Enough of the economics, my interest lies in writing fiction. However I expect I will use some contrarian economics in an alternate world scenario some time. Keep reading for the promise below of some free plot suggestions.

I see a lot of alternate history that starts with an event not happening, or turning out in an a-historical way, but what about impulses that try to go against the stream of history?

What about a successful class war in Medieval times? Watt Tyler tried to overthrow a cruel feudal society in 1381, as did many others, so how might their revolutions have turned out?

What if slavery was outlawed by the church in the early 16th Century? (Religious integrity overcoming economic interest.) Would Spain’s empire have foundered? What about all the later plantations in the New World?

What about the technical advances in the 1700s, that could have led to the Industrial Revolution taking off then – steam pumping engines, canal building, dyeing, cotton spinners, and knitting frames, etc? What they lacked in order to start the industrial ball rolling were the social conditions. These, if I recall correctly, were the agricultural advances that enclosed the common farmland and created a large dispossessed workforce, the colonies that supplied cheap raw materials, and the captive markets in those colonies for cheap manufactured goods – especially cotton products.

In my novels I wanted to bring together the ideas of starting an Industrial Revolution in a society not otherwise prepared for it, and that of the interactions between people with outlooks like our own and those of an earlier age. Like Samuel Clements (Mark Twain), who was so fascinated with the idea of juxtaposing our common sense with attitudes frozen in backward societies that he wrote “A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur”, I wanted to explore the interactions between moderns and people of an earlier time.

How would one create a scenario where a static society could be pushed enough to start it moving in a new direction? First, you have to pick a society – and select something that readers are already fascinated with. In our history, between 1650 and 1720, we have all the elements of swashbuckling adventurers (although strictly speaking, the buckler went out in Shakespeare’s time), sailing ships and cannon (seafights and pirates), revolutions and wars (Marlborough and Prince Eugene against Louis XIV’s marshals), and some good diarists (Pepys) to provide the day to day life as background.

This gives rise to my Iskander scenario.

My group of people with modern ideas and knowledge have to be brought into this earlier society, and they have to be persistent enough to overcome the inertia of ideas inimical to the developments they want to introduce. I didn’t see any alternative but to have them arrive together by some vehicle (a starship), and have no means of avoiding the task I set them (they are in an alternate Earth and cannot get back). The starship is just a taxi and becomes a geosynchronous satellite and communications base – I wanted to keep the focus on the realistic aspects. (No whizzing around the stars in space opera, and no funny-face aliens.)

There is a choice between bringing them into our own 17th – 18th Century world or a completely different one. If I chose ours, I need to have them act within already known parameters and events. I felt that limited me to another very English or American colonies what-if, since only a selected few foreign sources have been translated into a language I read. By picking a markedly different alternative world, I could use the culture of the period but set it in other parts of Europe, or even the world.

Early drafts were criticized as having too weak a story tension. These poor local inhabitants with their gunpowder weapons presented no danger to my modern whizz kids. This was before the Iraqis and Afghans demonstrated that the perseverance, doggedness, and outright cussedness of a less technically proficient society could outweigh all that modern technology could bring against them. (One more proof of the old military dictum that the spirit of the soldier is worth more than all the secret weapons imaginable.) Before 2006 I had to counter the impression of technological invincibility by introducing earlier stray starship invaders who arrived 200 years before and conquered the largest empire in the alternate Earth. (The Carthaginian). By the time my people arrive, these other strangers have clamped down an interdict on any technical advance which could upset the status quo of their empire. They thus provide a second and larger obstacle to my group’s success.

Ideas about the Multiverse hold there has to be a historical bifurcation to get into an alternate timeline, and I chose to have the Carthaginians win the Punic Wars. There was no Roman Empire on Gaia, the name of this alternate Earth.

I know there could be some weaknesses in my scenario, but throughout my emphasis has been on creating publishable character driven novels – and their requirement is different than a wargame or sim-type scenario. I propose to suggest possible openings and scenarios for a number of alternate history plots over the next few weeks (just think, some FR** novel plots that I’d like to see but don’t have the time to work on).

If you had bought the whole basket of stocks used to provide the Dow Jones Index in 1999 in preparation for your retirement this year it would have cost you $10,000. Guess what? The Dow just clawed its way back to $10,000 this week – you wouldn’t have lost a thing. Except today’s US dollar would buy you 25% less than it would in 1999. Good luck on your retirement.

The dictionary says of the word equity; fairness or impartiality, justness, something that is fair and equitable. Since everyone’s stocks would have lost the same amount of value I suppose one must concede that the stock market is eminently fair and equitable. I’m not so sure I would call it just.

I have stayed away from the stock market for 40 years, because the hit I took in 1969 convinced me that the only source of profits in the market are the losses of the poor suckers whose stocks go down. And the probability was strongly in favour of mine being the ones to go that way. I don’t know horses, but I would expect an equal amount of insight and judgement devoted to following the races as one spends on investigating corporate balance sheets would result in somewhat better returns. At least horses don’t lie, even if their owners might.

Of course, most people put their savings in the hands of experts – mutual funds, hedge funds, real estate income trusts and the like – and sleep soundly at night. The question there is the competence of experts – the economists who advise banks and governments for example. The people who I follow online at the Daily Reckoning have a sound contrarian take on economists, quote –

“Of course, everyone now knows that the recession is over. NABE interviewed 44 economic forecasters. Four-fifths of them said the recession was over.

