Envisaging Agricultural Collapse

I thought it was blue …

Despite the bleating in the Guardian, I think it is still the case that there is a surprising dearth of global warming-related science fiction. This lack of effort by sci-fi writers is despite the fact that the changes are fast approaching, and most surprisingly one of the changes expected to take longest – arctic ice loss – is happening at an incredible pace before our very eyes, with potentially huge effects. We have already seen major crop losses in the UK due to flooding, and I am convinced that the flooding in the UK is due to arctic sea ice loss (or I will be convinced, I should say, if it is a regular phenomenon in the next few years). So, I’m wondering if the world faces the possibility of a major, generalized agricultural failure in our lifetime, and what that will look like. Let’s have a go at imagining it, but first let’s look at what it might be and how it might happen.

Describing a generalized agricultural failure

Only a small number of countries provide a large amount of food for the majority of the world. Wheat, for example, is primarily produced in China, the USA, EU, Australia and Canada; rice is clustered in a small number of Asian countries and is highly dependent on monsoonal weather and water supplies. A generalized agricultural failure would easily occur if just a couple of countries experienced a simultaneous loss of productive capacity. Particularly, crop failures in the USA, China, the EU and Australia would seriously disrupt the balance of food supply. Furthermore, there are a lot of countries that due to either economic decisions or environment are heavily dependent on imports of food. Middle eastern countries with large areas of non-arable land and African nations that are heavily committed to cash cropping are examples of this. Many of these countries are also low- or middle-income nations with very limited emergency food supplies, which makes them very vulnerable to disruptions in international trade. Finally, some major high-income economies with serious military power – such as Japan and the UK – do not have food security, and are currently heavily dependent on international food markets. Collapses in supply for these countries would make them extremely itchy about guaranteeing overseas trade supplies.

Much of the world’s food is devoted to supplying cattle, and a lot of arable land is currently devoted to biofuels or other “non-essential” supplies (such as sugar cane or oil-producing crops). However, food is not an immediately replaceable good – being dependent on seasonal patterns, it can take a year to switch crops, but societies with poor food reserves can’t go a year while they wait. Also some crops that might be replaced in that year have a huge investment in infrastructure that their owners might not want to reverse in times of national emergency: cork, olives, vineyards and all forms of orchards can take 10 or 15 years to bring to productive capacity, so ploughing them under to grow essential foods means a potentially quite long-term reduction in food diversity. The global agricultural system is not nimble in the way that a manufacturing system might be, and is also often heavily subsidized and protected.

So a general agricultural failure would involve failure of crops in a couple of independent producers for a couple of different food types all in the same year – possibly after a couple of years of build up in which reserves were strained – and in both the northern and southern hemispheres. For maximum effect it would need to occur in some high- and some low- or middle-income countries, disrupting not just the production of food but consumption and export patterns. It would have to affect a couple of exporters to have a truly global impact, and it would have to affect foods that are used for human as well as animal consumption.

How would agricultural failure happen?

In the short- to medium-term, a generalized agricultural collapse is only going to happen if it combines some global-warming-related phenomena with some bad luck. The only global-warming-related phenomenon that seems to be reliably weird at the moment is the arctic, but this is having fairly large effects and they can probably be expected to grow more extreme. They seem to be particularly affecting the food producers in the EU and North America, so a viable near-term scenario for agricultural failure would probably be:

• serious flooding in Autumn in the EU and/or UK: due to the arctic sea ice loss increasing rainfall over northern europe
• crop failure due to late spring and severe winters in Canada and northern/western europe: due to weakening jetstreams around the poles allowing cold air to flow further south and disrupting the Atlantic climate
• a massive el nino causing drought and crop failure in Australia and latin America: obviously this is completely unrelated to global warming but the chances of a switch to el nino over any 5-10 year period are very high, and in a warming world the next el nino is going to be associated with some very unpleasant high temperatures
• a random failure of monsoon or rainy season in east or southeast Asia: also (probably) not global warming related, but for example this year Japan’s rainy season – important for its rice crop – is already late and showing no signs of starting

In combination, these effects could lead to a huge loss of wheat, rice and corn crops in several major food producing nations. The likelihood is that the full global implications of the failure would not be understood until after the northern hemisphere harvest, by which time (maybe) the crops for the following season would already be laid down in the southern hemisphere. Even if governments were quick thinking enough to see the risk for the following year and mandate changes in crops, this would mean the southern hemisphere would have wasted a lot of arable land on non-essential plantings. Of course, the chances that governments would respond in time to the crisis to be able to mandate planting of only essential crops are pretty small, and although price signals might encourage some farmers to switch to essential crops, it is likely that this would take more than a year to happen – especially given the highly protected nature of agriculture in most parts of the world. So after the initial food collapse shock it is likely that there would be a second year of weak harvests, even if the weather turned good. Collapses in wheat and corn crops would be followed by a glut of cheap meat as farmers killed off unprofitable herds; the following year would see a spike in meat prices (I think this happened this year, actually).

What would a generalized agricultural collapse look like?

The collapse would likely be seen in the most vulnerable nations first, most likely those countries with limited food security and heavy subsidization of food prices. I think a lot of these countries are in the middle east and there have already been suggestions that the Arab spring was related to food markets. Jared Diamond famously blamed the Rwanda massacre on pressure for farmland, and other historians have suggested an economic imperative driving the holocaust. Even where it is not obvious, pressure over food and food prices can lead to political instability, upheaval and chaos, and this will likely be the first symptom of the collapse, as prices rise and food importers in the middle east respond rapidly to the collapse of stocks. Unfortunately, market liberalization doesn’t happen quickly and in any case, in the face of a general loss of supply there will be no solution for these countries: they will fall into an increasingly desperate round of riots and political upheaval, and possibly also major population movements.

Following internal tensions in the most food insecure nations, international tensions will begin to develop between major traders and their clients. Faced with generalized crop failures in major wheat trading partners, countries will try to find new markets, but some of these (such as Australia) will also be facing lost supplies, and will likely restrict trade to ensure security of domestic supply. This would lead to tensions between trading partners, followed by a desperate scramble as countries like the UK and Japan rushed to secure supplies. The first casualty of these efforts would be the poorest nations, who would suddenly find food suppliers deserting them for lucrative western markets. At its worst this could lead to riots, seizure of property, and expulsion of businesses and representatives from high-income nations. Emergency food aid would also collapse as countries conserved resources, and this would lead to famine and disaster in countries like North Korea and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as countries newly thrown into food insecurity – especially poorer middle eastern countries like Yemen and Iraq.

