quite possibly. But would it have made the book much more interesting? Quite possibly as well. As it stands, it’s a 51% book with weird sauce.

Technically Adept

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Probably the most iconic weapon associated with technical trucks is the Zu-23 double barrel 23mm AA gun. What I’ve found fascinating is the basic reason why.

There’s an interesting convergence here. First off, yes, it’s a very good medium autocannon that’s cheap and common enough that even the poorest can get them en masse. Its use in battle is obvious. Yet its its dimensions more than anything else that puts it in the goldilocks sweet spot.

On one hand, its big and heavy enough that it needs to be mounted on a vehicle to move quickly. But it’s light enough that it can be effectively operated from the back of a pickup truck. Function followed form.

Gor The Infamous

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A while ago on Fuldapocalypse I reviewed the first, comparably sane (but only comparably) entry in the “legendary” Gor series, Tarnsman of Gor. Since then, it quickly devolved into what it became infamous for. Which is to say, a series devoted entirely to talking about how the natural, right, and proper order of things is for men to be masters and women to be slaves. And I mean this literally.

One might think that Gor would have a tiny fig leaf of sword and planet adventure to go into ‘slave sleaze’. While true, it also has a tiny fig leaf of ‘slave sleaze’ to go into talking in gargantuan walls of text repeatedly saying the exact same monologue repeatedly. So why has it become so infamous?

I think there’s a few reasons. The first is that it had a degree of mainstream (by sci-fi standards) exposure. More “importantly”, it had a small degree of mainstream pretentiousness. So in its heyday (and in a smaller book market), you had this thing that acted like heroic fantasy and wasn’t honest enough to admit on the cover that it was smut. And it rubbed a lot of people quite reasonably the wrong way.

Review: Aviation Stories For Curious Kids

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Aviation Stories For Curious Kids

Reading a book made extensively with AI is a genuinely interesting feat for me. The illustrations in Aviation Stories For Curious Kids give it away from the start-diffusion image models are notoriously bad at making airplanes without an established outline. That the text parts follow the Q and A quiz model of “Here’s things in a whimsical tone, now a question” gives it away more, though I’d be curious how much was manual.

As it sticks to the famous events that LLMs can (generally) get right (even if it’s just big sample size), there isn’t much too objectionable here. The exception is Laika, which is treated as a wonderful canine adventure and not a cruel sacrifice of a dog one on what everyone knew was a one-way trip for the sake of a publicity stunt.

At least it’s interesting, which is more than I can say about a lot of books reviewed here. Even if it’s not exactly recommended.

Review: Airframe

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Airframe

Michael Crichton’s Airframe is a book I really, really wanted to like given my interest in disaster investigation and systemic failure. One of the issues is that I already knew a lot about the topic. But there’s two more.

The first is that has Arthur Hailey meets Herman Melville levels of “look how much I know/research I did.”. The second is that air disaster investigations, while a fascinating topic, are one of the worst main topics for a thriller novel, especially with the setup Chrichton makes. He has to use a large impending sale as a mostly artificial way to increase the stakes, race the clock, and create a conflict (said conflict is: The accident might cost the manufacturer a large order. Oh the huge manatee!) The reality is that disaster investigation is one of the least punitive or conflicting events there is, with the worst being various stakeholders understandably trying minimize their direct fault. Which can be problematic and difficult, but isn’t exactly Jon Land conspirators trying to rule the world.

Spoiler Alert: The problem is that it tries to shoehorn the Aeroflot “kid in the cockpit” disaster in, when a far more interesting and realistic method would be to have even the highly trained pilot making a mistake, especially given that what happened (tried to keep controlling it manually too long, which is what someone with a lot of skill would be more vulnerable to falling for.)

So yes, this doesn’t get off the ground. Metaphorically speaking.

Review: War Dispatches Volume 1

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War Dispatches Volume 1: Stories from the Front Lines of World War III

War Dispatches Volume 1 (note: not the most smooth title) is what is known in the anime/manga industry as an “omake” to Alex Aaronson’s 1980 World War III alternate history. It’s a set of stories that didn’t quite fit into the main books, but were/are still interesting enough to be told. These take place in the Middle East, from the Caspian Sea Monsters to MiGs in the sky to BMDs on the ground.

Being omakes, they are limited in scope. But this is no knock on their quality. In fact, they’re influential and good enough that I’m already starting work on a similar set of vignettes set in the Soviet-Romanian War. How’s that for a positive opinion?

Women in the Cockpit

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The International Society of Women Airline Pilots has a graph (at least as of 2023, but the trend should be clear) of stats involving female aviators. (And yes, to get this out of the way, there is no significant difference in accident rates and never was).

  • India is a surprising large first at around 12%
  • Scandinavia is likewise surprisingly LOW at around 4% (worse than the 5.5% of the knuckle-dragging Yankees)
  • Global average around 6%
  • East Asia has an abysmal rate that leaves everyone else in their dust. Even the Middle East has substantially more.

I do think the skew is going to stay because no matter how good the policy, pilot is about the least mom-friendly career by its very nature. But it’s still a very interesting look at demographics.

A Thousand Words: Titan

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Netflix’s Titan

Netflix’s new documentary Titan is about the submarine that sank near the Titanic in 2023. It’s a well-produced film with many heartfelt interviews. However, I felt it wasn’t as good as it could have been, with one small thing the filmmakers did have control over and a much larger thing that they didn’t. Let me explain.

I think the film could have gone into more detail on showing what a proper deep-sea submersible looks, sounds, and feels like. It would have highlighted Rush’s obsession with making the nautical equivalent of the Bonney Gull even more effectively. While I can understand why they might not have wanted to get too technical, I also think i could have been explained in ways a non-scientist could understand.

The larger issue is that the cause of the disaster really wasn’t very complex. Disasters typically have a ‘swiss cheese phenomenon’ where a bunch of ‘holes’ in the countermeasures all align. So even if the initial catalyst was simple, the situation where it could become catastrophic was not. This isn’t the case here. The carbon fiber hull was fatally and fundamentally flawed, and Rush was a megalomaniac who believed his own propaganda.

That said, this is a worthwhile movie and some of the non-technical parts are actually the most interesting and telling. The CBS crew falling for Oceangate’s potemkin village is a perfect example of how the media can get strung along by people who seem like they know something. I found the host being assured by their safety checks interesting-it’s the kind of thing that seems right and would be if the hull was fundamentally sound, but the equivalent of an early Comet isn’t going to care if the fuel gauges are moving correctly. The other thing is how we see Rush trying to put women who had no seafaring experience into being the pilots of the submarines because he wanted to stand out in the media-another strike against it.

For all my nitpicks, this is a worthy documentary about a real-life terrible person who did terrible things.

Text LLMs

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Not despite but because I’m a writer, I’m looking more at text AI LLMs/models and using them. Why? Well, we have to go back to Leopold Stokowski, a legendary conductor who supposedly saw one of the first sound mixers and went “uh, so what do you need me for?” He of course then got to work studying and using them, knowing he couldn’t be left behind from this combination threat and opportunity. Image AI generators have been beautiful for me because they didn’t overlap. Writing ones do overlap, which is why I’m finding them interesting.

Part of the reason (besides knowing they’re just a rich man’s autocomplete dependent entirely on inputs) I was less panicky about AI is because my family has lived through a lot of creative technical changes already. Musicians may not like and not use synthesizers if they can help it, but they have to know how they work. Same for writing.