But we don’t care what they said. These are the same seers who missed the biggest single event in financial history. There are many banking crises, recessions, panics and defaults in the record books. But none were as great as the one that hit September a year ago. Most economists didn’t see it coming; why should we trust them to tell us when it is going?”

The US administration is attempting to shore up the hole in the credit dyke with every last trillion they can borrow (satire intended) – and badgering wiser foreign governments into maintaining the same reckless policy. The problem isn’t a lack of credit – it’s an overwhelming preponderance of debt. People don’t want to borrow and spend – they have already borrowed and spent too much. They are trying to whittle down the debt they’ve already taken on. The only organizations accepting the free credit that the US government is shovelling out the door are the banks, who borrow it for next to nothing and turn around to lend it back to the government as Treasury bonds making a 4% return. Talk about money for old rope. Talk about a swindle.

Goldman Sachs announced a big profit. JPMorgan, the Wall Street firm that was bailed out by the feds a year ago, reported income of $3.6 billion in the 3rd quarter. Isn’t that good? Not if you look where the money came from – the poor sucker who foots the bills, the US taxpayer.

Following the Daily Reckoning again – the current crisis is not a recession, it’s a depression. A recession is a temporary hiccup in the daily flimflam of putting one over on the suckers – it recovers quickly once the markets hit the brakes and then the accelerator and continue with business as usual. But when the problem comes from a systemic failure – like the failure of the credit bubble that has lasted for around thirty years – and no amount of twiddling will get the fuel flowing again, then you’re in a depression.

Everybody’s mother warned them about borrowing when they were in the cradle – or should have. When you borrow, the folks who loaned it expect it back – with interest. If you borrow more than you can pay back you land in the poorhouse with Dickens’ Mr Micawber – “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” The US, both government and society, have been borrowing and spending far beyond their means since, at least, 1973. There can be no recovery until a huge portion of that debt is paid off and the creditors are confident that the rest will follow in due course.

The rest of the world waits with bated breath to see what is going to happen, but some are still betting on the stock market – in this case, not that stocks will go up in value but that they will come down. They are shorting the market, selling stocks that they do not have in the expectation that they will be able to buy them at a lower price by the time the law requires them to hand them over. Is what happens to the sucker who just bought them at the higher price equitable? Is it fair and just? Considering that the market would be a great deal fairer if the law required a more prompt delivery of the stock – but doesn’t – the amount of profit to be made at the sucker’s expense could be limited. Regulate such a thing? Outrageous! How are the financial wizards to keep their profits up and their queue of eager clients increasing? I guess the other fellow’s loss is unimportant if it doesn’t happen to your savings.

If you’re into stocks, the $10,000 Dow is an illusion. It can fall as fast as it did last year. October is a good month for stock market crashes … and waddayaknow, it’s October now.

I picked up a couple of London Times interviews with Gore Vidal this week and have to reproduce some of his comments here to show you what a really intelligent contrarian brings to a discussion. I’ll quote a few things from an earlier interview, from May 18th 2008 – while the presidential election campaign was just gathering steam.

Firstly he speaks about JFK and compares him to Barack Obama. The interviewer is ‘I’.
“I ask if he thinks Obama has a similar charisma to that of John F Kennedy, whom Vidal got to know because he was related to his wife, Jackie.

“I never believed in Jack’s charisma,” Vidal says shortly. JFK, he believes, was “one of our worst presidents”; Bobby, his brother, was “a phoney, a little Torquemada”; and their father, Joseph, was “a crook – should have been in jail”.

So much for Camelot. “But Jack had great charm,” he adds. “So has Obama. He’s better educated than Jack. And he’s been a working senator. Jack never went to the office – he wanted the presidency and his father bought it for him.”

Here, GV is a contrarian from insider knowledge – always the best source upon which to base an opinion. The trick is to find an inside source one can trust. I’m prepared to accept the opinions of the Kennedys on trust, because they are not unique to my reading.

The next excerpt which aligns with the educated opinion from outside the US, is contrarian in that it is the opposite of that expressed by most of the internal US commentators. I particularly like his take on advertising which backs up my own comments in a previous post of mine.
“However, in Vidal’s eyes, McCain is just a symptom of the real malaise affecting America today: the cynical subversion of the US constitution. “The Bush people”, he says, “have virtually got rid of Magna Carta and habeas corpus. In a normal republic I would probably have raised an army and overthrown them. It will take a hundred years to put it all back.”

By now he has worked himself up to a crisp fury: “Those neocons, lawyers, the big corporations – worse than that, extremists – want to get rid of the great power of oversight of the executive. See what they’ll try to do to Obama. They’re crooks. They’re just gangsters. They are the enemy of the United States. There’s no such thing as a war on terrorism. It’s idiotic. There are slogans. It’s advertising, which is the only art form we’ve invented and developed. It’s lies.”

Now to go to the later, September 30th 2009 article.
“Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.” America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’.”

In this next paragraph, note that he speaks of ‘you foreigners’ because the interview is for a British newspaper. Also the reason for the fox hunting metaphor, which I must say doesn’t equate to kindly old men in most British eyes – so the contrarian can be as biased or out of touch as the rest of the world, but then Vidal is 83.
“Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

One or two more excerpts – just to pull a few more chains.
“Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefitted us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realize how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

I guess the contrarian has to be prepared to support unpopular, even hated causes at times. ( I suspect the ‘bought’ below is a typo for brought.)
“Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims. “And I was torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought Oklahoma into the Union.” McVeigh claimed he had done it as a protest against tyrannical government.”

