The Fourth Sphere Pt. 5 – Heavy Support

So, here we are; the heavy support section. After the elites section, there is no slot on the Force Organization Chart more sharply competed for, or more key to the success of a cadre. There are four choices here, and two of them are so powerful it's something of a no-brainer. It's possible to find cadres without Hammerheads, or more rarely without XV88 Broadsides, but unless someone is trying to specifically create a terrible list you literally will not see a list without one or the other. And since Hammerheads come singly and XV88s are 1-3, it's very easy to rapidly fill up the heavy support section, and therefore very difficult to squeeze anything else in. The Skyray can occasionally take the place of the Hammerhead, using its markerlights to buff the units around it and providing mobile heavy cover with its AV13 front. But the fourth choice? Oh, the fourth choice.

The Sniper Drone Team looks good enough, on paper. A 36" S6 AP3 gun is pretty good, and three of them for 80 points, with a Stealth Field for protection, isn't terrible. And you can stack three of them together in a single heavy support choice, so you can have nine of those pretty good guns scattered around the field, equipped with Target Locks so they can concentrate or spread their fire as much as you want. It sounds kind of alright, doesn't it? Unfortunately, for those upsides, there are some pretty steep downsides.

For one thing, you get three drones and a Fire Warrior with a drone controller for those 80 points, and if the Fire Warrior dies, he takes the rest of the squad with him. Given that he's T3, W1 with a 4+ save, killing him is not that difficult, so the squad is ludicrously fragile. And of course, the other three drones are just as easily dispatched. Especially since, being drones, it's extremely difficult to get them cover saves; as relatively small models, they tend to either be completely obscured or out in the open, no middle ground. Worse, for whatever reason their jet packs don't make them Relentless, so they can't manoeuvre for good firing positions or take advantage of the Tau's signature jump-shoot-jump technique, because their guns are Heavy 1. And those three fairly decent guns? They're mounted on BS3 platforms, which means these upgraded drones are arguably slightly worse at shooting than regular, BS2 twin-linked gun drones. So, three drones who can't hide, don't shoot well and are extremely fragile for 80 points, or six drones who shoot with an average skill, can JSJ and don't have to worry about losing a drone controller for 72 points; it makes the humble Gun Drone squadron look pretty solid by comparison, doesn't it? And hardly anyone takes Gun Drone squadrons!

So, what's the prescription for these guys? Well, more than any other unit, I think the Sniper Drone Team needs to be fundamentally reworked. My first suggestion would be to drop the Fire Warrior with the drone controller, perhaps replace him with a marker drone or another sniper drone, and make the remaining drones capable of fighting on regardless, but the Fire Warrior is a pretty solid piece of pewter (probably resin, now) and there's literally no chance that GW would just stop making and selling them. So, how do we make these three drones and a Fire Warrior work?

I think the key to making this unit work is the philosophy behind their Target Locks; independence. So, let's turn that up to eleven, metaphorically speaking. Under the new rubric, not only do the drones have Target Locks, they're excused from the constraints of unit cohesion entirely. They can be deployed anywhere, with no requirement that they be near each other or their controlling Fire Warrior. But the individual drones remain weak, and at 80 points for three rail rifles and a markerlight, which are ten points each whenever they show up on other units, they're still not terribly competitive. So, another small change; in place of their standard stealth field generator, let's give them O'Ralai's 'Eclipse' shield generator, from his Imperial Armour entry. This gives them a 4+ invulnerable save, and if they don't move they get the benefit of the stealth field as well. This protects them if they need to re-orient or re-position, and once they're settled they can be difficult to winkle out, which is appropriate given how much they cost. They'll still be somewhat slow and unwieldy, unless we give them Relentless too (which is a debateable move), but it makes them more survivable, and given that you can get a T4 W2 2+ XV88 Broadside for nearly the same points, survivability has to be taken into account. There's just no way for SDTs to compete if they're fragile, immobile, clustered, and one failed 4+ save away from losing the whole unit.

There are a few other, smaller tweaks worth making, too. A variable squad size wouldn't be a bad idea. Say, each SDT is 2-5 drones and a controller, and you can still field three teams for a single slot on the Force Org chart. And like all drone units, they really should be able to automatically pass break tests; these guys have a fairly good chance of fleeing as soon as they lose one drone. And giving them the Acute Senses USR makes sense, because why wouldn't you load your sniper drones with the best sensor package available? And, frankly, a bit of a price decrease wouldn't hurt, either; these things are never going to compare, point-to-point, with a Broadside. They have to go with quantity over quality, and that means they have to be cheaper. But I think, more than anything else, the ability to deploy these things anywhere you want on the board, and hide the fragile controller while you're at it, is the single most important fix that could be made to this unit.

And even then, it's still going to struggle against the two powerhouse units it shares its slot with.

