So last night was the long-awaited debut of V, the show about beautiful aliens who show up and claim to come in peace and offer us lots of goodies... but turn out to be rapacious lizards in disguise. The pilot moves along at a brisk pace, introducing the aliens in the first 10 minutes and setting up various characters as anti-alien and pro-alien. The younger priest is suspicious, but the older priest is an alien-sympathizer. Elizabeth Mitchell's FBI agent is suspicious too, but her teenage son guzzles the Kool-Aid. The nice-suited African American guy is conflicted and doesn't want to be "that guy" any more.

By the end of the first episode, it's already made crystal clear that these aliens are up to no good. They've had sleeper agents on Earth for years, including Alan Tudyk's FBI agent. And other aliens living secretly among us are part of an anti-alien resistance, which may look like terrorists to the uninitiated.

So now that you've had a chance to see the pilot for yourself, you can judge whether it's actually a broadside aimed at our president. The Chicago Tribune's Glenn Garvin seems absolutely certain it is:

Imagine this. At a time of political turmoil, a charismatic, telegenic new leader arrives virtually out of nowhere. He offers a message of hope and reconciliation based on compromise and promises to marshal technology for a better future that will include universal health care.

The news media swoons in admiration — one simpering anchorman even shouts at a reporter who asks a tough question: "Why don't you show some respect?!" The public is likewise smitten, except for a few nut cases who circulate batty rumors on the Internet about the leader's origins and intentions. The leader, undismayed, offers assurances that are soothing, if also just a tiny bit condescending: "Embracing change is never easy."

So, does that sound like anyone you know? Oh, wait — did I mention the leader is secretly a totalitarian space lizard who's come here to eat us?

Welcome to ABC's "V," the most fascinating and bound to be the most controversial new show of the fall television season. Nominally a rousing sci-fi space opera about alien invaders bent on the conquest (and digestion) of all humanity, it's also a barbed commentary on Obamamania that will infuriate the president's supporters and delight his detractors.

The meme spread throughout the right-wing and left-wing blogospheres yesterday, with Ana-Marie Cox weighing in over at Huffington Post.

So now that you've had a chance to see the pilot for yourself, is it really all about how we would have been better off with McCain in the White House? Umm... Probably not. But it was definitely not a subtle episode. The aliens had "too good to be true" plastered on their faces from the beginning, and because the episode moves so fast, we're left wondering why anybody would have bought this dog-and-pony show in the first place.

And there are some little winks at the right-wing tea-partiers that may just be intentional, like when Anna (Morena Baccarin) talks about "change," and the sleazy journo guy asks her about universal health care. Mostly, though, the show seems designed so that you can project whatever ideology you want onto it — not unlike Anna's luminous screen, floating over the world's major cities.

The show isn't subtle, but that's part of the point — there are no hidden messages here at all. The messages are all right on the surface, and they're pretty basic science-fiction standbys, like "aliens who seem too good to be true usually are." Even the show's little jabs at the media and our dumb youth culture feel like they're just slapping a 21st century paint job on the show's 1980s fable. Media talking heads are blow-dried and dumb, young twerps enjoy tagging and Youtube — it's not exactly incisive social criticism.

I really doubt Obama is worried here.

The fast pace, though, is a good thing — that's one of the things that endeared me to this pilot in the first place. Anyone who remembers the original show is going to know these aliens are hucksters, so the faster that's revealed to the audience, the better. And compared to the pilot of FlashForward, which fixated on the crashy destruction and chaos attendant on the future vision/blackout in its pilot for several minutes, V got the disruption of the aliens' visit over fairly quickly, with one desultory plane crash.

Watching the pilot for a second time, the main problem that jumps out at me is that those two teenage kids are going to make me want to claw my face off. And it seems like Smallville's Laura Vandervoort is going to be somewhat painful to watch as well, with the woodenness. But getting to see Elizabeth Mitchell kick more ass and be less angsty than she was on Lost pretty much makes up for those drawbacks. And priest guy, who hails from The 4440, is still just as fun to watch as ever. Plus Baccarin can only get slyer and more engaging as the evil Anna, once her evil plans unfold.

I'm pretty sure this version of the pilot was significantly different from the version we saw at Comic Con. We knew the final sequence was going to be different — that laser shooting robot drone (in the clip above) was not there before, and the last few minutes were generally zippier. But also, my favorite scene is missing from the televised version. In the original version, when we meet Chad Decker, he's just had sex with the vice president's cougar-ish assistant, who promises to get him an interview with the Veep in return for the booty call. It lets us know right away that Decker is a man-whore, and is sort of hilariously trashy besides. In the televised version, that's replaced with a bland scene of him wanting to interview the Veep, but being told that he's just the talking head who reads the news. I have a feeling there were other weird, funny touches removed before the show aired, but I can't remember the others off the top of my head. This definitely felt a bit blander than the original pilot, although how much of that was editing and how much was just seeing it a second time, I'm not sure.

But despite some quibbles, this was a pretty fun outing, and a nice start to the series. It got us to the "OMG the aliens are evil lizards" part quickly and zippily, and set us up for three more episodes of alien intrigue and human gullibility, with an anti-alien resistance simmering under the surface. Now if those two teenagers can just get blown up in a tragic shuttlecraft accident, preferably next week...

A Duke University study, conducted on November 4th, 2008, measured voters' testosterone levels before and after the winner was announced. Participants were asked to chew a piece of gum at 8pm, when the polls in North Carolina closed, and then again at 11:30pm after Obama's election was announced. By analyzing the spit samples in the gum, the researchers were able to analyze the testosterone levels of the participants.

