More Words, Deeper Hole

I am surprised that your readers need no introduction to the mononymic Ctein. (Though I don't; I've known him for years through mutual congoing.)

Perhaps everyone has read Post Exposure: Advanced Techniques for the Photographic Printer and Digital Restoration from Start to Finish but me.

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icecreamempress.livejournal.com

I didn't know he was a writer as well as a photographer.

I wonder how the collaboration process went? I know other people who have coauthored with Sandford, but they were younger enough than he to fall naturally into the junior partner role. Ctein is such a senior figure in photography that I wonder how the junior partner role worked for him.

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I wonder how the collaboration process went?

According to Ctein, whom I saw a few months ago, it went very well. He seemed pleased with the experience.

By the way, as is not uncommon with hard SF novels, the book has an afterword several pages long (SPOILER ALERT) where the authors comment on the background of the story.

Edited Date: 2016-03-15 08:06 pm (UTC)

From:

kiya

IIRC there was discussion of the collaboration process and how it came about in Scalzi's Big Idea column when the book was on the Big Idea but I am not sufficiently encumbered with spare cycles to be able to go check right now.

From:

brooksmoses

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/10/08/the-big-idea-ctein/ is the post in question.

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Say, that's pretty interesting, and

icecreamempress would probably enjoy reading it. Ctein's responses in the comments section shed even more light on the collaboration.

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The only reason I have any idea of who he is is because I read Scalzi's blog moderately often, and he is a fairly regular commenter.

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sanskritabelt.livejournal.com

I had no idea who Ctein was, and after googling I don't know how I would have known.

From:

the_rck

I'm getting an internal server error when I click on the link. It says something about not finding a last name in Ctein. Whatever that means.

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I think it means my site falls over dead when presented with a name like Ctein or Prince.

From: (Anonymous)

FYI I'm getting errors on your site due to the lack of a last name for Ctein. I was actually trying to follow a link to a different review (not Saturn Run).

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THERE IS AN ISSUE WITH MY SITE. WORKING ON IT

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I also just got an internal server error message when I tried to follow the link to the review.

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THERE IS AN ISSUE WITH MY SITE. WORKING ON IT

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Guess I got lucky, having spotted your mention of the review on Twitter, which offered a link that worked just fine.

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It was weird: it took some time for the site to decide that it really, really didn't like Ctein's one name name. Just removing Ctein's name didn't help. I had to delete the review entirely and reinput it.

Edited Date: 2016-03-15 04:59 pm (UTC)

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A scandalous example of the monophobia so rampant among database programmers.

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icecreamempress.livejournal.com

We used to have that problem with Madonna and Cher in my library days when computers were young. And other people who were born mononymic, of course.

I would have thought some enterprising Burmese/Indonesian/South Indian/Afghan/(I'm likely forgetting a bunch) programmer would have fixed this by now. It has to come up pretty often there.

From:

w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)

I'm sure they have. That doesn't mean it will get adopted everywhere. Heck, people are still getting hit through security bugs that were first fixed more than a decade ago.

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nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)

There's a famous article about the problem, "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" written by an expat in Japan.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

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w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)

Oh, I loved that when I first read it 8-)

From:

nancylebov.livejournal.com

Both authors missed that cats are obligate carnivores.

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icecreamempress.livejournal.com

Literature is a comedy for those who think, a tragedy for those who feel, and an endless series of tiny annoyances for those who remember more facts than the author.

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I'm scratching my head over the notion that someone would name a spaceship after Nixon.

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The authors though it was funny.

As I recall, Agnew was something of a space cadet but he has not had anything named after him in skiffy since an old Benford novel.

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nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)

Since it's in the future, Nixon's scandals will have faded into background trivia, but we still don't name stuff after Harding even though no one deeply cares about his misdeeds anymore.

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bruce munro (from livejournal.com)

In the long run, I suspect the infamy of being one of the founding fathers of the post-New Deal Concensus Republican Party will long outlive any fuss about Watergate and secret tapes.

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seth ellis (from livejournal.com)

He opened relationships with China! He got us out of Vietnam! Truly, the first post-colonial President.