Finally, as food reserves dwindled, tensions would rise between high income nations as they competed with each other for food supplies. Particularly, the EU, Japan and China would run into conflict as they sought to outbid each other for the remaining food supplies from the Russian breadbasket areas and the Americas. In southeast Asia, piracy would become commonplace, as it also would around the horn of Africa, and the second-tier powers would probably finance or trade with pirates as an alternative to direct conflict with the major powers. To protect these sea lanes countries with traditional rivalries – such as Iran and Iraq in the Gulf, and China and Japan in Asia – would have to send expeditionary forces. Although Japan currently has the ability to defeat China on the high seas, a war over something as fundamental as food is one of the few situations where China might be willing to deploy its nuclear arsenal. Imagine also what would happen if America suffered a general crop failure due to widespread drought, but Canada’s crop failure was only partial…

Small countries with the ability to protect their borders and a smart farming community or government could stand to benefit from these changes, however. For example, a small country with no bad weather that responded rapidly to food collapse by switching from cash crops to high-intensity farming of a particular food supply could feed its own community and potentially make huge amounts of money selling to major trading partners; in such a case, for a developing nation, centrally mandated rationing and calorie restriction could enable a huge accumulation of wealth through trade that could completely change the country’s future. On the other hand, countries in such a situation who are near a major regional power might suddenly find themselves annexed and subject to strict rationing as the regional power confiscated the fruits of their clever planning.

In the broad, we would see major famines across much of Africa and the middle east, and for the first time in perhaps 50 years we would see generalized famines outside of a small region of Africa, including potentially on other continents. Political upheaval and chaos in the middle east and parts of southeast Asia would bring down governments and lead to major population movements. Piracy and low-level national conflicts, as well as breakup of unstable nations, would lead to violence and conflict on a large scale through complex regions like southeast Asia or East Africa. Finally, there would be the risk of major conflict between the high-income nations, ending in nuclear attacks if the collapse was broad enough.

I think this would be quite a good campaign setting … but let’s hope it stays in the realm of the imagination …

 

The Moral Hazard of Near-system Space Colonization

Imagine our planet sends out a colony ship, to colonize some distant planet. It’s flying at near light speed, but the journey is still expected to take about 300 years; time dilation effects on the ship mean shipboard it’s only, say, 150 years – 5 or 6 generations. While the ship is speeding to its destination, development continues on earth, and about 100 years after launch they discover faster-than-light travel. By the time the colony ship reaches its destination the planet has already been colonized, populated, developed and matured. The colonists arrive to a huge party, to discover their mission was pointless.

If you were one of the middle-aged residents of that colony ship, would you be happy with the society that sent your great-grandparents out into the dark? You spent your entire youth and young adulthood in a tin can, for nothing except the promise that soon – in your lifetime – you would arrive at a new world and have the chance to make a unique contribution to human history. Instead, some bunch of cosseted earth-siders got their first, because they had the good fortune to be born 200 years later. Your contribution becomes a footnote, for which you waited 40 years in the freezing dark, drinking your own piss.

Crooked Timber has an interesting discussion about the viability of colonizing interstellar space, started from one of John Quiggin’s economists’ assumptions. In amongst all the technical jiggery-pokery about giga-joules and the Great Filter, a few people have pointed out the moral bankruptcy of colony ships, based on the simple and obvious fact that the children are being born into a tin can, and have no way out. Thinking about this at the gym (which, presumably for weight purposes, a colony-ship wouldn’t have), it occurred to me that the moral issues associated with colonization are getting a lot more real than those discussed in the Crooked Timber post, and that we need to be aware of a serious risk of moral hazard, and of serious ethical challenges, in our lifetime. I speak, of course, of the Mars One private mission to Mars.

Mars One and moral hazard

Mars One aims to settle up to 40 humans on Mars by 2025, on a one way mission. The mission will be financed by some kind of Big Brother style TV show documenting the (no doubt fascinating) process of colonizing Mars. The settlement is intended to slowly develop, even to ultimately be able to expand using local materials – hopefully to even build a dome of some kind large enough to grow trees. But it is likely that for the foreseeable future it will be dependent on supplies from Earth, and that these supplies will be coming through the parent company – which is financing itself through the sale of research opportunities and the TV options. For a few years this seems like a pretty viable source of income, but people will get bored of the Mars TV, and anyway we don’t know what will happen to that parent company. This all raises the very real possibility that the company will fail, at which point those people on Mars are ostensibly going to be cut off from their supplies. There is also the possibility that they will breed out there in the Red, and that their children won’t be happy about their birth situation. Which raises two scenarios demanding attention from the people of earth:

1. The company goes bust, and suddenly the task of supplying those 40+ people (80 if the adults have been breeding efficiently) falls on … who? A government will have to step in and bail out those people, because no one on Earth is going to tolerate the possibility that 40 or more people in the world’s first ever interstellar colony will starve to death because of a corporate bankruptcy. This project is too hope-y to fail. Once the company gets those shmucks onto Mars, the rest of the world is going to be basically strong-armed by morality and sentiment into backing the project no matter what. And given that currently there are only three groups – NASA, ESA and Russia – capable of getting stuff to Mars, this means it will be Europe, the USA and Russia that foot the bill if anything goes wrong. This is classic moral hazard, banker bailouts on an interstellar scale (if not financial magnitude): the private company raises a couple of billion bucks to sink into a stupid high-risk project and then, when it collapses, for reasons not predicted by the regulatory authorities, it can’t be allowed to go down.
2. The company continues, and the settlement is a success, but the Children of Mars decide they would like to swim in the sea. They point out to their earthbound cousins that they didn’t ask to be born in a Mars colony and they would like to go home. If the original company is gone under this problem will be even more pronounced: not only is the ESA and NASA supplying the adults, but now the kids point out (quite reasonably) that they want out of their squalid little collection of domes. But nobody has the means to get them out. That wasn’t planned for. To get them out, space agencies will have to send the component parts for a rocket, then the fuel, and the folks on Mars will have to assemble that rocket, and with no option for test flights, the kids will hop on and come back to Earth. That’s a hideously expensive project, but someone on Earth is going to have to foot the bill and it’s going to be very hard to deny that responsibility. Of course, once the kids start going back, the adults will demand the same right. Which means that Earth has to either tell them – we’ll keep supplying you till you die, in a society with no children (who’s going to care for you?), or “sure, you made this decision 20 years ago when you were young and stupid, but we’ll bail you out now.” That’s classic moral hazard.