Let Them Eat Crake

So, Margaret Atwood. Canadian literary icon. In my book, she earned serious points for her recent efforts in Toronto, playing a part in rallying public opinion against major cuts to libraries. But this isn't a blog about Canadian politics, much as I could fill no end of space pontificating about all the various quirks and questionable decisions going on in the various capitols scattered through the Great White North. This is a blog about, amongst other things, science fiction. And when it comes to science fiction, well, Ms. Atwood and I rather sharply part ways.


I09 has the introduction to Atwood's new book, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, and quite frankly it's a lot of stuff and nonsense. While Atwood again claim's her resistance to having her books classified as scifi isn't about avoiding the literary ghetto, nothing in her opening argument does much to back that up. That she starts off initially by conflating science fiction with the shallow worlds children invent isn't damning, but it's hardly an opening that suggests a respectful take on the genre. But it is her attempt at defining 'nomenclatural allegiances', or a 'system of literary taxonomy', that is the real problem here. One cannot help but suspect that Atwood sat down with the conclusion that her books are not science fiction, and constructed this article backwards, from conclusion to thesis, in order to justify it. Which is why this argument contains the strangest, most hair splitting definition of science fiction I think I have ever seen.

"What I mean by "science fiction" is those books that descend from H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled, blood-sucking Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters-things that could not possibly happen-whereas, for me, "speculative fiction" means plots that descend from Jules Verne's books about submarines and balloon travel and such-things that really could happen but just hadn't completely happened when the authors wrote the books."

So, for Atwood there is 'science fiction' and 'speculative fiction', and unlike nearly everyone else who uses the term 'speculative fiction' it is not a subset of science fiction, but its own distinct genre. This is a curious argument to make, because to the best of my knowledge 'speculative fiction' is not a genre well-known by any particularly large group of people, and many of those who do recognize the term will hardly recognize Atwood's definition. For most science fiction fans, speculative fiction will be a type of science fiction, usually set 'Next Tuesday, A.D.' as it were, which involves some small but relatively important invention that allows the author to explore how society would change. Ralph Peters' War in 2020 is speculative fiction, for example, because it's about tracing the geopolitical impacts of foreign policy decisions and pandemic outbreaks to a potentially logical conclusion. It's also science fiction, because it involves fancy gunships with railguns and some sort of audio/EM weapon that puts victims in a permanent coma. It's both, at the same time, because speculative fiction is a subgenre of science fiction itself. Atwood then tries to muddy the waters, by claiming that

"In a public discussion with Ursula Le Guin in the fall of 2010, however, I found that what she means by "science fiction" is speculative fiction about things that really could happen, whereas things that really could not happen she classifies under "fantasy." [...] In short, what Le Guin means by "science fiction" is what I mean by "speculative fiction," and what she means by "fantasy" would include some of what I mean by "science fiction." So that clears it all up, more or less. When it comes to genres, the borders are increasingly undefended, and things slip back and forth across them with insouciance."

To some extent, of course, it is true that science fiction is often defined as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart did pornography; 'I know it when I see it'. Atwood mentions 1984, and wonders whether it is science fiction, and in some cases it's fair to wonder. Is Cormac McCarthy's The Road science fiction? What about The Book of Eli? Or Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Libeowitz? Or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Or Brazil? The borders are a bit blurred at times, and it's not always easy to determine exactly where some works fall. For Atwood, I would even give her The Handmaid's Tale as not being science fiction, since there's nothing inherently science-y in it. But the entire story of Oryx and Crake is driven by genetic engineering, with the storyteller taking to a species of newly-created and newly-sentient cat-people who were created in a laboratory to replace humanity. Nothing in that is 'speculative', as Atwood means it, because none of it could actually come to pass in any kind of reasonable way. You'd have better credibility classifying it as fantasy than some potential future for humanity, though I can't imagine the fantasy crowd would much want it wandering in their midst.


Of course, I don't particularly want it in science fiction, either. But it is, and the sooner Atwood stops trying to split the finest of hairs to try and escape it, the better off we'll all be.

There's an Energy Crisis Coming, and It's Not What You Think

It's not peak oil, or nuclear, or renewables. No, the real looming energy crisis is a crisis in personal energy. In the amount of energy, the amount of excess, free, personal energy, the individual has. And what's driving this crisis?

Progress and productivity.

Yeah, this?  Apparently, it's a pretty big problem.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but it's not. The hours a person works, per day, per week, per year, have been steadily coming down since the Industrial Revolution started up. But at the same time, the amount of stuff we can make, whether it's food or clothes or houses or iPods, has shot up into the stratosphere. More people now make more stuff, in less time, than at any other point in human history. And there's no indication that this is a trend that's going to change any time soon. People are working on serious, potentially useable prototypes for things like the replicators of Star Trek's Federation, and even if they never rise to the magic levels of those seen on the show, the ability to buy a device which can produce plastic objects or foodstuffs in the home will raise productivity and drop individual effort through the floor. The age of massive factories, eating up the labour and energy and time and, yes, even lives of hundreds and thousands of workers are over. Factories are smaller than they've ever been, even as mass production allows for greater productivity, and they're going to get smaller still. It would not, in the least, surprise me to live to see an age where there simply are no factories, anywhere, producing anything.