From:

ilya187.livejournal.com

In the afterword, Sandford and Ctein explain why they did it:

Precisely to evoke your reaction.

In other words, it was subtle trolling on the authors' part.

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I'm not sure it really counts as trolling when my reaction to this revelation can be summed up as "Meh."

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ilya187.livejournal.com

Still, an SF novel that explicitly rejects the idea of workable interstellar imperialism is an interesting novelty.

It occurred to me that "Saturn Run"'s take on the subject of first contact is almost exact opposite of Murray Leinster's "First Contact."

SPOILER WARNING!
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In a nutshell: Without a deep understanding of each other's culture it is all too easy to say or do inadvertently something that the other side will perceive as offensive, or hostile, or suspicious. Heck, it happened many times in human history, and parties involved were the same species! Consequently, direct communication between different intelligent technological species almost always ends in violence, no matter how benign were original intentions. Also, there is no FTL in "Saturn Run", so centuries or millenia can pass between visits to any given star system. So all the the sentient species throughout Milky Way galaxy who manage to develop interstellar travel without either blowing themselves up, or getting into lethal misunderstanding with someone else, interact via "caches". A cache is a refueling station/trading warehouse. Visiting starship takes some trade goods -- which more often than not are cultural artifacts, -- and leaves some of its own. That way civilizations can learn quite a bit about each other without ever meeting face to face, with its attendant risks.

From:

gohover.livejournal.com

Huh. Five minutes before I read your comment, I was reading about the Northern Mariana Islands (because of Trump's electoral win there). Here's an excerpt from wikipedia:

The first European explorer of the area was Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan in 1521. He landed on nearby Guam and claimed the islands for Spain. The Spanish ships were met offshore by the native Chamorros, who delivered refreshments and then helped themselves to a small boat belonging to Magellan's fleet. This led to a cultural clash: in Chamorro tradition there was little private property and taking something one needed, such as a boat for fishing, was not considered stealing. The Spanish did not understand this custom. The Spanish fought the Chamorros until the boat was recovered. Three days after he had been welcomed on his arrival, Magellan fled the archipelago.

Considering the story of the "stolen" boat, and considering your comment, I don't see how the cahes would work out very well. To directly apply the story of the boat, does anything stop visiting aliens from simply absconding with a cache? And if not that,what helps prevent other sorts of misunderstanding or miscommunication about what to do when a cache is found?

From:

ilya187.livejournal.com

Here is how it works:

First, every cache is in contact with other caches. When a ship approaches, the cache alerts the nearest ones. When a trade is concluded, it notifies them of what has been traded for what. If a caches is attacked, it also notifies them -- and abrupt cessation of transmission speaks for itself.

Second, trade goods are not just lying out in the open. The controlling AI of the cache evaluates what the visitors offer, assigns value to it, then offers something equivalent. Mutual value of trade goods are calculated on the basis of past interactions over millions of years, and the algorithms are constantly updated as the cache receives news for other caches. Limited by light speed, no two algorithms can be exactly alike, but that is the ideal. If the visitors try to take things by force, the cache has defenses, but more importantly, it will immediately inform the rest of the network that such and such species is not playing by the rules. They will be denied access to other caches, for longer and longer periods of time -- but not forever.

Third, the cache is not only a trade post, it is a refueling station -- and the fuel is antimatter. If cache's defenses fail, it can always blow itself up, so anyone who refuses to play by the rules, will succeed only in killing the golden goose. Sooner or later they will get the point that trade pays more than aggression.

Edited Date: 2016-03-16 10:56 pm (UTC)

From:

gohover.livejournal.com

Belatedly: thanks for the write up! That sounds interesting! I'm not sure I buy it, but your description made me want to read the book and see for myself.

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scott-sanford.livejournal.com

It's plausible enough for a novel, like the interstellar Kula rings in the background of Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand.

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jessie-c.livejournal.com

Ctein, of course, needs no introduction.

Uh, Whisky Tango Foxtrot, over? He certainly does need an introduction, because I've never heard of him, and apparently neither has the interwebs.

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