The links to the articles are –

I think that paints a fair picture of a lifelong contrarian, even if Vidal is rather a unique case. It points up the contrast between holding contrarian views and expressing them. I’m sure, if you asked Gore Vidal, whether it is honest and useful to express contrary opinions so forcefully he would reply that such are the bones of a full and complete debate. Does he get away with it? Well, he is 83.

I thought you might like to read parts of an e-mail I received a week ago to show I’m not only just one of many contrarians, I’m one of the sober ones. I’m not trying to sell you anything.

Part of the opening says –
* IS YOUR CHOLESTEROL HIGH ENOUGH to avoid heart attacks and strokes?
* ARE YOU GETTING ENOUGH SUN to prevent the world’s most dreaded cancers?
* ARE YOU EXERCISING SO HARD that it’s hardening your arteries?
* ARE YOU EATING ENOUGH SALT to prevent high blood pressure?
* ARE YOU EATING ENOUGH EGGS & BACON to ward off macular degeneration?
* GOT ARTHRITIS? GUESS WHAT! This animal fat reverses the damage in 24 hours!

The e-mail came to me from the same outfit that sends me investment tips as well as a daily newsletter on their reading of the actual state of the economy vs the Government’s slant. They are card-carrying contrarians – and no, I don’t invest with them, I just like to read their viewpoints. The author of the medical contrarianism is listed as William Campbell Douglass II, MD. billed as medicine’s most acclaimed myth-buster.

Let’s take a moment to comment on the claims above.
1. My Naturopathic doctor (the one whose advice I take before I go to an MD) says that the cholesterol hoopla is grossly overstated. Cholesterol is supposed to be flowing through our veins and arteries because it’s the substance the body uses to repair injuries and leaks in the vessels. If you have a lot of blood vessels patched up with cholesterol the damage was there first and caused by something other than the cholesterol – good or bad. Secondly, your body normally produces cholesterol for protein creation and in order to have enough of this repair substance available.

2. I know this is anecdotal evidence, but I used to wear nothing but swimming trunks and sandals when I worked for over four years in North Africa, in the hottest sun you might find anywhere. I subsequently wondered if I had set myself up for skin cancer – I had also been an avid sunbather in my younger years in England (not the same degree of sun exposure, I admit). However, I’ve never had a trace of it – so perhaps our Dr Douglass is right when he suggests we need to use our natural defences to make the most of them.
By the way – ever notice that if you tell a medical doctor about some alternative medicine that worked for you your testimony is mere anecdotal evidence? If you told an equally subjective tale as evidence in a court of law it could be sufficient to hang someone.

Let’s skip to 4. My Naturopath tells me not to reduce my salt intake below the moderate usage I have always had. The body needs the sodium salts to maintain the inner environment in the same briny state as the oceans where our cells evolved. Internally, we never left the ocean.
I think that’s enough to suggest that these claims are not too extravagant or unsubstantiated. This contrarian advice is as solid a description of reality as the opposite views of the medical profession, whose members are terrified to consider anything outside the gospel preached by the pharmaceutical industry and the medical associations lest they lose their licenses.

Dr Douglass is not as timid: –

“ No, you’re being way too patient! But we’re going to get the last laugh on those jokers…

Because all the ‘facts’ they’re flinging at you are just MASS MEDIA MEDICINE!

Mass Media Medicine is to REAL medicine as McDonald’s is to REAL food…

It was never intended to make you healthy…

It’s intended to make billions of dollars for giant corporations…

And the only science behind it is marketing science!

It’s all about selling us ‘health’ goods & services WHETHER OR NOT WE NEED THEM…

Scaring us into buying drugs to prevent diseases (like ‘high cholesterol’) that don’t exist…

Bullying us into buying high-markup, high-carbohydrate, meatless mush…

Hounding us to buy instruments of torture in the name of exercise…

And when all this stuff finally does make you sick, they reply that you need even more “ …

Now there’s a real Contrarian who’s not afraid to pull the chain of his opposition. He goes on:–

“ And you’re going to love what 40 years of clinical studies really tell you to do! As you’ll see on the pages ahead, from now on you have DOCTOR’S ORDERS to…

* Chow down on juicy T-bones and 3-egg omelets prepared with real butter…
* Trade in that water bottle for a case of ice-cold beer…
* Drink all the coffee you want, laced with heavy cream if you like…
* Take naps instead of running laps…
* And tell the cholesterol cops they’ll have to terrify someone else…

Skeptical?
Now you’re talking my language…

Never, ever do anything just because someone swears it’s healthy!
Make them prove it and guarantee it – like I’m going to do right now. “

Like the advice? You might want to take a look at his website http://www.douglassreport.com/   Personally I feel my present healthcare is doing what I need, but I’m always willing to look at opinion that may contradict, or perhaps go beyond the views I accept – as some of William’s does.

The words I like best are where he agrees that his reader should be skeptical. Trouble is, if his advice or the conventional MD’s does harm you may not have the ability to reverse it. In my opinion it’s the reason for learning how to live with a contrarian stance early and do as the Buddha advised, “Test everything”.