Now, here's the thing. People like to work, at least to some extent, and at the moment people need the wages of work. So what will happen to society when there is no work, and no source of wages that can meet the needs of people? What does a society do when nobody has to put in more than a few hours or work a week, or even can? What do workers do when employers don't need them for more than an hour or two a week, or a month, or a year? What happens to a capitalist society when nobody has any money, and nothing costs anything anyway?

"They give up using pockets?"

"Ooh, good try, chief!"

Science fiction has tried to answer this, in various ways and various media. Perhaps nobody has done it better than Iain M. Banks, in his Culture novels. Banks does a good job, or at least as good a job as possible, at visualizing the organization of a society in which there is no need for labour, and thus no source of money, and thus no functional economy as we could understand it. But of course, the problem is that Banks is one of us, and if we can't really understand it, neither can he.

The most fundamental problem, however, is not that we have no model for the next major stage of social development. We have dozens, hundreds even. The absolute most basic issue, instead, is that nobody seems to have any idea of how to get there from here. The period between late-stage capitalism and early post-scarcity is pretty much a white space marked with 'Here There Be Dragons' on the map that is science fiction. And that's a problem, because outside of deathly dry academic texts, science fiction is pretty much the only format that's going to address this issue with any hope of depth or scope. There aren't really any other cultural platforms that can, because nothing else is really set up to approach fundamentally changed visions of the future; heck, even science fiction is, more often than not, just the past with more chrome and lens flare. But it doesn't have to be, and it's pretty much the only thing for which that can be said.

I'm not saying it has to lead us by the hand through the coming turmoil. But make no mistake, that turmoil is absolutely coming. And it wouldn't hurt to have, if not a map, at least a few decent second-hand directions to help us find our way through it.

Take a Look, It's in a Book

A professor of mine recently posed an interesting thought-experiment. Imagine, she said, that you are thrown back four hundred years, to the early seventeenth century. For the sake of not having you simply die in a ditch, assume that you can speak the language and communicate with those around you. How do you live? There were a variety of ideas put forwards, though several of them were immediately discarded because the person answering missed that it wasn't some hypothetical Renaissance man being thrown back, but you, yourself. The others were fairly similar in tone. Become a prophet. Invent something. Marry a nobelwoman. Join the military.

To be fair, they'd apparently take anyone.

Notice something? Pretty much all of these ideas are based entirely on the idea that you have access to several hundred years of infrastructure, whether it's physical or social, technological or ethical or cultural. If you're dropped back four hundred years with nothing but your wits, what are you going to have to offer a noble for his daughter's hand? If you're not a captivating public speaker with a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of early seventeenth century religious trends, and possibly things like the exact timing of earthquakes or eclipses or floods and the like, how are you going to become a successful prophet? If you're not already a noble, joining the military (assuming you can find a standing army to join in the early seventeenth century) isn't really going to get you very far, because there is literally no method for advancement and no real way to earn a living except while you're actually at war with someone.

But it was 'invent something' that really floored me. People talked about discovering electricity, or inventing the lightbulb or the cannon, or four-stage crop rotation. But this is a class of social scientists, a third-year Political Science course. There aren't a great deal of mechanics and engineers here, nevermind knowledgeable agriculturalists who are familiar with pre-industrial methods of production. And yet person after person seemed convinced that, if thrown back four hundred years, before most of the Western world had paved roads nevermind a relatively educated populace with excess capital, they could invent some modern piece of technology without understanding the decades, or even centuries, of development between now and then.

Ash is the exception, people, not the rule.

And that's where science fiction literature comes in so handy. Most of the non-genre literature out there deals with people in established social settings, safely bound up in relatively affluent social circles. And of the rest, much of it deals with people who are used to a different way of life, so used to it that certain fundamental aspects simply aren't discussed. But science fiction literature routinely uproots protagonists, lifting them from one circumstance and depositing them somewhere very different, then leaving them alone to get on with their lives. It doesn't really matter whether the transition is from the past to the future, or from a spaceship to a planet, or from the opulence of a post-scarcity imperial centre to a colony of back-to-nature subsistence agriculturalists. The details aren't what's important, but rather getting one into the thought-space of visualizing other times and places. It's no surprise that science fiction has been identified as the literature of the immigrant and the colonist alike, because time and again it is, at its core, about dislocation. Whether it's the dislocation of immigration, or of colonialism, or nationalist or imperialist expansion, or of some sort of expulsion from society, the function of dislocation remains central to much of science fiction literature. What does a character do, novel after novel asks and at least tries to answer, when they are no longer where they're used to being?