You can see the way this will play out on earth, but in case 2) it is possible that the original inventors of the project will be dead. No one will even be around to be angry at. And, in a really visceral way, no one is going to be able to say no. Of course one can imagine other scenarios: imagine that the first settlement was made by the USA under Kennedy, and they were willing to spend 2% of their GDP on it; 40 years and a couple of financial crises later, with an increasingly oligarchical and corrupt government, suddenly Americans have a huge public debt and a weird resistance to growing more, their economy is declining, economic power is shifting east – but they still have to commit to sending supplies to That Stupid Colony. The kids of the new era might think they had been shackled with an unreasonable burden (“we could spend that money on Obamacare”) but of course, their choices about it are restricted to either abandoning the colony to starve, or paying some fantabulous amount of money to bring them back. This is hardly a fair choice to saddle your grandkids with. And of course, the original colonists are the people who made the stupid choice to go there, but even if you made them pay they wouldn’t be able to – no human being can work off a debt that size.

Note also the costs of supply will escalate if there are unforeseen medical problems associated with low gravity: then money will have to be sunk into solving the problem, and not by the company that sent them up there. And who is going to educate the kids? That is usually a state responsibility, but no one is going to be setting up a school on Mars. A solution will have to be found based on some kind of school of the air.

But there are other, unpleasant moral issues that will arise in the future of such a colony.

The morality of forced interstellar stardom

Mars One aim to pay for their project through some kind of television project, that will start from 2025. No doubt for a short time this will be hugely popular, but after a few years of watching people wandering around in a couple of inflatable domes the viewers are going to get tired. Revenues will decline. The company will have growing costs though, as the colony needs supplies to feed more members. What will the company do? It might be able to make up the shortfall in research services (“you want to investigate that crater? We’ll send a rover”) but there will be a limit to this, and of course as they try to sell more research services the price will go down. So then, naturally, they will begin to try to make the TV show more appealing. And how are they going to do that?

Zero-G porn.

Of course, for starters they’ll use the usual run of Big Brother-style offerings: stupid game shows, conflict, diary-room confessions, titillating shower scenes (well, maybe not, on Mars). But this will pale after a few years, and we all know what will happen next. Pressure will be brought to bear. Things will be done. People’s relationships will be laid bare. The failing relationships will be filmed; the young couples getting together; people’s most private moments. And the colonists will face an unpleasant choice: the person who supplies your water is telling you you need to make your tv show more “appealing” by doing X. Will you refuse? Probably not. And then, of course, there will be children in all this. Will they even be told about the cameras? At some point they will realize that all their earliest years of development were being filmed against their will by some arseholes a billion kms away, and watched by a million more arseholes. When they come of age, into their tiny domed town of 100 people, they’re probably going to have some righteous wrath saved up.

What will they do? What should we do about what they’re going to do, what has been done to them? When these kids, who have never been to a prom (but have seen prom-date movies), who have never been to a nightclub (but have watched music videos), who have a choice of, like, 6 partners (but have watched a thousand rom-coms) demand to return to a land with trees and standing water, what are the people on earth going to say to them? “We enjoyed watching you grow up on a strange planet, but we can’t afford to have you back”?

What does a riot look like, in a domed city made of plastic on a world with no atmosphere?

There is also, of course, the endless possibility for horror in this settlement. Suppose a dome blows, and the usual emergency systems don’t work properly: the colony loses its farm section, and no matter how hard we try we can’t get the food to them in time because it’s physically impossible. There’ll be no eating grass roots and insects and watching children with swollen bellies but knowing a precious few will survive, like Ethiopia in the 1980s. Everyone will have the certain knowledge that they will die. Will we be forced to watch as they turn to cannibalism? Who will turn off the tv feed? What if they have a broadcast installation? Then the videos will be going up on youtube no matter what the company does, and anyone with a dish will be able to see the sordid terrible end of our first stellar mission. We can all imagine hundreds of similar scenarios, and all of them on film by design.

Preparing for the moral hazard of Mars One

It’s not looking likely that anyone is going to ban Mars One, but it seems to me that as a society we need to come up with a plan for what will happen as a result of it. This isn’t Jonestown or even Greenland in the 15th century: whether we as individuals agree with the project, once it is in place on Mars we will all be watching it and cheering it on. Which means that we need to recognize that there is a risk that things will go wrong, and future generations – or us, in 30 years time – will have to bail out at enormous cost a project which was marginal from the beginning. I think governments need to find a way to prepare for that, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the first step in that preparation is to make Mars One think about the future. At the very least, some of the capital they raise needs to be put aside against eventualities. Some possible uses for a Mars wealth fund include:

1. Simple investment, to ensure that by the time things go wrong there is a stock of money available to finance special projects
2. Trust funds for the kids. They’re going to want stuff, and we’re going to need to provide it, so we should prepare
3. Funding directly to government-run space research projects, especially projects for deep space propulsion and Mars exploration. If the funds are used to develop alternative ways of getting to and living on Mars, it improves the options for those people in the future
4. Contingency funds for if the Mars population grows too fast
5. Profits could be invested in sending extra supplies to Mars, to build redundancy and stockpiles

With mechanisms like this in place, bailouts will be less costly, and there will be insurance against risk.

Laws also need to be passed. Governments need to look very carefully at the contracts these colonists are signing, and add clauses about the rights of colonists to refuse new entertainment demands, and the way that those contracts might extend (or be inferred to extend) to children. Anything involving porn or cam-girl type stuff needs to be carefully discussed. Some kind of dispute resolution system is going to be necessary, possibly even independent oversight. Imagine, for example, that a Mars colonist is being pressured to do some semi-nude stuff, but doesn’t want to: what options does he have to resolve that? What if the company refuses him access to a workplace rights lawyer? The company at the very least should be forced to establish an independent communications system, guaranteed by government, so that people on Mars can have a reliable and independent way to contact friends, relatives and conciliation bodies. Otherwise they will essentially be slaves.

I don’t think any of this has been considered.

Are Mars One taking the piss?

I’m noting that there is an application fee of between $5 and $75 for potential Martians, and they are hoping to recruit a million applicants. If the Mars One people are planning to fold before the project is initiated they will make a lot of money. It seems like a lot of aspects of this project are going to run on a very tight deadline, and haven’t been thought through. Is it possible that the whole thing is a get-rich-quick scheme that is never going to see reality? It seems very possible to me. But if not, we as a society need to be thinking very carefully about what we want to tolerate up there, and how we’re going to manage the ethical challenges and moral hazards of a private initiative to colonize Mars.