Men generally experienced a slight drop in testosterone over the course of the night, but the participants who voted for Obama did not experience a drop in testosterone. Male voters who voted for McCain or Libertarian candidate Robert Barr, however, experienced a significantly greater drop in testosterone than would be expected. Female voters did not show a significant change in testosterone, regardless of whom they voted for.

Duke neuroscientist Kevin LaBar was excited by the indication that voters are physiologically so affected by election outcomes, and plans to perform a similar experiment involving sports instead of politics. He figures studying Duke basketball fans is a good place to start.

[Physorg]

Written in 20 year increments, The Next 100 Years by George Friedman looks out over our coming century, with an eye towards geopolitics and international power. In the next twenty years, Friedman predicts that the global war on terror, which he terms the US-Jihadist war, will be winding down, a smaller conflict that will have little consequence after all is said and done.

Instead, numerous problems will crop up in the former Soviet bloc as Russia works to regain its former power by reclaiming older territories through economic growth and outright bullying. To an extent, this has already been hapepning, especially if you look at the short-lived war last year in Georgia, as well as the outcry in Poland more recently as the United States decided to pull its missiles out of the country in favor of settling Russian concerns and more mobile missile platforms. However, Friedman views this growth as short-lived, and predicts that Russia, while growing over the next decade or so, will run out of stream due to a decreasing population and declining economy.

Friedman blames declining birth rates for the declining fortunes of a number of nations — and this is a sort of side-effect of an industrial nation. Pre-industrial countries required higher birthrates in order to counter-balance a higher infant mortality rate. With people entering the workforce at a later age, with increases in medicine and the lowered need of numerous contributors in a household, Friedman argues that there's little need for larger families.

Thus, a major point of conflict in the next century, especially in the next fifty years as populations begin to drop, won't be over immigrants illegally entering countries, it will be over which countries can lure in the most new workers to help prop up their own economies and lagging workforces.

While the major powers around the world such as the United States and Russia will have economic slowdowns during this stretch, smaller nations will use this opportunity to rise on their own. Friedman notes that the larger nations won't be down and out for the count, and will thus be powers to be reckoned with - conflict will arise between the United States, which, in his view, will remain the most powerful nation on the planet, and these new players. Friedman singles out three countries, in particular, that will become the next major powers during the 21st century: Turkey, Japan and Poland, with other nations, such as Mexico, becoming far more powerful in their respective regions.

Why these three? All of them currently have advantages that will help them in the coming decades. Japan's economy is slowly growing again. Friedman believes that China will fragment under its rapid economic growth and growing internal troubles, which will further allow Japan to become a leader in the region. Friedman looks to past examples of Japan managing to take over Southeast Asia, at various points in the region's history, as further evidence of this.

As for Turkey, this country sandwiched between Europe and the Middle East will become more and more important strategically, and will become a more vital ally to the United States as Russia first expands and then collapses. In th midst of the Middle East's chaos, Turkey will be able to resist Russia and grow its own economy — and Turkey has traditionally been the leader in that part of the world for much of its history, when it was known as the Ottoman Empire.

Finally, Poland is singled out because it is essentially between two hard places - Germany and Russia. Fearing both, it will seek to expand its influence as Russia consolidates its power back towards its center. Because of its location, Poland has been overrun numerous times by both countries, and would likewise receive US support as Russia grows, because it represents a strategic location. It's entirely possible that those missile systems will be installed after all.

At this point in time, Friedman turns to an inevitable development for many countries - space travel, and how that relates to a country's strategic needs. The United States, he argues, is able to maintain a dominant position over the rest of the planet, because of its armed forces and economic power. A major tool in the U.S. arsenal is the ability to monitor and view every inch of the planet, mainly through the development over the last half century in satellite and surveillance technology. Other nations will inevitably (if they haven't already) develop their own space programs for this very purpose, and look into ways of disrupting the ability of the United States to do the same. At the same time, the US will seek to construct better methods of doing this, including larger crewed systems that could very well be operated by crews that number in the hundreds. At some point in the 2020s-2040s, numerous countries will be utilizing the Moon for scientific and defensive purposes, both overtly and covertly.

This shift in global power, Friedman predicts, will make conflict inevitable, between the United States and these three rising powers, who will loosely band together into a coallition. In order to disrupt the United State's orbital systems, Japan, (on Thanksgiving day, around 2050) will attempt to destroy one of these orbiting platforms from lunar initiated strikes, to maximize the shock value and surprise, in a move reminiscent of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, propelling the countries into war. The United States, faced with destruction of a key military asset, will go to war, as it has done with Pearl Harbor, the Maine and the World Trade Center. The US will retaliate with reserve forces that will eliminate enemy satellites, while soldiers on US lunar bases will attack their Japanese counterparts. By around this time, the US will also have the ablility to field armored infantrymen, straight out of the numerous SF novels and films that have come before.

Essentially, the world will be at war, with Turkey and Poland (Turkey fighting for control over Europe), and Japan fighting to maintain a hold over Asia, with the United States emmeshed in both sides of the conflict. This warfare will be characterized by air forces, robotic forces and enhanced soldiers, and will rely in electrical power grids and other resources as soldiers fight across new battlefields in Europe and Asia. Space will be a vital element, as it allows for communications and the ability to watch a battlefield from a better birds eye view. Friedman theorizes that there will likely be breakthroughs in technology that will allow for microwave and solar energy to be directly utilizied on the battlefield, which might further change how warfare is fought in the future.