That's not to say that other literature can't do that, or even that it doesn't. There is some. But if you look at the big-selling books in various genres, in the general fiction and the romance and the thriller and the mystery sections and all the rest, time and again it's about people in their own comfort zones dealing with issues they're at least generally familiar with and have both personal and institutional supports available to deal with. The dislocation is far and away the exception, and not the rule, when it comes to non-scifi literature. And given how disconnected the average modern person is from any kind of physical or unskilled labour, where would they learn about these things if not through the books they read (and the shows and movies they watch, of course)?

Some options are more informative than others.

So, read science fiction. Learn to expand your horizons. Learn to think outside the box. Imagine yourself in the past and the future, in elite social circles and on frontier planets, fighting slavering bug-like aliens or dueling with other cyber-wizards through a jack in the back of your neck. All of these things, and more, are out there. And reading about them is useful, not because they'll prepare you for those specific experiences, but because they'll prepare you to think about preparing for unusual situations. Sure, sometimes it's 'what would I do if aliens/zombies/robots attacked', but other times it's as mundane as what would happen if the power went out, or you were stranded somewhere, or you had to get along without the kind of basic conveniences you take for granted. And that, that is the true value of science fiction literature.

And for the record, my own suggestion? Start off as a manual labourer, and leverage your understanding of fundamental social organization (sanitation, roads, reasonable taxation to prevent revolution, the careful balance of church and state and the population, etc) to be a solid adviser to whoever's in charge. I've spent years studying the social sciences, after all, what else would I do?

 "Listen, I'm telling you, supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, 

not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.  And yeah, I totally thought that up myself."

Now I've Made Myself Nostalgic

I don't generally think much of the mainstream media's commentary on science fiction (or any other genre) output. But I must admit, Macleans has actually managed to put together a piece that actually goes deeper than stale jokes about Trekkies in their mom's basement and nerds obsessed with Gillian Anderson. And it raises a pretty good question, given the current state of genre television.

Namely, can sci-fi be saved?

Instinctively, I want to say yes. But is that just optimism, or even blind devotion to the format, talking? Fringe is currently doing well for itself on Fox, no mean feat for a series that involves parallel universes and super-science on a network that though Firefly was too high-tech, but it hasn't come close to the cultural high-water mark of that earlier Fox foray into the paranormal, The X-Files. Falling Skies was critically well received, though it didn't make much of an impact at all on the public, and Terra Nova has just launched with a two-hour event. But other than that? For the first time since 1997 there will be no new Stargate episodes. Eureka has just been wound down, despite still putting in a solid performance. Blood and Chrome appears to be in no hurry to put in an appearance. Space is full of 'reality' ghost hunter-style shows, and Sy-Fy airs a big block of wrestling. And as I09 pointed out a little while ago, this is the first time in a long time in which American network television has not included a single spaceship in its lineup.

Is sci-fi television in a slump? Absolutely. And honestly, I'm not sure what could pull it out. Oh, I have all sorts of suggestions, but many of them seem to have been tried, and found wanting. Doing well-written, character-driven stories didn't save Stargate: Universe. Lighthearted, easily-accessible 'adventure of the week'-style storytelling didn't keep Eureka from getting dragged under. For all the superhero energy coming off the big screen successes, neither No Ordinary Family nor The Cape could carry their premises. The Event's attempt to recapture Lost's fire fizzled. Is it the fault of the networks? Sure, Fox cuts down promising scifi television like it's going out of style and Sy-Fy dropped SGU and Eureka, but SGU simply was not pulling in the ratings, and even Fox' continuing and baffling refusal to try and recapture the slow-burn success of The X-Files can only explain so much. Is it the fault of the viewers? SGU was axed because its ratings were in the basement, and Battlestar Galactica, probably the closest sci-fi television has come to the level of The Wire or The Shield, routinely placed low enough that it would've been cancelled in a heartbeat on any major network. Is it just the state of the world? The immediate future seems to be growing increasingly bleak for more and more people, so maybe it's no surprise nostalgia, like Boardwalk Empire, PanAm, and The Playboy Club are in and visions of the future are out. Is it that they just haven't put the 'right' show on? Between Firefly, The Sarah Conner Chronicles, Eurkea, SGU, The Event, No Ordinary Family, Dollhouse, FlashForward, Century City and others, something must've been the 'right' kind of show; they've tried everything!

The strangest thing is that television sci-fi is in a place quite unlike its contemporaries in other media. In the world of video games, some of the biggest sellers lately have been sci-fi; Halo, Gears of War, Resistance: Fall of Man. On the big screen Avatar rakes in the money, while Thor and Captain America manage to be both critical and box office darlings, and Hugh Jackman is set to open Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots: The Movie. Even non-live action sci-fi television is doing well enough, with Transformers Prime, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Thunder Cats, Young Justice, Generator Rex and the like. Literary scifi may be in a somewhat less rosy position, but that's true of all literature at the moment, as the industry struggles to move from the old bound-paper paradigm to the new online one. And speaking of the internet, how much original fiction, and original video production, has been taking place? As computers become cheaper, faster and more powerful it becomes more and more feasible for individuals and small groups to put together their little little opuses. The achingly beautiful Voices from a Distant Star, after all, was the result of pretty much a guy and his computer in the garage.

