I know other people have answered this but they are zouaves, based on natives of French North Africa. No research, I'm aware of them because I came across a unit during some some research I was doing for a contract called the Canadian Pontifical Zouaves, a Quebecois unit raised to fight for the papacy during the Italian wars of unification. The really weird thing is that they came back to Canada and continued to exist as a semi-official Francophone militia unit until 1968. And they continued to wear the same uniform. A little off topic, but interesting.
My father knew someone who served in WWI who could not be woken up. His wife had to knock on his door, because if she woke him up directly he would freak out. In the trenches, you had to be alert for any intruder, and yet be able to wake up immediately in the event of an attack.. It's amazing the human body can adapt to.
Until about this time Canada's chief defence plan was essentially this, an invasion south from Ontario, splitting the US forces and attacking Washington (again).
@Makidian: I know, I was so offended when he called it Unobtanim. You might as well call it "McGuffin" or "convenient plot device"
This is something that has always bothered me. In much of science fiction that is considered great none of the people actually act like people. It seems like science fiction tends to focus on scientific realism, rather than social realism.
This whole argument is just tiresome. There's no better way to destroy creativity than by forcing artists to tiptoe around politics. Somebody's always going to be offended, no matter what you do.
Harrison Bergeron was already made into a full-length movie starring Sean Astin with much the same plot as described here. It wasn't great, but it's been done.
The real problem is the tyranny of genre that exists in all art. If it's good it's good dammit, I don't care what you want to call it. Something like the Jeeves stories take place in a world just as unfamiliar and impossible as any science fiction.
Much of Japan, especially in the poorer areas is just like this.
@Midnightxpress: I feel the same way about Snowcrash. "One-upped Neuromancer" really?
I think the whole lack of story reflects something quite fundamental about Japanese aesthetics. One of my favourite Japanese songs has no story, no people. just a beautiful, simple scene, and a feeling.
You see it in art. There's no need to find meaning in a work, or make commentary; the creation of beauty is meaning enough
One of my favourite authors.
Canada had the third largest Navy in the world at the end of World War II, just behind the US and Britain
weirdly enough I haven't heard of this before. And I'm an officer in the Canadian Navy
@twDarkflame:
BattleCar Galactica
@ACyclicUniverse: It was also used at the end of Thunderball.
I met a guy who used it in Project Coldfeet, a CIA operation to retrieve intelligence from an abandoned Soviet Arctic Research Station. He wrote a book about it.
The Revelation Space books by Alastair Reynolds posit that an AI species is systematically wiping out species that expand beyond their own solar system for reasons of their own