Friedman believes this war will last for around two years, through to 2052, when the coalition powers (Turkey and Japan) would be pushed so far as to begin to threaten nuclear retaliation. By this point, the United States will be seeking to push their enemies to sue for peace, rather than destroy them with nuclear weapons. The end result will be a shifting of powers in both the Middle East and Asia, with new nations created in a peace conference. The United States will have better control over space, and will have an expanded economy as a result of the war. America and its allies will prosper in the aftermath of the war. With war as a catalyst to essentially force the evolution of military capabilities and technology, Friedman believes that a war such as this will help to encourage space technology, which in turn will help inform civilian technology. Along with it, he notes, there will be a resurgence in American culture that begin to spread out over the globe, much as what happened during the 1950s-1970s.

By the 2080s, the United States will remain an economic and cultural powerhouse. However, Friedman believes that Mexico will be have been growing while all of this has been happening, and that it will become a dominant rival power in North America. In particular, this sort of rise will be problematic for the United States, because of a large ethnic group that will strongly identify with Mexico, one that has easy access to their homeland.

Rises in robotic technology will displace work forces from unskilled to skilled worked, and thus, unemployment will rise, which will cause problems domestically. Friedman cites a number of reasons, such as oil production and possible shifts in industry from legalized drug trades as a possible method for Mexico to increase its GDP. As Mexico rises, so too will tensions, domestically and internationally, rise between the US and its southern neighbor. Conflict will break out in the Southwest United States as a result of this, although it will be fairly low-key, and last for the rest of the century.

Now, obviously, there are issues with this future, as might be expected with any sort of look to the coming years. While Friedman notes that to look at the future, one must expect a sort of larger view that can gradually bring in vastly different environments from the present, some of his claims seem very outlandish, especially around the specifics. Additionally, he seems to disregard things such as the current 'US-Jihadist' war, which will likely last much longer - the issues in the middle east are long-standing, and neither side seems ready to give up or change to end the conflict.

Secondly, there seems to be a heavy reliance on the actions of the past that will inform the future. While Europe is a fantastic example of history repeating itself when it comes to warfare - German, Russian aggression, etc - the rest of the world generally doesn't seem to function in much the same way. The English, despite their long history as a maritime power, lost that status with the rise of the United States during the two World Wars, while European powers have not demonstrated any real interest in reclaiming influence in Africa, South America or Asia. Looking at the past is not a reliable method of looking at the future. While there are certainly examples (and some that are justly there) of this, it isn't the general rule of thumb that Friedman comes to rely on.

The main strength of this book is one of examination of the world as it is right now, and how that will inform the next two decades, and how those years will possibly inform the next. The years closest to the present are much easier to look at with a higher degree of certainty than decades from now. Friedman imparts some very good advice by pulling the perspective of the years out to a much larger view - as someone who studied geology and history in college, I can attest that looking at history in decades, centuries, millennia and eons will bring about much different perspectives on world affairs than what one might gain by only reading the newspaper or listening to the radio for current events.

The future that Friedman presents does seem very far fetched, but at the same time, somewhat plausible. Will Japan attack the United States in 2050 on Thanksgiving Day? Unlikely, but the important lesson here is the chain of events, brought together by a chain of geopolitical actions, will happen, either with that result, or with very different outcomes. The future will likely bring new conflict, war and problems — and along with them, large-scale shifts in how the world works.

In a way, Friedman presents a far different future than most of the older science fiction predictions, and more in line with some of the newer ones. (Charles Stross and Paolo Bacigalupi come to mind for modern-day examples of this.) What is certain, however, is that the actions of today will inform that of tomorrow. In the meantime, it might be a good idea to begin reading up on some of the more unlikely countries around the world. I'll be learning all there is to know about Croatia - it could be handy in my lifetime.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is bestowed on individuals of any nationality who are deemed to have contributed to US interests, world peace, or any cultural or social advancement. During his tenure, President George W. Bush awarded 81 such medals. But in his new book, Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer reveals that JK Rowling, whose Harry Potter series has been devoured by children worldwide, was suggested as a medal recipient, but tossed out because of the magical content of her books:

This was the same sort of narrow thinking that led people in the White House to actually object to giving the author J.K. Rowling a presidential medal because the Harry Potter books encouraged withcraft.

Barack Obama is an avowed Potter fan, having read the books with his daughters, and it'll be interesting to see if this news prompts him to consider Rowling for the medal himself.

Bush Officials Objected To Awarding Medal To J.K. Rowling Because Harry Potter Books Promote Witchcraft [Think Progress]

According to the New Yorker, Nader includes several real people in the novel, including Warren Buffett, Barry Diller, and Ted Turner, and he telephoned them up to let them know that they were in the book. Nader felt sensitized to this issue, because he's been featured as a character in other people's novels, including Greg Bear's Eon, which the New Yorker says

portrays Nader as "a saintly figure, a hero in a wasteland," whose followers win landslide elections in North America and Western Europe (in 2011) and bring down the Soviet Union (in 2012). "You see, that's science-fiction utopia," Nader said. "Nobody can give that any credibility."

Some people, including one famous billionaire, were a bit "snippy" about being included in Nader's book. But Yoko Ono and Warren Beatty were thrilled:

Yoko Ono, who in the book invents a logo called Seventh-Generation Eye that causes millions of people suddenly to shed their political apathy, sent Nader a brief reply. ("I think it is so sweet of you to write a book about somebody who resembles me. I don't mind at all, of course. Does she look like a tiny dragon?") Warren Beatty, whom Nader envisions running for governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger, and winning, with sixty-three per cent of the vote, blurbed the book. Nader, he wrote, was showing the world "how good he thinks things could be."

So just how weird is this novel? Here's how the San Francisco Chronicle describes the plot:

The story begins in 2005, not long after Hurricane Katrina. A secret gathering is convened by Buffett at a Maui mountain retreat, where 17 very wealthy people agree to take back the country they think has been betrayed.