 

Sudden Existential Crisis

The two inevitabilities in life: death and centripetal force

Iain M. Banks is dying: having seen off threats from militaristic empires and proto-gods, his galaxy-spanning, anarchist semi-utopian Culture has less than a year to live because of cancer. This marks the sad end of a great science fiction career, and a well-respected fiction writer.

My first encounter with Banks was his first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, which re-invigorated space opera for me. His Culture novels contain a combination of elements which, though present individually in other writer’s work, for me coalesce beautifully in his best science fiction. He takes the standard space opera tropes of technology-as-magic to its logical conclusion of post-scarcity economics, and is not scared to consider the full social and cultural ramifications of such a political culture. Simultaneously, he is willing to take on seriously the prospect of artificial intelligences (“Minds”) being vastly superior in capacity to humans, as close to gods as a physical object can be, and takes seriously the task of crafting stories in which many of the protagonists have close to godlike power. He also overlays his novels with a subtle political commentary, not usually overtly preaching in any direction and not necessarily coming to strong moral or political conclusions. His work is, in this sense, genuinely speculative, and a welcome addition to the canon.

He also invents great Ship names.

Iain Banks’s fiction novels are a stranger and more diverse affair, ranging from thrillers like Complicity to the semi-fantastic dreamscapes of The Bridge. His first fiction novel, The Wasp Factory (also the first of his fiction novels that I read) gained strong reactions, but I think is generally well-regarded. At the time perhaps his career prospects didn’t look good, though, because it was a radically weird work. At the Crooked Timber thread on Iain Banks they report this review from the Irish Times:

It is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparalleled depravity. There is no denying the bizarre fertility of the author’s imagination: his brilliant dialogue, his cruel humour, his repellent inventiveness. The majority of the literate public, however, will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it.

I guess his fiction is not as universally admired as his sci-fi, and certainly some of it I found uninteresting (I think I read the Crow Road and didn’t enjoy it at all).  I think he has also attracted some attention for his politics: in real life he is a staunch leftist in the Scottish tradition (more Burns and Adam Smith than Marx or Mills), liberal or anarchist in leaning and strongly critical of the major political movements in British life. Like another great leftist in science fiction, though, when his works are political they stand as a challenge to his own side of politics as much as his opponents, and his utopianism has more to say about the limits of anarchist political thought than it has criticism of modern conservativism. Compared to China Mieville I think he is more willing to put his politics forward in his work, but he does so sutbly and with a nice alloy of cynicism and realism that prevents it from being preachy. In fact, the most political book of his I’ve read, Dead Air, is more of a cynical cry for help than a screed, and the only other strongly leftist character in his books is an unhinged murderer (from memory).

So, it’s a sad day for science fiction as Iain M. Banks retires from the public eye to put his affairs in order. Let’s hope that he has a strong legacy, and his work remains influential for some time to come. It’s just a shame that he will Sublime before the Culture does …

 

AKB 48: Modern Nuns?

Today we heard word of a scandal overtaking the modern Tokyo phenomenon of AKB48. Their 14th most popular member, Minegishi Minami, was caught by a journalist leaving the house of a “boyfriend,” a 19 year old member of some random boy band (compared to AKB48, the boy band in question is largely irrelevant). The pictures were published in some scandal rag, Shukan bunshun (週刊文春), a magazine which basically makes its income from printing shit. As a result of this indiscretion, Miss Minegishi has been demoted to research student (kenkyusei) status, meaning a massive loss of pay and  that in the strange heirarchy of AKB48 she will have to climb back up the ranks to reclaim her position as an enormously popular public figure.

The heart bleeds, doesn’t it? Actually the apology is a beautiful and heartfelt thing, and it’s clear that Miss Minegishi is under a lot of pressure, as one might expect if one were published leaving the house of one’s lover the morning after a trist and published in a magazine read by millions of people, in a country where everyone (well, not me!) is watching you and discretion in sexual encounters is paramount. This is a nation where holding hands in public is still frowned upon by many young people, and kissing generally avoided at all costs. Being photographed the morning after a shag is obviously going to be very embarrassing.

AKB48 sold $200 million of records alone in 2011, and endorse everything from elections to instant coffee. They are the very definition of a household name, and getting into the top 48 of this weird little business enterprise is a license to print money for the young women involved. It’s also not easy: their recent documentary carries the subtitle no flower without rain, which draws on an old saying about how beauty and/or success depend on suffering. The structure of the AKB48 system is redolent of university and the early years of the corporate system: it is intended to reproduce the sense of having to strive to make it, being indebted to one’s seniors, and being vulnerable in the face of life’s challenges. In many ways, AKB48 are perfect representatives of the Japanese notion of gaman, of having to suffer through adverse circumstances to achieve: this is the same spirit of gaman that enables Judo masters to bully their charges[1], but which makes a Sumo wrestler like Takanoyama enormously popular because he tries so hard. Two sides of the same coin … I don’t know if it could be said that Miss Meinegishi is being bullied in this instance, though … what she did do is fall foul of a contractual obligation not to go on dates. That’s right – AKB48 girls are not allowed to go on dates! The Guardian article makes it appear as if this rule is based on “the strict rules to which Japan’s young pop stars must adhere to project an image of unimpeachable morals” but this isn’t the reason at all – that’s just bullshit western misinterpretation of east Asia’s so-called conservatism. The real reason that Miss Minegishi has to live a sexless (or at least secret) life until she “graduates” from AKB48 is that her band is idolized by nerds and pre-sexual teenage girls, and to both groups of fans they have to appear pure and single. These are girls next door who are struggling through a metaphorical high school/university/early corporate life, and girls like that don’t get DP’d in love hotels.

Miss Minegishi’s extreme haircut is also not forced on her by her contract: she did this all by herself, to symbolize her abasement. This means she’s going to be trying extra hard to regain the favour of her fans, and my prediction is that this little cock up is going to be a goldmine for her and for the AKB48 business: she’ll soon be returned to the top ranks, fans will love her more for having fallen and strived, and there’ll be another documentary with tears and struggle – a genre that AKB48′s fans love.