So, can sci-fi be saved? Maybe. To be honest, I'm not really sure what would have to happen for it to be saved. But I do know one thing. The only sci-fi that article is talking about is live-action network television; for the true fan of tomorrow, there's a whole wide world of quality work still being put out, just waiting to inspire the next generation of dreamers.

'Round and 'Round We'll Go

And everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as if something would be lost if the young man of twenty-three were not yet "finished," or if he did not yet know the answer to the "main question": which calling? A higher kind of human being, if I may say so, does not like "callings," precisely because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes time, he does not even think of "finishing": at thirty one is, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child. 

- Friederich Nietzsche, "Twilight of the Idols"

I'm not generally a fan of quoting Nietzsche. Entirely too many people do it entirely too often, with no regard to the larger context of their quotes or even the actual understanding of the concepts, that quoting Nietzsche often seems like one of the fastest ways to out yourself as rather on the pretentious side. And yet, while going over Twilight of the Idols (or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer), which for the record has one of the best sub-titles ever, I was struck by the above comment. Much as my liberal utilitarian socialist techno-utopian beliefs are utterly anathema to Nietzsche, and vice-versa, every now and then we can at least agree on a beginning, if not necessarily an ending.

For instance, we both thought this was a pretty bad idea.

But this is Forward the Future, not Forward the 1890's, so why am I talking about Nietzsche? Well, because way back then, at the tail end of the nineteenth century, he identified an issue that has only grown more ludicrous and problematic over the intervening century-plus. Namely, expecting young people to be 'finished' at an early age, to be ready to step out the doors of school and into the rest of their life. As though the shape of 'the rest of their life' could be decided by twenty-three!

The future isn't just about technological change, though of course that's the flashiest and most obvious way things change. Under the flash and chrome, however, there are more fundamental changes, ones that relate to conceptions of 'a good life' and morality and purpose and civil participation. One such change that's just starting to take shape, slowly rising from the rare and occasional to the more common-place, is that of the way we approach post-secondary education. To really understand what's coming, though, it's important to lay out the foundations of the change. 'Why' is always the most important question.

For the first and only times in their lives, these men have the right idea.

There are two forces driving this. The first is the increased productive life-span. The way a society whose people only generally reach forty or fifty, and are often of limited productive value well before that, approaches the labour force is going to be very different from that of a society whose people work until seventy, and live until ninety. Three or four years of specialized education in the early twenties just doesn't work if you're still going to be working thirty or forty years after that. And at the same time as people are working longer, corporations are getting more mobile, forcing labour to grow increasingly competitive to anchor good jobs in a community. As trade liberalization and deregulation continues globally, and there is no reason to think it won't in spite of certain catastrophic results, the competition for the remaining good jobs, which is to say non-retail, full time, benefit-carrying employment opportunities, is going to grow increasingly fierce. The concept of 'good enough' is already falling by the wayside, though curiously it's happening at the same time as so many people are finding themselves 'overqualified'. But that's another topic entirely.

So. We have people who are living longer, and need to work longer, and in order to work need to be increasingly well-educated and knowledgeable. It's difficult to conceive of any resolution to this issue but to have post-secondary education transition from being a one-time, early-twenties endeavour to one component in a work-'retire'-retrain cycle of labour life. Any lingering stigma attached to non-twenty-somethings in first or second year classes will have to fall by the wayside, as older adults are increasingly forced to supplement their existing accreditation or even branch out into entirely new areas of study and work. And with that will have to come a change in the construction of post-secondary, itself. As a twenty-something with a fair amount of time and relative economic security, I can afford to spend half the total time for my Political Science degree on non-Political Science courses; if I were a forty year old looking to brush up on my understanding of public policy or international relations, on the other hand, spending half my time filling up electives with history and english classes would be as wasteful as it would be expensive. At the moment it makes a certain amount of sense for universities to drag degrees out like this; each 'customer' will probably only be there once, for a limited amount of time. It's in the university's best interests to extract as much money from them as possible. But as university transitions from a once-a-lifetime endeavour to something you return to every fifteen or twenty years, a whole new understanding of the value of an education is going to come into play.

Nietzsche and I aren't exactly on the same page, of course. From the rest of Twilight of the Idols, and his other writings, it's likely what he meant was that young men shouldn't worry because the true man sets his own path in life, regardless of what anyone around him thinks. Its unlikely in the extreme that he thought, like I did, that life was going to be long enough that every man, and woman too, would have to have not just one 'calling' but three or four or more over the course of their life. But wherever we may diverge along the path to our answers, we certainly agree that rushing twenty-somethings out the doors to start their 'real lives' is pointless at best, and potentially problematic at worst.