They give speeches, write books, organize community action groups. They infiltrate corporate boards of directors, stage demonstrations for the environment and better wages. They start a People's Chamber of Commerce, advocate changing the national anthem to "America the Beautiful" and dream up a politicized parrot, "Patriotic Polly," that becomes a media folk hero.

"Fiction is a way to liberate the imagination," Nader says, "to see what could happen if 17 billionaires and super-rich people really put their minds to it, along with a parrot, and took on the existing business power bloc and the politicians in Washington who serve (it)."

The super-rich name themselves "Meliorists," believers that people can make the world better. They persuade the elusive Warren Beatty to run against Arnold Schwarzenegger for California governor. They conspire to force Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to allow its workers to unionize. They push for universal health care. They start a new political party, dedicated to publicly financed elections. They are so quick, and clever, their foes can't catch up.

Here's an excerpt:

I love Supernatural. In my opinion, it's the best speculative genre show on the air at the moment . . . Like I said, I'm a fan.

I'm also a black woman, and I've gotta tell you, that's been giving me some grief.

Because as a black woman, I can't ignore the aversive, stereotypical and damaging ways that your show deals with race. I can't ignore the fact that there hasn't been a single black woman on your show who has lasted more than one episode. This includes Cassie in "Route 666″– the only woman the show ever states explicitly that Dean loves. And even that was so frustrating . . . Perhaps you will understand the extent of my problem when I say that I can count the named black female characters who have appeared on four seasons of a television show on one hand: Missouri Moseley (in "Home"), Cassie, Taylor (in "Hookman") and Tamara (in "The Magnificent Seven"). That's four women–there were none in third or fourth seasons.

You know your show better than anyone. You know that the boys are spending a significant amount of their time south of the Mason-Dixon line. There are black people everywhere in this country, and even setting your show in, say, the pacific northwest really isn't much of an excuse, but I find it mind-boggling to watch episode after episode where Sam and Dean drive through a landscape of such exquisitely evoked Americana…except without the black folk.

It's like some sort of freaky horror movie.

Not the kind you were going for? Then let's talk.

Because it's not just the black women. In fact, that's the mildest part of my problems with race on the show. Because, for better or worse, it's difficult to mess up the portrayals of a demographic you have excised from the world of your characters.

Black men, on the other hand? Well, that's where I really hit some brambles. Because every single time [they show up on Supernatural] they are tragically evil, and they are killed off to add to the emotional angst of your white leads.

Nothing is wrong per se with a tragically evil character. You have plenty of tragically evil white people on the show, too. Ruby comes to mind, but also Travis (in "Metamorphosis") and Eva (one of Azazel's other special children).

But something is wrong when you follow the same pattern with every single black character of any importance on your show across four seasons.

Definitely read the whole essay, because she brings in a lot of specific examples that make her points really convincing.

via Angry Black Woman

Krugman came to Worldcon for two events: a conversation with his favorite living science-fiction author, Charles Stross (which we sadly missed because we were on an airplane) and a one-person talk about science fiction and economics. At the latter, he started out by saying Isaac Asimov's Foundation series inspired his decision to become an economist, since you couldn't actually study to become a psychohistorian. (He's said this many times before, and in fact, said it again in this past weekend's New York Times Book Review.)

But the most surprising part of Krugman's talk was his assertion that the world is actually changing less quickly than in the past. "The pace of change has actually, generation by generation, been slowing down," he claimed. "The world of today is not as different from the world of 1959 as the world of 1959 was from 1909."

So let's say that you travel 30 years into the future and find yourself in a shopping mall. You'll be astounded at the "great gizmos" that are for sale there, but you'll still be able to recognize it as a shopping mall, said Krugman. On the other hand, lots of trends are likely to come to a head over the next few decades, including climate change and peak oil, and they could result in a drastically different world.

Krugman just cleaned out his library and found he had four copies of tons of books published over the last couple decades, since he gets two advance review copies and two copies of the finished book. And he found himself tossing out duplicate copies of tons of futurist books that were depressingly off the mark about predicting the main concern of the 1990s or 2000s. (e.g. war with Japan.) So he's leery of trying to predict the future.

And of course, science fiction was ridiculously over-optimistic about the world of 2009, with talk of space colonization and undersea cities, and yet missed some huge changes which really have happened. "I remember reading something which had all these people flying around between planets, and using slide rules to calculate their next course," said Krugman.

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women-two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians-have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron . . . I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible . . . In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms-from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called "social democracy.

After much screaming on all sides, Phil Browermaster got the last word:

One area where transhumanists consistently disappointment me is politics. We can talk about accelerating change and singularities and human enhancement and the possibilities are endless, but when the subject comes to politics, everyone seems to revert to one of a very small number of philosophical templates, most of them created in the 19th century or earlier. And for some reason those are inviolate.

Read about the whole kerfuffle on H+.

Communist Amerika

Although the United States passionately feared a communist takeover, there is surprisingly little science fiction that imagines what the United States would be like under communism. During the Cold War, there were a lot of movies about communist spies and communist agents and communist invasions, but few stories tried to grapple with what the United States would look like in a long-term communist scenario. The propaganda movie Red Nightmare from 1962, with its grim portrait of small town commie USA, gestured at this idea a little bit. But it wasn't really until the 1980s with the miniseries Amerika that we saw a fully-fledged communist USA. The miniseries imagines what the United States would be like 10 years after the Soviets invade in the late 1980s. Hint: It's evil and must be stopped.