Which brings me to my William Gibson-esque point: these girls are Japan’s modern shrine maidens, the modern equivalent of western nuns of yesteryear. They’re required to swear themselves to celibacy, live lives of constant self-flagellation and torment, and simultaneously have to symbolize everything that is admired in the women of their time: chastity, beauty, sexiness, innocence and endurance. They also have to tread the line of hypocrisy that characterizes modern attitudes towards young women: at the same time as they are making swimsuit videos and soft porn, these girls will get demoted if they are caught having sex. And because it’s Japan they also have to be educated: there’s currently a TV show about some of these girls going to college and trying to get a qualification. William Gibson has a few short stories about these kinds of characters in the cyberpunk world (I think Idoru is the most apt, though I haven’t read it): women whose celebrity depends on their embodying all of the ideals of femininity of their time, and whose personal lives are warped or ruined as a result of it. So let’s hear it for Minami Minegishi, embodiment of all the trials and tribulations of modern womanhood – and of the complexities of the cyberpunk era. Ganbare, Minegishi san! The hopes of a generation, and the weight of an entire society’s sexist expectations, are resting on your skinny shoulders …

—

fn1: though maybe not anymore: watch the video of the coach apologizing and listen to the cameras – the girls he bullied weren’t willing to tolerate it and his humiliation is pretty much complete. These guys’ world is changing, and it’s apparent that they aren’t catching up…

 

Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars: Edge of the Empire Beginner’s Game

Doing the Kessel run in 12 parsecs …

Today I received my copy of Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, along with some necessary WFRP3 materials. Edge of the Empire is described as a “beginner’s game,” which means that it essentially doesn’t have any character creation rules, has a very stripped down combat system, and contains a well laid out but slightly railroad-y introductory adventure. There are 4 pre-designed PCs, but no way to make other PCs. The rulebook is just 48 pages, the adventure book is 30 pages long, and there are also some tokens to represent PCs/adversaries, and a set of special dice. It really is a beginner’s game, though those with experience of other Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) product can probably hack it (see below). This is a first impressions review.

First of all, the product is very slick. It’s well laid out, in a sparse and modern style that gives the whole thing an atmosphere supportive of a space opera setting. The graphics in the book are very nice, in a space opera style, and the pictures are very heavily focused on Tattooine, which draws the reader’s attention to the original three movies and ensures a certain fidelity to the production. The text is perhaps a little small, so that at times when it is interspersed with the coloured symbols for the dice it is kind of dizzying. The general flow of the rules is sensible, introducing the basic dice mechanic first and then describing skills, then combat and finally a little bit of GM material. The maps are nicely drawn and, as you can see from the picture, include a YT-1300 light freighter. What more can you want?

The system is very light and easy to learn, and it’s a testament to FFG’s game design and presentation skills that the entire system, as well as the GM section, can be laid out in a total of 48 pages (including acknowledgements and index) – even though it includes a section on starship combat. The system is essentially a rules-lite version of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying 3 (WFRP3), with all the fiddly componentry stripped out. There are no action cards for combat, no talent cards or recharge tokens, but essentially the same system in place. Instead of action cards there is a talent tree, with individual parts of the tree purchased at varying xp costs and dependent on previous parts of the tree. The dice system is simplified but very similar to the WFRP3 system. In place of conservative/reckless dice and training dice we have “upgrades,” which are d12s that replace the basic d8 stat dice; challenge dice can also be upgraded. There are equivalents of fortune and misfortune dice, and so the whole thing works in a very similar way. There are also equivalents to banes and boons, and a thing called a triumph that works as a combined additional success/sigmar’s comet. So if you’re used to playing WFRP3 it’s pretty much just a straight conversion, but the dice pools are easier to put together than in WFRP3. Critical hits and wounds are also handled more simply: there are no wound cards, just a growing tier of effects, with every PC able to bear four critical wounds before they become incapacitated; each additional critical wound has an additional effect. For the beginner’s game there is no death, just incapacitation. The system includes no character creation rules but it does provide four PCs: a human smuggler, Twi’lek bounty hunter, droid colonist and wookie hired gun. These are laid out in very attractive “folios” that contain essential rules information. Each folio has three double page spreads: the first is the starting PC, the second gives the same PC with two character development options selected to show how development works, and the third is blank but for the character attributes, and includes a talent tree so that you can develop the PC any way you want. So essentially these folios contain (implicit) information on four character classes and four races, though you have to do a bit of hacking to work out the background.

The adventure is very well laid out and carefully designed for beginning players. It is partially a railroad: the first instructions to the GM are to make clear to the PCs that a) they have to escape the town they are in and b) they can’t go any way except by spaceship. It then lays out a set of six encounters designed to showcase the major aspects of the rules, up to and including starship combat. Each encounter includes boxed sections that contain reminders of the key rules from the rulebook, so a GM learning the system can quickly adapt without having to fiddle in rulebooks. I’m not sure how other “beginners” games lay out their introductory adventures but this seems like an excellent approach. Given the simplicity of the system, I suspect that after one run through this book most GMs will be ready to handle anything else. There is apparently a second adventure available free at the FFG website, but I haven’t checked it.

I think essentially in this game the people at FFG have learnt from their mistakes with the overly complex and fiddly WFRP3 system, as well as identifying better ways to introduce the system to new players and GMs, and intend to trial it with this stripped back version for Star Wars. This version is a little disappointing, in that it doesn’t offer any freedom for experienced players to just jump into the Star Wars universe, and for an experienced GM like me it seems like a rip-off. It also doesn’t provide much background material on the Star Wars milieu, which I really need (I don’t know anything beyond the stuff in the original three movies), and it is set in the early stages of the rebellion so is the perfect setting for exploring the world of the original movies with a fast-paced, simple and creative system. Given this, I’m disappointed that they didn’t include a second book of background material, perhaps with options for character development. I certainly hope that the next set they release in the series will flesh out the full system, including Jedi, so that we can have a complete gaming system for the Star Wars universe. I remain a big fan of the fundamental ideas underlying WFRP3, and it’s nice to see FFG committing to producing more material in a similar vein, while ironing out the creases in the original.

Finally, I think that the system presented here could be easily hacked to produce a rules-lite version of WFRP3. I might give this a go over the next few weeks, and see what I can come up with. In any case, I think it’s only a matter of time before the revised system presented here gets turned into a classic fantasy RPG. That will be fun, I think. Let’s hope that this Star Wars system is a success, and FFG are encouraged to apply its pared-back rules to other settings.

 

Japan’s Science Fiction Political Party

But what is our policy on Godzilla?