Contrarianism is widely considered to be only a stock market strategy. Since most investors are completely incapable of predicting the future moves of the market it stands to reason that opposing the flow and doing the opposite – selling while others buy, and buying when others sell – is more likely to lead the individual to a beneficial result. What I suggest is that most people, in all categories of human activity, are completely out of their depth and likely to cling to the popular and conventional beliefs and attitudes out of desperation. The chances are – they’re wrong.

One has only to consider the huge number of people – mostly men – who spend no time preparing and informing themselves to confront the serious matters of their times, but who can spout off the whole teams of players at their favorite sport and list the scoring records of these individuals right back to the time they came off the Ark. How likely are these individuals’ opinions about social concerns and voting choices in elections to be guided by wisdom and good sense?

That is why we celebrate the times when the great mass of the public excel themselves in producing consensus in problems that really do matter and take part in actions that lead to improvements in the human condition. Those events are truly worth celebrating, but it’s a great pity that they do not come more regularly. What I suggest with my promotion of contrarianism is that enough people consider alternative opinions and mind-sets all the time that society has a wellspring of wise discrimination, and beneficial decisions become more common.

What about some examples?

Firstly matters of health. Far too many people live thoughtless lifestyles of greed and self-indulgence in the expectation that some pill exists, or will exist, to treat their ruined health when nature follows its natural course. Even medical doctors mouth the platitudes of preventive health care – while merely prescribing the latest panacea pill that big pharma has produced, in the hope it might alleviate the symptoms.

The whole western world enjoyed the spectacle of a simple faith that property could only increase in value, and that it was wise to take on huge burdens of debt in order to cash in. Real property is a finite resource, and over the longer scheme of things it must inevitably be sought after by an ever growing population, but none of these plungers into huge mortgages ever considered the shorter term considerations defined by their employment histories and likely lifespan. The contrarian noticed that the real estate bubble had become unstable and stayed the heck away.

The tricky subject of religion shows the immense power of the herd instinct. If the neighbours go to worship in this mosque, this church, this synagogue, this temple, then most people follow the crowd – even when in their hearts they find the platitudes and or diatribes totally irrelevant and unsatisfying. There is absolutely no shortage of religious expression in the world, but very few people have ever had the gumption to examine the ones they were born into critically and consider leaving them. The contrarian can be expected to do so, for after all, you are stuck with this life and should make the most of it.

What about the music the herd listens to? Ever notice how little the popular taste resembles music? What about the movies – very few of which are worth the price of their admission. What about the lawn in front of the house when water shortages and total waste of your leisure hours could be reduced from converting the grass to xeriscaping? What about the political party you vote for? The same one that your dear old Dad supported – and every ancestor of his since Magna Carta.

I get a big kick out of the Gnostic Gospels – the Nag Hammadi library discovered at Jabal-al-Tarif in 1945. In one, the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is reputed to have said, “Men think perhaps it is peace I have come to cast upon the world. They do not know it is dissension I have come to cast upon the earth: fire, sword, and war. …” If the Christian religion did only one good thing, it was the releasing of western society from the bonds of tribal conformity and allowing us the gift of thinking for ourselves. And changing old ideas for better. Let’s hear it for the contrarians. Let’s hear it for the rebels.

Another late post because we were away where I had no Internet access. (At least, not enough peace and harmony to compose something and take it to a local library to post it through their online access.)

I’m making a transition to a new topic, an exploration of the contrarian viewpoint. I don’t have a posting to mind as I start writing this, but I do have some thoughts from the past five days that may serve as a transition piece.

This summer my brother-in-law spent almost six weeks in hospital with heart failure. Actually a partial failure in the by-pass arteries he’d had installed about eight years previous. He wasn’t expected to come out of the hospital on his own feet, but eventually the low point of being strapped into a bed with six IVs and tubes everywhere transformed to the first faltering steps of being able to get out of bed – and later to an expedition out of the ward to buy fresh fruit from a stand in the foyer and to eat them on a bench outside the hospital entrance. This without approval or assistance. (His nurse eventually decided he’d played truant long enough and sent security to fetch him home in a wheelchair.)

After many troubled days, during which he was dumped on us, he was at last admitted to the lodge that wouldn’t originally accept him until some residual conditions were dealt with. In the past five weeks he has recovered some strength as well as a great deal of desire to regain his old stubbornly independent and hermit ways. It seems to me that he has entered a time of life where the underlying changes have rendered his previous modes untenable, but he is desperately attempting to claw them back. (Rather like the US administration attempting to claw back the old bubble debt economy instead of accepting that the world’s biggest debtor needs to put its house in order and pay its bills.)

Watching him desperately attempting to reverse the effects of age and sickness – even if only in his own mind – has been a salutary lesson to me. In some ways a quite heroic picture, but in others equally pathetic. One cannot dismiss heart failure by an effort of will. The past five days he has been in his own home again – a visit because the medical authorities have pronounced him unable to care for himself – where we tried to help him gather up some more essential belongings to take back to the limited space he has in the lodge. He, however, was fixated on collecting and boxing his extensive collection of movie DVDs and music CDs. I carried a total of more than 150 pounds of boxes out to stack in the back seat of his car to take back with us. He has yet to persuade the lodge to provide the extra storage space for these boxes, but that’s not the biggest problem. He didn’t take the DVD player and has no space in his small room for his huge flat screen TV. It doesn’t look as if he is ever going to be able to get them back out of storage to use in the future. He might offer his fellow lodge members a couple of years of movie nights on a lodge DVD/TV setup, but that is a suggestion he scoffs at.