Two books from the 1990s offer slightly more plausible scenarios. In Maureen Mchugh's China Mountain Zhang, the United States suffers an economic collapse in the 21st century, followed by a revolution led by Chinese communists. China has become an economic superpower, while America founders through its own cultural revolution. And in the British short story collection Back In The USSA, Theodore Roosevelt is reelected as a progressive candidate in 1912, thus setting in motion a series of events that lead to a people's revolution in the United States in 1917. Russia, however, remains Czarist. It's a fun thought experiment for people who like to geek out about early 20th century American progressive politics.

Could it happen?
It's telling that Back In The USSA has to reach so far back in history to make its scenario plausible. And McHugh posits a future disaster. The point is that this scenario is an extreme deviation from the country's current trajectory. Sure, anything could happen – there are always black swans. But this possibility feels more like a thought experiment than a genuine possibility.

Fascist Fragments

Americans have feared a fascist takeover perhaps as much as they have feared communism in the past. In fact, the two are often lumped together in political polemics. But in science fiction, Philip K Dick's early 1960s novel The Man In The High Castle set the standard for fantasies of a fascist takeover. In Dick's vision, FDR is assassinated early in his presidency, which results in a weak government that fails to pull the country out of the Depression. So the United States doesn't have the economic or industrial capacity to aid the Allies, Germany conquers Europe, Japan conquers the Pacific, and the United States is broken up and divided among its conquerors. Parts of the nation remain free, parts go to Germany, and most of the West Coast goes to Japan.

Other fantasies about a fascist United States also imagine the country as having broken up. Even the recent television show Jericho depicts (at one point in the series) a post-nuclear apocalypse in the U.S. resulting in its fragmentation into small, authoritarian regions. Obviously there are some alternate histories that imagine a unified United States going fascist, but the idea of a fragmented country falling prey to authoritarians is a common one.

Could it happen?
The United States has sometimes flirted with authoritarianism. Presidents like FDR and Richard Nixon consolidated so much power that many historians would call them proto-fascist. The fact that the United States does not have a parliamentary democracy often makes it appear to resemble nations whose leadership is confined to a small cadre. However, the country also has a history of correcting itself when power is too closely tied to one group. Term limits were set for presidents after FDR died, and the Watergate scandal destroyed Nixon's regime. The question is, would this self-correcting mechanism remain healthy if the country fragmented into smaller pieces? The Man In The High Castle, even after all these years, still makes a persuasive case that a divided America could become fascist.

Corporate Feudalism

Many cyberpunk stories are predicated on the idea that in the near future the United States will be ruled by corporations who are more powerful than governments. This is the premise in William Gibson's classic Neuromancer, Marge Piercy's post-cyberpunk He, She, and It, and is even an important idea in the TV show Fringe. Although a shell of the U.S. Government might remain intact in these scenarios, true power is held by multinationals. Neal Stephenson does a terrific job showing what this would be like in his novel The Diamond Age. Corporations create enclaves with their own cultural norms that function as city-states. (One such enclave adopts Victorian social values and fashions, for example.)

This situation leads to a scenario like feudalism because the corporations become like kingdoms, with an executive class serving as aristocrats and workers as serfs. The world is fragmented economically and culturally, but in many versions of this story the governments remain the same. Still, these governments are more ceremonial than anything else. The world is run by capitalists, not politicians.

Could it really happen?
As we see in the TV show Fringe, corporate feudalism seems as if it has already happened. Although the show is not set in the future, the corporation Massive Dynamic clearly has as much power as the government, if not more. Wealthy companies like Google and Microsoft have more money than many nations. If Google merged with Northrop Grumman and bought Blackwater, could they take over the U.S. Government? Sounds a helluva lot more plausible than a communist revolution.

Since we still live in a democratic society, go ahead and exercise your right to vote. Take our poll and tell the world what you think is going to happen to the U.S. Government.

Bova tells about how he got out of jury duty once, by telling the prosecutor and defense attorney he wrote science fiction for a living. (They couldn't get rid of him fast enough.) And then he insists:

If our political leaders had been reading science fiction, we might have been spared the Cold War, the energy crises, the failures of public education and many of the other problems that now seem intractable because we were not prepared to deal with them when they arose.

We could be living in a world that is powered by solar and nuclear energy, drawing our raw materials from the moon and asteroids, moving much of our industrial base into orbit and allowing our home world to become a clean, green residential area.

But very few of us read enough science fiction to learn how to look into the future and see the possibilities of tomorrow, both the good and the bad. Certainly our political leaders are constantly surprised by each new crisis. They don't look into the future any farther than the next election day.

Science fiction, at its best, is an experimental laboratory where you can test new ideas to see how they might affect people and whole societies. To my mind, it should be required reading for everyone.

[Naples News]

Painting via Faithmouse

In The Girls From Planet 5, published in 1955, the United States elects a female president by 1988, and soon enough, women are running the whole country! The novel's main character, Dave, doesn't mind too much — until his girlfriend gets the job he was in line for, and becomes his boss! So Dave moves to Texas, the only part of the country where men are still men. You can't vote unless you can rope a steer, and they'd never let someone like Ann Richards be in charge. (Oops.)

Anyway, in 1998, a group of female aliens from Planet 5 land on Earth, accidentally killing a bunch of people in Alexandria. Despite that little misunderstanding, the aliens appear friendly, and the citizens of "Biddyland" (which is what Texans call the rest of the U.S.) welcome them with open arms. Only the Texans, who are nominally still part of the U.S., view these visitors with suspicion and ask pertinent questions like, "What happened to their menfolk?" Turns out the young sexy aliens are really being controlled by older, ugly aliens. And are therefore evil. Only the independent-minded Texans can save us!