It’s election season here in Japan, and this morning the full listing of competing parties fell through my mailbox. This multi-page, newspaper-style document lists the major parties and their main candidates, along with a very brief statement of their agenda. It’s a useful summary of the state of policy debate in Japan, I suppose, though it can make depressing reading if, like me, you think that the future of Japan depends, at least medium term, on nuclear power – aside from a few fruit loops who want nuclear weapons, almost every party is committed to Nuclear Zero. Even the Communist Party, though at least they have the decency to propose an alternative energy policy. I scanned this set of policy agendas to see if any party had any policies on immigration or foreigners, but I didn’t get very far because I got distracted by a glossy brochure from the Happiness Realization Party, which I think should rename itself the Giant Robot Party (ジャイアントロボット党). This glossy brochure is as disturbing as it is cute: the front page demands that a rock star who made landing on the Senkaku Islands be made governor of Tokyo, presumably not as a token of goodwill in international relations. The back page also makes the nationalistic path to happiness clear, with its number one demand being action to protect Japan from China.

But the middle of the pamphlet is the two-page spread reproduced above, showing the Happiness Realization Party’s vision of a future Tokyo. For those who aren’t familiar with Japanese, some of the more notable features include:

• Making Haneda Airport operate 24 hours a day (far left of the image)
• Heliports! (on reclaimed land: next to the lobster- and crab-tower)
• Fish farms in buildings (below the heliplane-y thing with the crate: the actual phrase means “become able to catch fish inside buildings!”)
• Maglev trains! (These are the big loops running around the outside of the city)
• All motorways underground
• Underground safety shelters (I guess this is necessary if you’re going to go for nuclear armaments)
• Giant robots!!!

The party is also, apparently, in favour of lower taxes. So how they’re going to get to this future Tokyo isn’t entirely clear. I think the way they envisaged it is obvious though: the Tokyo in that picture is basically the city depicted in the Appleseed comics, though the robot’s a little bit bigger than anything in Appleseed. I’d like to point out, though, that the future world of those comics is not exactly a smoothly functioning democracy …

The Happiness Realization Party is also, apparently, pro-foreigner and denies the Nanking massacre, in a classic example of the weirdness of Japanese conservative politics: this party is a low-taxing, pro-foreigner, nationalist and militarist religious party. Based on this weird-looking cult, apparently, which means the health policy will be fascinating: on their website this religious group claim you can heal yourself of cancer. It’s space exploration policy should be interesting too: apparently the religious group’s leader discovered a speed faster than light 30 years ago.

As a foreigner living in Japan I don’t feel it my right to offer advice to Japanese people about how to vote, but on this occasion I think we can all agree that it is my duty to demand all good citizens vote for the Happiness Realization Party: the sooner we can move to a Bladerunner-esque, nuclear-armed Japanese state guarded by giant robots, the sooner we will all achieve full happiness.

 

Playing Gredo

Yesterday’s role-playing was a session of Saga edition Star Wars, set in the era just after the clone wars, and my character was a Rodian scout – that is, one of Gredo’s race, pursuing essentially the same trade and with probably just as much aplomb and skill.

My character, Seredo, was joining an established group, who were on a mission to rescue a turncoat admiral from an imperial prison. The prison was hidden in a treacherous fungus forest on the planet of Feluchia, and the majority of the group had already made landfall and been caught in a firefight with stormtroopers. I had been sent separately, hunting a criminal who was in turn stalking the group, and so I reached the firefight halfway through. This gun battle was taking place across a stream, and involved a couple of stormtroopers, some speederbikes and our party: a human jedi, a protocol droid, and a wookie. Seredo’s aim was to enter the battlefield secretly and use stealth to ambush two stormtroopers who were trying to alert a star destroyer to the group’s presence; unfortunately, Seredo did a Gredo, and fumbled his entrance – instead of sneaking onto the battlefield, he stumbled into a thicket of puffballs, which exploded in clouds of different coloured spores, giving Seredo a rockstar’s entrance to the scene. Still, he was able to pick off one of the stormtroopers and provide covering fire for the jedi and the droid, who were able to kill the others.

Having joined up, we then had to enter the prison block. Being star wars, this was going to have be done only one way: by stealing a scout walker. Our session had to finish after four hours, so we didn’t complete the task, but we’re halfway through: the Jedi is on the roof of the scout walker, I’m between its feet, and the wookie has been spotted. The best laid plans of men and walking carpets, etc.

Playing Star Wars is fun. Blasters, prancing jedi, droids and speeder bikes – it’s just like being there. One of our players has a weird little wookie-head-shaped device with 10 buttons, that when you press it makes various wookie sounds, and it comes with a code so that you know what button to press at what time. Every success and setback is greeted with its own roar of glee or outrage. There are outlandish aliens, stormtroopers to kill, and all the dubious and seedy characters of a universe that is, essentially, a fantasy realm with spaceships wrapped around it. Fun! The system is a variant of d20,  simplified a little and with some additional deadliness built in – it has a kind of wound system that makes it a bit nastier to play with blaster weapons, and it’s probably a bit faster than standard d20. So it’s a good balance of crunch and swashbuckling. Of course, being d20 it still takes a bit of time to get anything done. It’s also nice to be playing a PC that can actually do something useful, even if it is only at a Gredo-esque level of ability. So, there’ll be more of Seredo’s exploits in a month or so, when we return to the planet of Feluchia and find out whether he’s going to end his reptilian span prematurely under the feet of an AT-ST, or whether he’s going to ride one to glory freeing imperial slaves …

 

Does Avengers Fail the Bechdel Test?

I finally got to see the Avengers today, and a fine romp it was too. I’m still chuckling now about the encounter between Loki and the Hulk, and the movie has much to recommend it. It has good characters, excellent explodiness, very snappy dialogue, and some very smooth cultural references. I know nothing about the Marvel universe, but I really like the Incredible Hulk and I think he’s done very well in this movie, as is the Stark guy. Thor was a bit bland, and Hawk Eye both incongruous (a bow? really?) and a little weak, but Black Widow was excellent, and even Captain America had charm despite his obvious inherent blandness. So that’s four good characters, an excellent script, some genuinely awesome action scenes, and a plot that mostly made sense. I’m willing to forgive Joss Whedon the flying aircraft carrier madness because a) it’s pretty cool and b) it was probably some Marvel stupidity anyway, so whatever. Though FYI to super-spy agencies planning on building a massive flying double-decker invisible aircraft carrier: more than four rotors is a good idea. Try eight. Also, maybe there’s a new truism of movie-making here: plots that occur on a massive flying invisible aircraft carrier will be a bit silly, because I thought the whole shenanigan in that part of the movie was a little unbelievable. I don’t in general like it when the bad guy’s scheme is so devious that it relies on 88 layers of mistakes by his otherwise intelligent opponents (“I know! If I get myself captured and trick them into taking away my weapon and placing it in the dungeon right next to an unstable ammunition supply, and then they simultaneously build a hoverbike in the same room – which I know they’ll do – and the hoverbike relies on beta-particle generating fusion power for its locomotion – which I know it must – then surely the resulting chemical reaction will kill them all and free me from the indestructible prison I know they will put me in!”)