Yeah... 'Potentially'...

Of course, Neitzsche might have put it a little more artfully than I.

The Fourth Sphere Pt. 4 - Fast Attack

Whoo boy, here we go.  After the trainwreck that is the Ethereal the last two installments have been fairly low-key; not so much how to make a bad thing good as how to make a decent thing better.  But the fast attack slot contains arguably the worst unit in the whole of the codex, which is really saying something.  That's right, today we're taking a good, long, hard look at...

The Vespid.

The question 'what does this unit do' is perhaps nowhere more essential than with the Vespid.  Because, quite frankly, what do they do?  They're expensive, they're poorly armoured, they're average shots with close-range, low-output guns, they're average combatants, and if they lose their Strain Leader (sergeant) their leadership is completely in the tank. Usually, with a unit that's not quite competitive, you could just say 'cost cut' and make them at least moderately useful. But even if you could spam Vespid it's difficult to see how they could be useful, because they are simply, terribly designed.

Here's the problem.  To be of any value, Vespid have to get close to their target; their guns have a 12" range.  And since they're one of the few sources of AP3 in the Tau Empire, presumably you're meant to use them to hunt Marines.  To do that effectively you need to not only be within 12", but within 12" and with no intervening cover to give those Marines an invulnerable save only slightly worse than the one the Neutron Blaster is stripping away.  But Vespid are only average shots, hitting half the time, and it's entirely possible for a full-strength squad of Marines to survive a volley of fire from a full-strength squad of Vespid.  And what then?  Well, the Vespid can charge, and with I5 they'll get to hit first, but they're not very good in close combat and they're not very strong, and when the surviving Marines hit back, and Marines will survive to hit back, their 5+ saves are not going to do them much good.  They'll probably hang on for a turn or three before the odds whittle them down, and then maybe they'll make it out alive and even more maybe-ly they'll regroup and contribute something.

Given that a full-strength Vespid squad costs 188 points, that's pretty unacceptable.

So, what would make them better?  Well, the answer to that lies in their purpose; to kill Marines.  The gun they have to do this with is suicidally short ranged, but that's not necessarily a deal-breaker.  Rather than increase the range, the Vespid would be well served by increasing their ability to kill up close.  With T3 and a 5+ save they're clearly something of a glass cannon, so let's run with that.  Giving the Vespid rending, for example, would go a very long way towards making them worthwhile.  They'd be frightening indeed on the turn they attack, blasting through power armour and then charging in to tear the survivors to shreds, but they'd remain vulnerable to long-range fire, and anything they couldn't swarm and kill immediately would still have a good chance of taking them apart in return.  They'd remain something of a specialist unit, still struggling to compete for space against Pathfinders and Piranhas, but at least that way they might beat out gun drone squadrons for a slot.

There's a second option, as well.  At the moment the Vespid have Fleet, which is frankly useless; nobody is ever going to forego shooting to run and charge with these guys.  Their guns are the only things worthwhile about them.  Instead of Fleet, then, why not let the Vespid enjoy that most quintessential of Tau strategies, jump-shoot-jump?  Jet pack Vespid would be significantly more survivable, especially if they held on to the Skilled Flyer USR, which would let them pop in and out of cover to deliver their close-range blasts into the most vulnerable of targets.  It's not a bad change, but personally I prefer the first option.  The Tau Empire already lacks any particular degree of variation in its units, and making another JSJ-anti-MEq unit wouldn't do much to alleviate that.

But the Vespid are bugs, giant space bugs with blisteringly powerful guns and diamond-hard claws that they use to tunnel through floating mountains.  These guys should be terrifying on the charge, and squashable at all other times.  It fits the fluff, and it fits their role on the tabletop, a rare win-win in 40K.

A Singularly Utopian Delusion

Although I'm a techno-utopian by inclination, even my belief that things will get better has its limits. And one of those limits is the Singularity.

Well, I think that about sums it up, don't you?  Class dismissed?

The Singularity, for those who don't know, is something of a quasi-religious belief among certain techno-utopians, and like all religious beliefs it comes in a variety of forms. The one I'm most concerned with, here, is the idea that, at some point technology will become so advanced, so all-powerful and all-encompassing, that the fundamental nature of humanity will be irrevocably altered by it. We might all become code running on atom-sized supercomputers spread across the length and breadth of the solar system, or we might 'evolve' into beings of pure mental energy held in a grid projected by our omnipresent nanobots, or we may well just be perfect versions of ourselves, mobile but in a sense suspended forever in amber, kept at the peak of our physical and mental abilities through the most esoteric of methods. The point is, come the Singularity, everything is supposed to be fantastic, and fantastically different, for everyone, for ever.