Over at Crooked Timber, John Holbo has a fantastic review/summary of this prophetic novel. He even typed in some paragraphs of breathless prose, including the part where a woman says "I spunkily made myself a drink." And then she insists that women actually can vote in Texas, and she was roping and branding steers long before most of these dudes. Anyway, in the end, Texas hero Sam Buckskin rounds up a posse, and they go to rescue the rest of the country from these nasty femaliens, before it's Too Late. [Crooked Timber, thanks Gregory]

Not according to Igor Panarin, a former KGB analyst and dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's diplomat school. Like Ernest Callenbach's seminal book Ecotopia, Panarin foresees the Western states splitting off to form their own independent Republic of California. But he sees them either becoming part of China, or under Chinese influence, not becoming an eco-friendly paradise. Meanwhile, the midwestern states will become part of Canada or under Canadian influence, the states around Texas will become part of Mexico or under Mexican influence, and the East Coast liberal elites will finally join Europe. (Oh, and Russia gets Alaska back, making Sarah Palin's boast that she can see Russia a reality at last.)

It's all pretty fanciful stuff, although I think the timetable is what makes it especially ludicrous. If he'd placed his predictions of fracturing in the 2020s or 2030s, it would be somewhat harder to dispute them. What makes Panarin's doomsaying somewhat more significant is that the Russian state-owned media has been pushing it hard, and he's been invited to lecture on it constantly. So the real news is that Russia is promoting these crackpotty views as quasi-official state futurism.

Panarin compares himself to the people who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union a decade or two before it happened — which may be the real reason his views are so popular in Russia now. It's our turn to feel the ground collapse out from under us. I'm just imagining the poor Europeans getting stuck with the hellhole of Conneticut, and having no idea what to do with it. [WSJ]

Last week, the Croatian station Radio Antenna began broadcasting reports of an unidentified flying object, a bright spot of light seen moving through the sky. The reports were apparently a planned hoax by the station’s journalists and Kresimir Misak, the host of the local science fiction show, “On the Brink of Science.” Much as Orson Welles staged his radio broadcast of HG Well’s The War of the Worlds to expose the public’s gullibility, these hoaxsters claimed there was a point to their deception:

The Croatian radio journalists admitted only around noon that their report was a joke, aimed at ridiculing Mayor Milan Bandić’s plans to turn Zagreb into a police stronghold. Bandić intended to supply the police with a helicopter, an unmanned flying device, an armoured car and other special instruments, as well as to build a fortified command centre. The journalists behind the joke had decided to test the authorities by faking a Martian attack on the air.

But the mayor was not the only one deceived by the broadcasts. Zagreb residents jammed up the phone lines with calls to relatives, the authorities, and the local fire department. Police officials are currently investigating whether the reports resulted in any public harm and plan to file charges against those involved.

[Balkan Travellers via Marooned]

Edward Bellamy and the Socialist Movement: In 1888, Edward Bellamy, a Massachusetts lawyer, published Looking Backward: 2000-1887, one of the most influential socialist works ever written. A young Bostonian falls asleep and wakes up in the year 2000 to discover that America has transformed into a socialist utopia. In a world without capitalism, the state runs everything, providing for social and technological advances, paving the way for credit cards, the elimination of middlemen for goods and services, the reduction of the work week, and early retirement. By not wasting their energy on market capitalism, he argued, men were able to become rich, productive, and part of a totally integrated society.

Looking Backward was by no means the earliest work of socialism, but it reached middle class America in a way no similar text had before. It became an overnight bestseller, rivaling Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur in sales. Bellamy removed the stigma of socialism, which had long been associated with sexual libertines and non-traditional values. “Bellamy Clubs” sprang up around the country to discuss the book and its ideals, and it has been said to have influenced England’s garden city movement and the design of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles. The book was also a profound influence on many famed American socialists, including Eugene Debs, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, and Erich Fromm.

HG Wells and Winston Churchill: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is almost as well known for his oratory skills as for his wartime leadership. But many of his lines and ideas came straight from the Grandaddy of Scifi himself, HG Wells. Churchill was a great fan of science fiction, and of Wells in particular, and Wells’ words had a habit of creeping into his speeches. Borrowing a phrase from The War of the Worlds, he referred to the rise of Nazi Germany as “the gathering storm.” Shortly after reading A Modern Utopia, Churchill spoke before the Scottish Liberal Council in Glasgow advocating for social reform in a manner that echoed Wells’ text. Just days before the speech he wrote to Wells, telling the writer, “I owe you a great debt.”

Wells’ influence on Churchill involved more than apt words and social theory. During the Great War, Wells advised Churchill on the creation of a device for trench warfare, although it was developed too late in the war to be of use. The two maintained a friendly relationship, and corresponded until Wells’ death in 1946.

Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein, and the Libertarian Movement: Ayn Rand grew up in communist Russia, and devoted much of her literary career to penning tales like Atlas Shrugged and Anthem, in which boldly self-interested souls would stand up against communist dystopias. Robert Heinlein wrote anarcho-capitalist tales of bold frontiersmen who tame the moon free from government interference. In high school, a young man named David Nolan read these authors, and their work helped mold his ideology. Nolan would go on to found the US Libertarian Party, and to this day the party uses works of science fiction to illustrate its objectives and values.

Robert Heinlein and 1960s Counterculture: Heinlein has influenced a wide range of cultural arenas, and his novels have been found in the classrooms of America’s military colleges and in hippie communes in the 1960s. Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein’s tale of a mystical man from Mars and his church of communal living and free love matched neatly with the urgings of counterculturalist Timothy Leary and the Eastern philosophy in Hermann Hesse’s novels. Heinlein may have meant Stranger as a fictional exploration of social mores (or, if you believe some accounts, part of a bet with Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard to see which writer could start a religion), but many New Agers used it as a literal manual for daily life, giving it a niche in the counterculture movement.