But otherwise it was excellent. Though I must point out that the wiggly monster-thingy from the preview that appears in the final battle, though 78 spiny shades of awesome, does appear to be a bit of a copy of a certain monster from a Final Fantasy movie I watched. But as Chumbawumba said, there’s nothing new under the sun, and provided it explodes in sufficiently technicolor glory I don’t care. And anything that gets punched by the Hulk does, so all’s well that ends well (unless you’re the spiny beast from beyond space and time – it doesn’t end well for them).

I was reminded while watching, however, that a while back I put up a post about Game of Thrones passing the Bechdel test, and that this post was inspired by the observation that the Avengers fails the Bechdel test, so having finally had a chance to see the movie, I’m in a position to make a judgment about this burning cultural issue. As a reminder, the Bechdel test requires that two female characters must have a conversation about something other than a man.

In this simple sense the movie fails the Bechdel test, but this is for a very simple reason: there are only three female characters in the movie, only one of them is a significant lead, and they basically don’t meet. Most assuredly, it fails the “where have all the chicks gone?” test, but there’s a very simple reason for this: it’s set in the Marvel Universe, a comic book world designed for teenage American boys, and so there are very few lead characters who are female. The only chance for any woman to interact with any other woman in this movie is in the first half of the movie when Black Widow is on the bridge of the USS Stupid Flying Invisible Aircraft Carrier, and there is one other female agent who might be able to engage with her – but that agent’s role is so tiny that she gets maybe three speaking parts and is largely irrelevant through most of the movie.

I think a more relevant question is whether Joss Whedon should have considered putting women in more secondary roles – e.g. Agent whatisface who gets killed, or the physicist guy who does something. Alternatively, and more radically, Whedon could have considered making one of the five core cast members a different gender. I’m not sure how Black Widow could be made a boy given her name, but Captain America and Hulk are both gender neutral names. Come to think of it, a female Hulk would be fascinating on so many levels of feminist inquiry, it would make the average teenage nerd’s head explode. It would probably also lead to the movie being shit-canned as “too politically correct” before it even got to the funding stage. And Marvel would no doubt not have supported it.

I guess the moral of this is that the Bechdel test really only applies to movies set in genres which allow women to have meaningful roles.  That pretty much rules out much of the super-hero genre and a lot of sci-fi too. Bechdel tests are an irrelevant second order concern when women can’t even be portrayed in strong roles in a genre, and in fact the female characters that Whedon did put in this movie really shone: Black Widow was awesome, and the nameless female agent on the bridge was very competent and cool. Sadly, everyone else was a bloke. So, more important than giving Black Widow the chance to workshop her mass-murder issues with a couple of her girlfriends, is actually giving her female colleagues. Once the American comic universe has risen to that level of sophistication, we can upbraid Joss Whedon for not having the all-female murder crew talk about something other than the men they’re going to kill…

 

Campaign Ideas: After the Warming Apocalypse

This month’s rapid and unexpected disappearance of the Arctic sea ice is perhaps the first time that global warming (AGW) has really shown an ugly side that can’t be easily put down to just weather and/or luck. But something that surprises me about the sci-fi genre is that AGW’s worst case scenarios don’t seem to have made much impact on the genre – there don’t seem to be many stories which make it a central part of the setting or the narrative, even though it’s rich with possibilities and very topical. I guess I could be wrong, but it seems to have slipped under the sci-fi radar. But as it becomes apparent that we are heading into a future that will not be consistent with any part of our recorded history, a wider and richer fictional discussion of the topic seems like exactly what sci-fi was invented for. How will the world change? Will it be ruined? Will the move to a low-carbon economy happen organically, or will we see authoritarianism and fascism take over only when things become desperate? Will societies adapt or collapse? I’m an optimist about AGW, I think it’s not going to be as bad as the worst case scenarios suggest and I think human society will respond, probably just a bit late and at greater expense than was necessary, but life will continue pretty much as it always has. Nonetheless, the world of the future will be different and the combined challenges of population growth, development and AGW open up vistas of apocalyptic catastrophe that, while they may make for disturbing public policy planning, make for an excellent potential role-playing setting. What would they look like?

Like the After the Flood campaign setting that I’ve been thinking about recently, apocalypses of the AGW kind offer gamers the ability to have a kind of canned Traveller universe in the world we’re familiar with, because the creeping imposition of rationing and constraints means that some societies will adapt and continue to develop, while others will collapse or go backward. If the apocalypse is just bad enough that the altruism of the adapters is challenged, or their accumulated (social and infrastructure) capital is depleted enough to make their situation fragile, then the world will fragment relative to the state it is in now, creating even greater gulfs in technology between the haves and have-nots, and making transition between them more difficult and dangerous. But unlike the After the Flood setting, a post-warming world won’t be quite so catastrophically environmentally challenging (maybe). So it offers the potential for apocalyptic adventuring with occasional havens of rest and peace – probably the best kind. However, under the worst case scenarios we see a global desert, ruled by road warriors and lunatics. Either situation is unattractive in the real world but very appealing in gaming. So let’s consider a few post-warming worlds for adventurers to explore.

The Collapsed Water World

This is the classic figment of AGW “alarmist” visions, and one that can be played up with a bit of sci-fi chucked into the mix. In this scenario, the campaign setting is perhaps 100 years from now, and in addition to Al Gore’s most fevered sea level rise (what, 60m?) we imagine a few simple positive feedbacks, such as reduced ice albedo and a bit of permafrost melting, to project the sea level rise up beyond reasonably expected norms – say about 200m. This completely changes the geography of the Earth, and with a bit of poetic license we could imagine quite exciting new settings: Indonesia becomes an archipelago of tiny islands, like Earthsea; Australia’s inland deserts flood, forming a shallow sea; Russia and parts of Asia are divided into new, more desperate entities (what would the Siberian archipelago look like?). Britain in this kind of scenario was described in the White Bird of Kinship series, in which the UK had divided into multiple small island countries, ruled over by a harsh and authoritarian church (there was a musician involved in a heretical movement, I recall). JG Ballard’s The Drowned World also possibly describes this kind of setting. This setting encourages maritime adventure, but the collapse of the population and nation-states of the existing world mean that much of the world will have been thrown back to a previous era – perhaps that of the mid-19th century  – with occasional small countries retaining higher technology, artifacts available for discovery, and organizations gaining great power by hoarding old technology.