He has always owned cameras, usually expensive professional ones, but I won’t even dwell on the new top of the line digital camera and the stand-alone print copier he has never used because he’s never been able to figure them out. They too, of course, must be taken to the lodge. As the neighbour commented – he never takes pictures anyway. (He very briefly attempted to get into the computer age about 20 years back but gave up in disgust because the devices wouldn’t obey his orders.)

Most of his life he wholeheartedly accepted the role of consumer, whose only input into society has been to buy stuff. He used to be a prisoner of Malls and Sales, and now is a prisoner of the ‘stuff’ he accumulated. It struck me that all those possessions are a necessary part of the self-image he has of himself. In some ways he’s not safe – not complete without them. I have no idea how to get him to attempt to free himself. I cannot guess how many more days or years of active life medical science has granted him, but I neither can I see him taking advantage of them. He has the opportunity to throw himself open to new possibilities outside of the self-imposed hermitage he’s lived in for the past ten or more years – despite his new limitations. If only he would leave his private room at the lodge once in awhile and learn to love his fellows in humanity …

So I’m looking at his predicament as a way to avoid making my own mistakes – because although I may sound smug and superior I know I’m not really that much different. But I’ve always been a contrarian, so I see switching paradigms as inherently possible. If you see how stupid it is to smoke cigarettes you quit, as I did over 40 years ago. If the lifestyle you developed over the past umpteen years is no longer practicable you look for a new one. While that is the logical procedure I doubt it’s as easy for me to accomplish as I imagine. It may not be easy for you, either. That’s what I want to explore with my new direction and I hope you readers will follow me into the insights possible through contrarianism and offer your own comments.

The main reason for using an earlier alternate Earth as scenario for a novel or a series is the freedom to explore events that did not happen in our world. I’ve already covered the absence of a Roman Empire. A bigger distortion, following critical suggestions from early readers, was the introduction of the prior arrival of another group of off-worlders – the crew of a lost star-cruiser from yet another alternate Earth. Yeah, I felt it stretched credibility too far as well.

This criticism of my original scenario took place near the summit of the hubris under which the Bush administration took on two wars that they thought would be walk-overs. My critiquers didn’t accept that any society without advanced technology could pose a threat to a modern intrusion. Hello, Iraq and Afghanistan. We now know better – in fact I knew better then – but I felt I should cater to the beliefs of my potential readers.

So I added the Trigons to the series, conquering the indigenous Greco-Carthaginian Empire about two hundred years earlier. I had felt the indigenous empire was all too capable of getting the better of my hi-tech arrivals, and so I postulated only a couple of hundred Trigons who had intermarried to the point that they had become a foreign aristocracy who devoted most of their energy to protecting their privileges from the locals – much like the Normans in 11th/12th century England. I did keep my intention of showing that a lack of technological expertise doesn’t mean the local antagonists are incompetent, and also that in any conflict situation it is morale, belief system, and courage that wins every time. Unless you happen to be sitting in Langley, Virginia, and bombing some helpless individuals in Pakistan, but then the degree of arrogance displayed is counter-productive to any future settlement.

The Trigons were from a society technologically more advanced than my Iskander Earthlings, but they were a military crew, capable of operating their star-cruiser efficiently, but no more capable of maintaining or replacing it than would the modern crew of an atomic submarine be of doing the same to theirs. When refueling or major maintenance is needed on any of these modern ‘wonders’ they have to be taken to the specialist installations to have the work carried out by a whole new team. No wonder then that the Trigon conquerors lost not only the use of their star-cruiser in the intervening 200 years, but also the ability to maintain a technologically advanced society. They are right back to the same 17th century infrastructure that the locals had created.

Which brings me to the reasons for picking the late 17th century for my Gaian society. Firstly it has to be the romance of the period. In Earth history this is squarely located in the middle of  “Three Musketeers” territory with all the excitement of swordfighting and sailing ships. The early financial empires, the Fuggers and the Medici, had begun to give way to national banks in Venice, Holland, and England. The primitive broadside warships of the Armada period had given way to the standardized ‘rates’ and fleet tactics of the Anglo-Dutch wars. Ships and mariners could undertake routine ocean voyages – not without periodic disasters, but more certainly than could the sailors of Philip and Elizabeth’s time. The pike was being superseded by the musket and bayonet, and field artillery had become more of a battlefield weapon than the old cannon hauled by teams of oxen. The early glimmers of science were beginning to make way against the dead weight of revealed knowledge and superstition.

The next reason has to be the availability of good historical records of the period. I have to admit that my depth of research would be considered scanty in a history department, but with two good  works to bookend the period available, I can easily find extra publications to expand on particulars. For my window into the thoughts, society, and actions of my 17th century Gaians, I found Samuel Pepy’s Diary to be a valuable source. For my guide to the politics and campaigns of the period I find Sir Winston Churchill’s biography of his ancestor John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, to be more than adequate. I have a collection of history books that I have accumulated over the years – almost too many to detail, but I’ll mention some – “European Economic History”; “25 Centuries of Sea Warfare” and N.A.M. Rodger’s “Naval Histories of Britain”; “Western Civilization”; “By the Sword”; “A Brief History of Science”; “The Lore of Ships”; “Anne of England”; “The Old European Order”; as well as all the instant sources to hand on the Internet.