But what technology has ever reached everyone? The home computer may be omnipresent in rich, infrastructurally solid Western nations, but they're significantly less so in Latin America and South-East Asia, and Africa has largely leap-frogged over home computers to smartphones and PDAs. Even within those rich, infrastructurally solid Western nations, technologies that would be considered commonplace in some areas are pearls beyond measure in others; for instance, just try to get cutting-edge broadband internet access in rural America, or northern Canada. The absolute best case scenario sees customers paying a king's ransom for what in an urban city centre would be sub-par access, and that rests on the assumption that such access even exists. In many small, isolated communities it doesn't matter how much money one has to spend – the access simply is not there.

"I'd trade every iota of this island paradise for one episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  And a hat."

And that's with a technology that doesn't confer immediate, personal and most importantly relative benefits on those who have it. Being a hyper-intelligence running on the distributed platform that is the information network of the solar system might be wonderful, but for many people out there it would be even more wonderful if there are still non-uplifted humans to lord over. Sharing the internet is one thing. Its greatest value is in its ability to link content producers, so having an isolated and private little internet is largely of no value to anyone.  Sharing the kind of technology that would make the elites, those who have undoubtedly invested huge amounts of whatever resource obtains at the time to bring this change to fruition, completely redundant is something else entirely. And something that, given the general thrust of, oh, all human history, seems decidedly unlikely.

And that's the real problem with the Singularity. It may be that it's possible to invent the sorts of technologies necessary to underpin the Singularity, paradigm-shiftingly-advanced though they may be, but it's another thing entirely to assume that the sorts of people who would provide resource backing to make it happen would be in favour of making it freely available to all. For a comparison, I'd invite anyone to look back at Nikola Tesla and his plan to provide world-wide free energy, and the response by his principal backer, J.P. Morgan. There's no reason to assume that those inventing the foundations of the Singularity-enabling technologies wouldn't face their very own J.P. Morgans, interested in nothing more or less than stopping such change dead in its tracks. The sorts of people who most benefit from the status quo are those least likely to tolerate changes to it.

This is J.P. Morgan.  He does not give a damn how many people you can uplift 

if he can't personally charge each and every last one of them a service fee.

The Singularity is a paradisaical dream, nothing more or less than that. Something approximating it may, some day in the far future, come to pass. But existing elites and institutions will fight it tooth and nail, and while they may not succeed in the long term, there is every reason to assume they can hold its implementation back for a very, very long time.

The Girl Who Waited, and Then Was Completely Ignored

'The Girl Who Waited', the latest episode of Doctor Who, is on the surface a story of love and devotion across the decades, interspersed with some decent action scenes (at least for Doctor Who) and set in a very striking aesthetic space. The story concerns Amy, the titular Girl Who Waited, being stuck in a divergent timeline for thirty-six years, and what happens when the Doctor and Rory manage to track her down again. Moments for them, a lifetime for her.

But as I was watching it, I was struck by something I don't think the writers quite intended. You see, when the Doctor and Rory realize what's happened, that Amy has been living there for nearly four decades on her own, under constant threat of death and utterly isolated from any other sentient life form, they understand how hard it must have been for her. How it must have hurt her. Not just that she was afraid, but that she felt abandoned by the two most important, and ultimately the two most reliable, men in her life. And they decide that they should do something about this. Now, that's all well and good; if you have a time machine, and someone has had a bit of a rotten life, I'm sure your first impulse would be 'let me just pop back a few decades and set that on a better path for you'. But old-Amy doesn't want them to do that, for the very simple reason that doing so would mean she ceases to exist. That she would die in favour of a younger, prettier, more liked version of herself, who in thirty-six years would grow into a totally different person. Unsurprisingly, this is not exactly a great argument to make for ending the existence of a human being, and old-Amy is never really convinced of it.

"Wipe myself out of existence because you don't like my wrinkles and attitude?  I've got a sword, y'know..."

And that's where the episode's morality went rather off the rails for me. It's a problem you often find in stories that involve clones or duplicates or some other kind of replica, this idea that the original's existence is somehow more privileged than that of the copy. Doctor Who itself took this very idea to task in the recent two-parter The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People, wherein the idea that the Flesh versions of the people there, including the Doctor himself, were any less worthy of respect and existence than the original versions was treated as rather heinous. The primary antagonist in those episodes was a woman who seemed dead-set on killing the Flesh versions for no reason but that they weren't 'real', and that's pretty much exactly what seemed to be happening in The Girl Who Waited. Old-Amy may be a human being, but she's not the 'real' Amy, so it's okay to erase her from existence to make things easier for the 'real' Amy.