Such a setting gives a GM the opportunity to set a campaign on earth, but to fiddle with the geography pretty much at will, to have a semi-mediaeval science fantasy setting, and to populate it with a wide range of different societies and tech levels. The players can prosper through finding old artifacts and adventuring for more powerful forces, there will be new lands and kingdoms to explore but the world will largely retain the geography (and in many cases, the social orders) of now – just perhaps poorer and more devastated.

The Warring States Model

In this model the sea levels are largely irrelevant, but environmental and resource collapse have led to wars and chaos, and the late response to climate change has led to enforced energy poverty for much of society, at the same time as it has forced rapid technological change. Some societies have become winners in this new order, but most have lost out, falling into poverty, war and chaos. This kind of society might be what we see in Alita: Battle Angel or Appleseed, where a small community lives with extreme technology in a highly protected enclave while the world outside goes to hell in a hand basket. This is also, perhaps, the world of Judge Dredd (though the causes are different in all these cases). In this world the adventurers might be barbarians from one of the collapsed countries, or they might be agents for one of the survivors. Either way, there will be much conflict in this world, and adventures may derive from resource conflicts and the shady dealings of corporations, countries and rich individuals that are trying to get ahead in a harsh new world. It’s an ideal setting for a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk themed campaign.

The Ascendent South

Perhaps more interesting for its context, in this campaign global warming has devastated the nations of the North, but was far less destructive in the South, leaving the old South to become the new world powers. In this world Africa and latin America is where the new superpowers are gathered, and Europe, North America and much of Asia are in ruins, the home of multiple warring cities and tribes. The civilized peoples of the South ride out from their high-tech enclaves to exploit or aid these ruined nations, and vie with each other for supremacy in the new world. But with the environment more fragile, the world has become more dangerous. Perhaps also many of the countries of the South fell victim too, so that next to a super-advanced Ugandan power we find a huge expanse of starving and desperate Africans, warring with each other and desperately trying to form alliances with their stable neighbour.

Alternatively, with the collapse of the old order the South has reverted to older and more traditional structures of governance, so instead of seeing nation-states in Africa along current lines we see the empires of the old world, such as once stretched from Nigeria to the mediterranean, or over large parts of the southern half of the continent. With these new empires come new political fault lines, new resource wars, and very old imperial tensions – which the ruined nations of the north can only hope to benefit from, or become victims of.

The Full Reversion

In this model, the collapse of the environment took society with it, and after hundreds of years of chaos a completely new world order has emerged, based on new (or very old) technologies, with completely new social systems. Maybe it is a single nation for the whole world, ruled by a technological priesthood who hold much of society in chains; perhaps it is a couple of great empires with extremely authoritarian and regressive governments (theologies, monarchies and fascisms) that continually war with each other for the earth’s few remaining resources; perhaps the world has reverted to some stone age ruin, and looks more like the world of the Atlan saga or Julian May’s Jurassic world than the modern era. In this campaign setting global warming is really just an excuse to make a science fantasy campaign setting out of a newly primitivized earth, on the bones of the earth we already know.

Mysterious Powers

In this setting, global warming either caused or was caused by the unleashing of mysterious arcane powers, and led to a new society ruled by magic and superstition. This was part of the pre-text for an old apocalypse campaign I ran years ago, although the apocalypse in this case was a direct satanic intervention on earth. In this case one could gild the lily to make the current crop of climate scientists (Mann, Hansen etc.) either heretical figures (because they are believed to be the evil wizards who caused the apocalypse) or saints (because they warned of its coming and tried to stop it). Maybe if they caused it they are still around, ruling post-apocalyptic mediaeval states from their position as immortal heads of an AGW priesthood – a denialist fantasy made true by Satan himself! Alternatively, all of the past is forgotten and the world has reverted to magic and faith, but one can occasionally dig up relics of the old world – along, perhaps, with the true story of how it fell apart and how it can be restored …

The X-Files

In this near-future campaign, the scientists of AGW have found a secret magic or technology that enables them to make any universally-held view become the new reality. For some reason (service to their alien masters?) they have decided to make AGW the new reality, and the PCs stumble somehow on this fact, and have to race to save the world from oblivion – or worse still, to prevent various churches from managing to get hold of the magic that makes mass beliefs come true. This campaign could fit in a whole range of other conspiracy theories – about moon landings and assassinations and the like – and potentially allow the slow introduction of magic into the world as the science cabal’s secrets become known to the PCs. It also allows a sequel campaign – if the PCs prevent the technology from being used, they enter a new campaign of spies and international intrigue as major governments pursue them to get hold of it; if they fail, they shift straight into the beginnings of the Mysterious Powers campaign. Or, they could use the technology to make any other campaign world of their choosing …

Post-apocalyptic fiction, movies and games are quite common, but I’m surprised at the dearth of specifically global-warming focused ones. Depending on how much one wants to play fast and loose with the science, it can provide a potentially rich backdrop for a post-apocalyptic setting, since it doesn’t just change human society, but changes the very environment in which that society lives – it’s like transplanting the human society to a new world, in the near future, but retaining the geography and many of the properties of this world. It also offers on the one hand a very mild form of apocalypse, characterized by nothing worse than population crash and technological regression; or, on the other hand, any level of extremity up to and including people being forced to live on a new version of Venus. Many of these settings are replete with adventure opportunities and, unlike the After the Flood campaign, don’t involve the kind of extreme terraforming that makes it difficult to imagine any hope in the world. I think this makes AGW a rich mine of possibilities for campaign settings and adventuring. I wonder why it hasn’t been explored more?

 

I Want my Speeder Bike

Apparently an Australian company has developed a Star Wars style speeder bike to the point where it can hover and move, and has posted video footage to prove it.

I think I deserve one of these for being me.

There needs to be more of this kind of development. Where is my jetpack? My AT-AT (admittedly not very useful in Tokyo)? One group of researchers in Japan managed to build a semi-functioning Mehve (from Nausicaa) but it only seems to be able to travel about 100m. Clearly physics isn’t the problem, since these things fly fine in the movie and I know that Hayao Miyazaki and George Lucas wouldn’t be sloppy about these kinds of details – I just think the researchers need to get on with the important research. There must be some swine ‘flu funding or Mars Rover money that can be diverted to actually important projects. I mean, what’s the point in getting a human on Mars if he or she doesn’t have a speeder bike on arrival?

NASA haven’t been able to get their funding priorities right since they started work on the space shuttle!