I particularly like the date, 1670, the year in which a young woman called Julie d’Aubigny was born. For readers who find my heroine Gisel Matah to be a bit too hard to believe, I’ll mention something of what is known about “La Maupin”. Julie was born to the wife of a minor nobleman, Gaston d’Aubigny, a secretary to the Compte d’Armagnac. Gaston had two passions in life – womanizing and sword fencing – and having no sons to train devoted his attention to his daughter. Perhaps he also thought he should give her some advantage in life to protect her from men like himself. Anyway, by the time Julie was sixteen she could better most of the men who came to her father’s Salle – his swordfighting gymnasium at the Count’s chateau.

Julie was also somewhat precocious, becoming the mistress of the Count at the age of 16, and going on to a collection of lovers – male and female – over the following 20 years. She also had a husband who she lived with once, a fellow called Maupin who the Compte d’Armagnac had selected to prevent scandals should she become pregnant. Julie sometimes fought as a man and sometimes as a woman, and had at least one lover with whom she operated a fencing school. She also had a fine, if untrained, contralto voice and sang in opera in Marseilles and Paris.

Her most notorious exploit was the time she attended a ball given by the King’s brother, the Duc d’Orleans, dressed as a man. She attempted to seduce three young noblewomen at the ball, leading to challenges from three courtiers who were their escorts. Julie readily accepted the challenges, dismissed their complaints that the streetlights were out with the observation that the moonlight was sufficient, and defeated all three of them. King Louis XIV, the “Sun King”, was furious at her wounding three of his courtiers and wanted her thrown into the Bastille. One account says that Monsieur, the King’s brother, interceded on her behalf, but the version I like says she had an interview with the king herself and charmed him into forgiving her.

Julie died young, giving up her wild life and the Paris Opera in 1705 to enter a convent, where she died a couple of years later. She deserves a new novel to be written about her – to complement the one written in 1835 – but I’m not sure whether to attempt it. As my historian friend at the University of Calgary says, my French isn’t up to original research. She did suggest a couple of English language sources I might try, but … we shall see

Maybe time to take a break from Earth 2309. How did the current cultures of Gaia evolve?

I will start with the underpinnings. First I suppose I should mention the underlying mechanisms of an Alternate Earth that guided my conception. The Many Worlds theory is a part of Quantum Mechanics that attempts to account for the randomness of quantum events.

Erwin Schrodinger was a physicist who contributed one of the most important bricks in the edifice of the developing quantum theories in the early 1930s – his … “derivation” of the wave equation for time independent systems, and showed that it gave the correct energy eigenvalues for the hydrogen-like atom. This paper has been universally celebrated as one of the most important achievements of the twentieth century, and created a revolution in quantum mechanics, and indeed of all physics and chemistry. (Wikipedia)

He was a friend of Albert Einstein and entered into personal correspondence over Einstein’s reluctance to accept quantum theory as ‘complete’. The issue of the actuality of the collapse of the wave function in quantum theory creating paradoxical events in the macroscopic world was their source of dissension. The Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment was one of the outcomes of the correspondence.

Consider a closed box, containing a cat, a vial of poison gas, and a radiation counter. The radiation counter is set to capture a quantum event – the random event of the decay of a radioactive atom – which will either release the poison or not. Quantum mechanics says that until the outcome of the experiment is observed and the wave function collapses, both events take place – inside the closed box the cat is both poisoned and not poisoned. It was difficult to accept the idea of the cat being both alive and dead simultaneously.

One of the concepts devised to account for this was the Many Worlds Theory. Whenever an event such as this occurs in the universe a bifurcation occurs – the path of reality splits into two so that one of the events satisfies logic in each of the resulting alternative worlds. Each event that could have more than one outcome upon the collapse of a wave function results in more separate and non-communicating worlds being split off.

As a novelist, I followed the popular version of this. I presented the cause of the existence of an alternate Earth to a different outcome to the Punic Wars – Carthage was not destroyed by the Romans under Scipio, because the Carthaginians under Hannibal had defeated Rome’s armies and sacked the city some 40 years before. On Gaia, the ancient Greek name for Earth, there had never been a powerful Roman Empire. In fact all trace of Rome’s history was lost, and Greek and Carthaginian accounts and civilization prevailed. From approximately 200 BCE, the history of Gaia diverged from ours.

In fact there was nothing labeled a BCE – before Christian era – on Gaia. The events in the Holy Land of the Roman Empire that gave rise to the creation of the Christian religion never took place. The most powerful religion in the West of Gaia is that of the Holy Flame – a syncretism between the Zoroastrian and Greek philosophies. The Gaian dates are counted from the birth of Zoroastrianism. In the Far East, these Mediterranean events had no effect upon the local religions, except for the contacts carried by pilgrims and travelling scholars, and Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and others are substantially the same as in our world. I have to qualify this in one significant way – with no Christian religion to act as a stimulus, the philosophy of Medina – Islam – never became a powerful force and thus the Buddhist culture of India was never put to the fire and the sword.

A small side track is needed to cover Judaism. With the prevailing empire around the Mediterranean being Semitic instead of Caucasian, the Jews never suffered the same persecutions, conquest, and diaspora. They and their religion never disappeared, but became a philosophical thread within the paganism of Carthage – in much the same way as surviving fragments of Buddhism merged into some of the lines of thought in Hinduism. The other philosophical threads of the Holy Flame religion were pagan Greek, which had the same enormous influence on the resulting theology as they did on early Christianity.