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia and the Green Movement: Published in 1975, Ectopia was hardly the first work of environmental speculative fiction. Works like Aldous Huxley’s Island and Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants considerably predate it. What makes Ecotopia special, however, is that it provides a roadmap for sustainable living in a high-tech society. It envisions a near future in which a political movement has succeeded in creating harmony between man and nature.

Several environmental movements of the 1970s adopted the book as their manifesto, notably the green parties in Europe. And many of its ideas – the focus on localism, the elimination of combustion engines, and production on demand, continue into the modern American green movement as well.

The Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy and Ronald Reagan: Ronald Reagan was famously a fan of science fiction, having grown up reading the epic adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs. And he didn’t view science fiction as mere fantasy; he believed that science fiction writers offered an invaluable insight into technology and the future. Science Fiction writer Jerry Pournelle pulled together the Citizen’s Advisory Council on National Space Policy from astronauts, engineers, and, most prominently, several other science fiction writers, including Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Robert Heinlein, Greg Benford, Dean Ing, Steve Barnes, and Jim Baen.

Their original function was to help the Reagan transition team adjust to its new role in space policy, but the council eventually became a fixture of the administration, drafting several space policy papers for Reagan’s team. One of the council’s most famous endeavors was to convince Reagan that it was technically feasible to intercept ballistic missiles in flight. The council even drafted portions of Reagan’s first speech regarding the Strategic Defense Initiative, which would become better known as Star Wars.

For now, writer Marc Guggenheim (Eli Stone, Green Lantern) isn't saying. The only thing that's certain is that the comic is a respectful look at the experience of being a soldier in Iraq — early copies have already been distributed to soldiers in the field, and they've already written Guggenheim fan mail. Artist Barry Kitson (whose pencils are, characteristically, lovely to look at) put a lot of work into making all the army gear and other details look accurate and convincing. And it looks like Spidey himself winds up over there.

Guggenheim makes a big point of saying, in an interview with the L.A. Times, that he chose to put Flash in Iraq, rather than Afghanistan, because people always show soldiers in Afghanistan to avoid political overtones. Guggenheim didn't want to do a political story, per se, but he also felt like U.S. soldiers in Iraq are underexposed in popular media.

I'm not sure how I feel about these sorts of "very special" stories, like the spate of AIDS comics in the early 1990s. It would be better if Flash Thompson hadn't been such a cipher for so long — he was Peter Parker's enemy, but then he became more mature (after fighting in Vietnam, actually) and then he and Peter became friends. And more recently, Flash suffered a weird and somewhat convenient case of amnesia, which made him revert to bullying Peter Parker again. But eventually the amnesiac Flash became Peter's friend again, and even helped hide Parker when he was on the run after the huge "Civil War" storyline. And now he's randomly going off to war. I barely know who this guy is. On the other hand, the pencils (over at the Times site) do look amazing. And there's something cool about seeing the normally New York-based Spidey in a different, even grittier setting. [LA Times]

The beauty part of the chart below is that if you go to C-SPAN's website it lays out each debate like this, and you can easily mouse through it and click through quickly to videos and transcripts backing up the chart's claims. I'm telling you, this is pure information crack.

Keywords in the Debate and Timeline [via Information Aesthetics]

The pundit: Markos Moulitsas (DailyKos)
What they recommended: "Franchise" by Isaac Asimov.
What it's about: This 1955 story is part of Asimov's "Multivac" series of stories. In the futuristic world of 2008, the United States has become an "electronic democracy." Multivac, the super-computer, chooses one lucky person to be "voter of the year." This person, Norman Muller, answers a series of questions and the computer uses those to decide what the results of an election would have been, if an election had happened.
Why is this good election-season material? Moulitsas tells io9:

We live in a world that has accepted 1984's doublespeak as part and parcel of the political process. But that's too easy and cliched and answer. So how about Asimov's "Franchise"? A single voter, chosen by computer, decides the election, and he's proud that the citizens got to make their voice heard through him, except, of course, that everyone else didn't get to vote. Consider the modern political campaign, with robo polls which proclaim the electorate's choice after a few hundred responses, and robo calls and electronic voting machines and all that stuff, and maybe someone can torture out an analogy. In reality, this election season has been stranger than any fiction imaginable.

The pundit: Andrew Sullivan (Atlantic Monthly)
What they recommended: Wall-E
What it's about: In this Pixar animated movie, the human race has abandoned the garbage-strewn Earth, and our childlike descendants now live on a space liner, laying on floating barcaloungers and having all their needs met by robots. One garbage-compacting robot remains functional on Earth, and he discovers a single piece of vegetation, proving that the planet can still support life.

Why is this good election-season material? Sullivan didn't elaborate, but Wall-E is rife with political allegory. You can read it as a simple environmentalist fable about the dangers of mass consumption and unsustainable living. You can see it as a warning against the "nanny state" which would try to take care of all our needs and save us from getting our hands dirty. You can see it as an admonishment to be curious about the world we live in and how we got here.

The pundit: Jonah Goldberg (National Review Online)
What they recommended: Angel, season four.
What it's about: An extra-dimensional being (played by Gina Torres) appears on Earth, and everyone who sees her becomes totally devoted to her and starts to worship her. She brings peace and prosperity, and only Angel's friend Fred can see that she's really a hideous monster.

Why is this good election-season material? Goldberg tells io9:

In the story, the world is mesmerized by a god from another dimension played by a charismatic black woman who truly does bring universal peace and love to the planet. Her only price: we all must worship her (and provide her with a statistically irrelevant number of humans to eat) and unify around our love for her.