The question of who, or what, is 'real' is one science fiction has been tackling pretty much as long as there's been science fiction. It's perhaps the central issue surrounding Frankenstein's monster and the replicants of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and it's a recurring issue for the Tanks and Silicates and Chigs of Space: Above and Beyond and the clones in Schwarzenegger’s often-unappreciated The Sixth Day, with as many more examples as a perusal of What Measure is a Non-Human (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatMeasureIsANonHuman) can provide. The question is such a recurring one, of course, because it's the purest metaphorical device for the many different 'versions' of humanity that societies have decided, over the course of thousands and thousands of years, aren't quite human enough. There's a very good reason many of the groups science fiction holds up as being non-human but still deserving of human rights and respect are bound up with labouring and servitude, after all. And an equally good reason why so many robot uprisings are led by servant-class robots; it's rarely the military machinery that actually gets the ball rolling, but the robots who are most personally involved with human affairs. The fact that actual slave uprisings were both more rare and less successful than robotic uprisings is beside the point. Science fiction is attempting to warn by pointing to the worst possible outcome, not simply recreate the past with more pistons and brushed steel.

Though there are occasional, glorious exceptions.

And one of the best things about science fiction's treatment of non-humans is that, so long as they're not mindlessly or unceasingly hostile, like the bugs of Starship Troopers or the Tyranids and Necrons and Orks of Warhammer 40K or the Martian tripods in War of the Worlds, the moral of the story is always to err on the side of rights and respect. Just because Data was built in a lab, or the Tanks were grown in tubes, or Frankenstein's monster was stitched together from the pieces of corpses, doesn't mean they're not just as human-like as the actual humans that surround them. Indeed, in the case of Frankenstein's monster, the original science fiction treatment on the subject, it's rather more human than its creator, to said creator's ultimate detriment. It is Victor Frankenstein's gross failings as a human being that turn his creation into his monster, not any kind of inherent quality in the creation itself. As one of the characters in the Hellboy comics put it, to be different from human is not to be less than human.

This is all bound up in autonomy, of course. The surest way to tell when a sentient is being repressed in fiction is to find a sentient who is being denied the most basic autonomy. The replicants of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are told they can't live on Earth, no matter what they want, and killed if they try. Data is only considered non-human property when he attempts to resign his Starfleet commission. And old-Amy, in The Girl Who Waited, is utterly incapable of deciding she wants to live and having that decision respected. To his credit Rory initially responds to old-Amy as just Amy, who happens to be a bit older than the last time he saw her. It is the Doctor who initially decides it's possible to go back and rescue young-Amy, but once that idea is put forwards neither men treat old-Amy as any kind of possessor of autonomy. Even the one decision she makes that they seem to abide by, that she will help rescue young-Amy so long as they both get to continue existing, is nothing more than a lie; there was never any intention to allow her to continue to exist. Her autonomy was never real, merely coincidentally aligned with the desires of the 'real' people.

"Old-Amy, as seen by Rory and the Doctor."

The worst thing, of course, is that from a storytelling perspective there are tons of alternatives. The easiest would've been to simply switch old-Amy and Rory's reactions; to have him determined to make things work (two millenium as the Last Centurion didn't do him in, why should thirty-six years finish off Amy) only to have old-Amy determine that she'd rather not have spent the time here in the first place. There are other options as well, that's just the first that leaps to mind and doesn't have a slightly ugly undertone.

This season seems to be about the Doctor overstepping himself, something of a return to the dangers of the Timelord Victorious. In that sense, you could make an argument that this is appropriate for his character. But it's still the antithesis of the morality of science fiction in general, and the Doctor in particular, and it's something I hope doesn't set the tone for the rest of the series.

To Boldly Stay Here

It was brought to my attention recently that, for the first time in several decades, there are no American network programs featuring people on spaceships.  There're still scifi shows, and the more vague 'genre' shows', being put out, of course.  But nobody is going boldly at the moment, and it doesn't sound as though that's set to change any time in the immediate future.  But does that matter?

Personally, I would argue no, and that's coming from someone who would personally punch out every last SyFy executive over the cancellation of SGU.  The reason for that is that scifi, particularly television scifi, is never really about its setting anyway.  The best programs make full use of the potentials of their setting, of course, but at its core scifi is simply using its setting as a metaphor for current realities.  That being the case, then, why does it matter if the issue of the day is represented by an alien who's black on one side and white on the other, or an artificially gestated 'tank', or a group of monotheist terrorists?  The story is what ultimately matters, and while I enjoy a good space opera as much as the next scifi fan, the fact that people are travelling through space on a ship to make for a good series.  I'd take an episode of Eureka over Andromeda any day, and as great as Firefly was it could have been just as great if they'd had an airship instead of a spaceship.  It's not the setting that really matters, it's what the creators do with it.

And the scifi creators out there are doing a pretty good job of it.  Eureka, Miracle Day, Outcasts, Falling Skies, Chuck, Sanctuary, they're all doing varyingly well critically, though in some cases that hasn't been enough to save them from cancellation, a fate every scifi fan knows to expect and dread in equal measures.  And with Terra Nova coming up, scifi television is making a pretty solid return to the major American networks.  Just because it doesn't have spaceships in it doesn't mean it's not worthwhile science fiction, after all.