But back to the physics – how did the Iskander drift from one unconnected alternate world to another? Doesn’t that imply connection? I am a skeptic of the current mathematical fantasies that produce String Theory and its related cosmology. Karl Popper pointed out that to be truly science a theory had to be able to be disproveable – it had to state the outcome of an experiment that could be tested. Since String Theory is still looking for the required indisputable experiment that fails to find fault with it, it exists as much as fantasy as science. While some of the younger physicists imagine all kinds of connections between their mathematical games and science fiction none of their musings have more credibility than the stories of fantasy. They suggest that some feature within the equations they call worm-holes could be mechanically manipulated to act as the hyperspace jumps of their boyhood readings.

With their strict anthropocentric viewpoints they suggest that only the first four of the dimensions within the 11 (or 12 in some versions) dimension mathematics of String Theory are developed into reality to form our four-dimensional environment, while the other dimensions are curled upon themselves and thus have no real substance. This is not verifiable. Taking the proposals of physicist David Bohm about the implicate and explicate order of the universe as a guide – there is just as much logic in accepting all the dimensions as real, if not normally accessible. The seven ‘unextended’ dimensions could even be the real framework of the universe while our four are merely a ‘special case’ – drifting like a scrap of paper on a cosmic wind.

The Iskander could have diverged into one of these superluminal dimensions and emerged into the Gaia universe just as readily as accomplishing its intention to bypass a thousand or so light-years of ours and arrive at N-3. More about Gaia next time.

I mentioned in the post before last that I envisaged the intended Iskander mission, developing the infrastructure on the colony world N-3, would be a corporate one. This wasn’t because I particularly admire corporate projects, although I have been employed in a few good ones, but because it reflects the social and economic changes necessary before the crises threatening the world can be dealt with. I guess my postulating a technologically active world in 2309 is itself a vote of confidence that this will happen.

Before disasters such as runaway climate change and nuclear warfare through proliferation can be controlled it is essential that both corporate and public enterprises cooperate instead of preying on one another, and that the operating charters of each hold up the furtherance of the public good as their primary responsibility. This would bring an end to such crimes as the huge resources deployed by the oil and coal lobby to prevent any meaningful legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The course of public policy once established should be an inviolable principle and any action to hinder it would become a criminal offence.

Similarly the military-industrial complexes worldwide and their huge misuse of public resources, not only in the USA, must be reined in and the cultivating of trained xenophobes in military circles ended. Many years ago I proposed in the disarmament newsletter I edited that the only military force allowed in the world should be operated as a single international force under a world body. I hesitate to say this should be the United Nations because of the inherent limitations of the present world body caused by the power plays of the nations that set it up.

In my 2309 Earth, the General Assembly of the UN would be replaced by an elected body, requiring universal suffrage, and the present Security Council would be the executive arm of that elected body. This is impossible to create within the charter of the UN and so a new international body must replace it.

How does climate change develop in my projected Iskander Earth of 2309? Firstly, I see no meaningful action to control greenhouse emissions until the last quarter of the 21st century – perhaps even later. Nothing meaningful will be done until the Netherlands and Manhattan are under water. The costs of containing or even mitigating the disaster will be, as promised, far in excess of the cost we would incur in curbing it today (or yesterday, when the need was first pointed out.) My biggest regret is that those who have blocked action for their own personal gain will be dead and buried when the full extent of the crime cripples civilization, and they cannot serve the life sentences of hard labour they deserve.

What are some of the features of Iskander 2309 that shape their world? The US will be hit particularly hard by climate change and social pressures. Not only will the southern states become full deserts rather than semi-deserts, but the coastal regions that account for a significant portion of the national wealth will be swamped and uninhabitable. The mid-west corn belt will be completely unproductive, even with the water diversion from Canada that a future quisling government in Ottawa will cave in to. The unbalanced social structure where the top 0.01% make 6% of the income (and the top 10% make 50%) particularly mitigates against developing a sound social system where everyone works together to solve problems. Today’s news reflects that. All the sun-belt developments will become ghost towns as the people board up the windows and return north where the last of the water resources can be eked out. The remains of the Great Lakes will be the last existing National Parks, but they will no longer be deep enough to float an ocean going freighter.

What will happen to nuclear non-proliferation, currently a project on the Obama to-do list? I predict that the Obama administration initiative will die an ignominious death because nothing can be done without bargaining between the Israeli nuclear arsenal and the Islamic ones – the existing Pakistani and the possible Iranian ones. The Jewish lobby in the US will man the barricades on this one, because even admitting the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons will be a huge setback to their preponderance of power, and I predict Obama will blink.

I hate to suggest the awful outcome of the standoff in the region, but all indicators point to the impossibility of settling the Palestinian/Israeli issue as a two state solution. It will never happen. Not two real states, each with full national powers, living peacefully side by side. That leaves only a single state, with either one side or the other in the driving seat, and at best, continual political strife in the single legislative assembly representing everyone. At worst, it will lead to continued civil strife and bloodshed until one side has taken more hits than they can sustain.

If the fratricidal conflict in the Middle East (they are both Semitic peoples) escalates it seems inevitable that nuclear weapons will be used. Perhaps the ultimate sacrifice of so many innocents will provide the driving force for the rest of the world to firmly say. “Never again” and actually work toward nuclear disarmament.