I don't think Obama is evil or a villain of any kind. But the lesson is pretty valid. Obama is the high priest of a cult of unity. Unity can be useful, but it is also very, very dangerous. That's why the founders conceived of a system of divided government, after all.

The pundit: Amanda Marcotte (Pandagon)
What they recommended: Margaret Attwood, The Handmaid's Tale.
What it's about: This Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel takes place in a future dystopian U.S. governed by religious fundamentalists. Women are no longer allowed to learn to read. Because of declining fertility, fertile women (like the main character Offred) are turned into "handmaids," whose only job is to bear children for wealthy couples.
Why is this good election-season material? Says Marcotte:

It probably sounds a little trite since it gets referenced so much, but in light of the promotion of a true-believer fundamentalist to a national ticket, I have to recommend Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It's not just because it's a dystopia that shows what America would be like under a Christian theocracy, but also because the book brilliantly skewers other aspects of the right-wing culture. You have the female misogynist Serena Joy that finds out the hard way that she isn't exempt from the category 'woman' just because she was a stalwart soldier for the far right. You also are reminded that the conservative men who carry on about sexual morality in public all too often have their own closet full of secrets. The book is a reminder that right wing politics isn't so much about 'values', but about power and control.

The pundit: Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit)
What they recommended: Vernor Vinge, Rainbow's End.
What it's about: It's 2025, and enhanced reality is everywhere. People use contact lenses to interact with computer-generated artifacts, and people use "silent messaging" to communicate ubiquitously. Poet Robert Gu rediscovers this world after his Alzheimer's disease is cured, and gets drawn into a world of conspiracies and bioterrorism. And because everything in our lives is run by computer systems, including our cars, it's super vulnerable to hackers — especially artificially intelligent hackers.
Why is this good election-season material? Says Reynolds:

It describes a near-future that seems to be getting safer as it is actually growing more dangerous. I think it is a must-read.

The pundit: Kevin Drum (Mother Jones)
What they recommended: Frederik Pohl, The Merchants' War.
What it's about: Pohl's 1984 sequel to his 1955 collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants. In the first book, the Earth is basically taken over by advertising agencies, and we follow one exec who is trying to sell people on the idea of emigrating to Venus. In the sequel, it's 100 years later, and we follow Tenny, an exec who's addicted to Mokie-Koke and stuck marketing "intangibles," meaning religion and political candidates. But it turns out Tenny's boss is really a Venusian agent who wants to take over the Earth government and cause an economic depression on Earth, so Earth will leave Venus alone.
Why is this good election-season material? Drum tells io9: "If you don't think it's about modern politics, read it again."

He later elaborated on his own blog, noting that real-life political consultants have been developing "endorphin branding," the use of scents at political events, to create a positive emotional experience linked to a candidate. The scent "can be reintroduced at a later time to trigger and recreate the desired response."

Writes Drum:

A few days ago an editor asked me which science fiction book I'd suggest people read before the election. I recommended Fred Pohl's The Merchant Wars. It probably seemed an odd choice, but here's an excerpt:

New York, New York!....I saw a miraculously clear stretch of sidewalk....I walked past — and WOWP a blast of sound shook my skull and FLOOP a great supernova flare of light burned my eyes, and I went staggering and reeling as tiny, tiny elf voices shouted like needles in my ear Mokie-Koke, Mokie-Koke, MokieMokieMokie-Koke!

...."I warned ya," yelled the little old man from a safe distance....He was still waving the signpost, so I staggered closer and blearily managed to deciper the legend under the graffiti:

Warning!
COMMERCIAL ZONE
Enter at Own Risk

...."What's a 'Mokie-Coke'?" I asked.....There was a vending machine, just like all the other Mokie-Koke machines I'd been seeing all along, on the Moon, in the spaceport, along the city streets. "Don't fool with the singles" he advised anxiously. "Go for the six-pack, okay?"....Poor old guy! I felt so sorry for him that I split the six-pack as we headed for the address the Agency had given me. Three shots apiece. He thanked me with tears in his eyes but, all the same, out of the second six-pack I only gave him one.

...."Dr. Mosskristal will review your medical problem for you." And the tone said bad news...."What you have," she explained, "is a Campbellian reflex. Named after Dr. H.J. Campbell. Famous pioneering psychologist in the old days, inventor of limbic-pleasure therapy."...."Let's just say that you've had your limbic areas stimulated; under the influence of that great upwelling of pleasure you've become conditioned to associate Mokie-Koke with joy, and there's nothing to be done about it."

Doesn't seem quite so much like science fiction after reading about endorphin branding, does it?

Kanye and Kool Keith prove you can have scifi hip hop, and beyond that hip hop itself is high-tech genre whose roots are planted firmly in the early computer age when kids started using machines and computers to create new sounds. On the pop culture side, you could argue that Brother from Another Planet is a scifi hip hop movie. Or you could say Will Smith is the ultimate scifi hip hop action hero. What the hell, Cockrel? Let's not divide natural allies. Hip hop and scifi go together like peanut and butter.

Still, you have to love the guy for quoting from both Terminator 2 and Star Trek in his speech. According to the Chicago Tribune:

Cockrel wrapped up Friday's inaugural address with quotes from the "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" movie and the "Star Trek" TV series.

He endorsed the words of "Terminator 2"'s John Connor, who says "the future is not set" and "there is no fate but what we make for ourselves." And Cockrel says Detroit, like the Starship Enterprise, needs "to boldly go where no one has gone before."

Will we have to start calling Cockrel the Mayorinator?

Detroit's New Mayor: I'm a Geek [via Chicago Tribune]