I think that’s enough prediction for today. It leaves untouched the size of the world population in 2309, which will determine the amount of resources the world will have to launch ambitious programs like the N-3 colony. It also leaves my estimation whether such an off-world endeavor would ever be possible – a given in the series scenario but still a big doubt in my own mind. I have not suggested any name for the top dog among the world’s nations, or even presented a case for believing that national administrations will whither away as people become more used to a  multicultural world and more mature institutions. Perhaps the readers already have their own ideas on these matters.

What are the features we would find most remarkable in my 2309 Iskander Earth? I would suggest that the present unstable economic foundation will only get worse – at least for a century. I have no expectation that the present lip-service paid to the idea of reining in the catastrophic derivatives markets will take place during the current depression, but perhaps it will happen after the one after the next. The Iskanders’ expedition does not take place for two hundred years – perhaps enough time for the economists of the last 50 years to be forgotten.

The present beggar thy neighbour form of international interactions may be moderated by a more representative and influential United Nations. If we are supposed to be paragons of democracy why do all citizens not get to vote for the people who represent us there? The present European Parliament could become the model on which the UN’s development is based. I believe that institution has proved itself and outpaced the same kinds of sniping that the aristocrats of England aimed at the first universal parliaments. Let the backward dictatorships and royal rulers scream and drag their feet but they can eventually succumb to the power of the people.

I’m not a particular fan of science fiction that paints the future as a technological utopia. Perhaps I see the present technological free-for-all as too trivial and ephemeral. Something like 90% of the technological toys on offer at any one time are not only destined for an early visit to the landfill but are less than essential to a socially adjusted human society. We need to learn to value the good and laugh as those which turn out to be mistakes, like the airship, while they tumble into their graves.

Aviation offers a good analogy. When I was young and stupid I worshiped speed and jet fighters. The romance of the creation of safe and stable supersonic aircraft filled my earlier years. To me then, helicopters were nothing but dull and boring ‘egg-beaters’.

I actually worked and studied at Farnborough – Britain’s NASA – and saw as well as worked on wind tunnel models and full scale experimental aircraft that were a part of the project that led to the Concorde. I crawled under the FD-2 to watch a problematic fuel pump removed by the test pilot, Peter Twiss, who held the world speed record in that aircraft at the time – 1132 mph. Beside it was parked the first prototype of the aircraft that became the Lightning, a Mach 2 interceptor. Heady stuff for 19 year-old aeroplane enthusiast.

In my later years as a contract surveyor and advance man in oil exploration I spent many more hours in helicopters than fixed wing – and now they clearly have my preference. An example – I had to pick out a route up and over a spur of Thunder Mountain, one of the peaks in the Livingstone Range near to my home. I went up with the pilot of the Gazelle we were using at the time to take a look. I soon needed to get onto the ground to inspect more closely and mark my intended route but the pilot decided there was no ground flat enough up there to land.

“I tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll hover with one skid on that big rock while you climb out.” That big rock was poised on the brink of a 1000 foot precipice. So we did just that, he hovered with one skid on the top of the rock while I gingerly climbed out onto the skid and then made a quick transition to the top of the rock. I ducked down and waved the pilot away, but he of course already felt my weight leaving the aircraft. I did my work up there and when finished he came back and hovered over the same rock for me to get back in.

Now to the point I was going to make with the example. The supersonic jet exemplifies our forever accelerating technological innovation and the social changes it plunges us into – one after the other before we have had time to adjust to the first. The fixed wing aircraft is always in a race against an inevitable crash that will happen when and if the fuel runs out. The helicopter is that sane and stable carrier of humanity that allows us to put a foot on the ground and reconnect with the real world when necessary. When is this crazy contest to turn the largest possible volume of resources into landfill garbage going to end? When the ‘fuel’ runs out and we crash – as inevitable as the succession of Bull and Bear in the stock markets.

By ‘fuel’ I do not necessarily mean an actual fuel, although all are finite, but could be economic, political or social. I have my own take on that in the next novel in the Iskander series, “The Wildcat’s Burden”. Our Gisel makes a very human journey in that novel and sees that the meaning she looks for is within her.

It has taken a lifetime but I finally accept that all our mastery of the endless succession of technological developments merely carries us farther and farther from our real nature. If you master the most arcane of physics theories or mathematical procedures you are still no more than a mere mortal doomed to a mysterious existence without solid reason or destination. Extending our present trajectory, we could eventually become nothing but wide-eyed passengers in a runaway vehicle we no longer understand and no longer control. Perhaps we already are. Certainly the so-called economists who pretended to understand the mechanisms and innovations of the financial world but who almost all failed to see the coming crash are our most recent examples of egotists who substitute loud voices and arm-waving for solid understanding.

My 2309 Earth the Iskanders left must surely be founded upon sound social principles rather than the overheated experiments we are the white rats for today.

The engineering I learned was founded upon a solid understanding of first principles, but today the young are introduced to devices and procedures they have no understanding of and could not work around them if they failed. Just the other day I saw the question asked, “If every installation in the world is controlled my Microsoft software, what happens to society when a brand new, fatal glitch manifests itself?” We are led by people who are fixated upon the artificial and the complex, when once we were served by trained people who understood the wisdom of KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.

The medieval churchmen had an image that fits our world – we are surely a ship of fools.