Batman Could Only Have Developed in America

      Not many characters from speculative fiction are uniquely associated with the United States.  Superman, despite "Truth, Justice, and the American Way," is from a distant planet.  Monsters are almost always foreigners: the Mummy from Egypt, Wolfman from the Celtic Lands, Frankenstein from Germany and Switzerland, Dracula from Transylvania, the Gillman from the Amazon Basin, Godzilla from Japan, Mothra from the South Pacific, etc., etc.  Wonder Woman hails from Atlantis and Green Lantern got his powers from somewhere out in the universe.  Silver Surfer caught a space wave from out beyond, as well.  

     But Batman is firmly rooted in the good old US of A more than any other, because his very name would not make sense elsewhere on Earth.  Consider that in Berlin he would translate as Flying Mouse Man, in Paris as Bald Mouse Man, and in Naples as Peep-Peep Star Man.  Further back, in the ancient Roman Empire, he would have been Little Evening Thing Man.  Even among the Brits, with whom we occasionally share a common language, his name could not have caught on, for it would suggest a flunkie serving a military officer.  And so it goes.  Not nametags that exactly would make a criminal tremble.  

     So we must be grateful for our homegrown hero, even if he dresses less patriotically than Captain America.  He is so much one of us, both in his strengths and his weaknesses.  Empowered with his belt full of technological wonders and beset with periods of emotional anxieties, Batman looms over Gotham like the ghost of our national imagination.  Whether the rest of the world will ever truly understand him, we know not.  Yet our own visceral bonds to him will never fail.  Hail to this Dark Knight in a land that dubs no knights of its own.  May he always lurk in the alleys where our fears wait to assail us, offering the salvation he could never give his own privileged family.  Batman is America.

Will Old Malls Become New Mini-cities?

     Here in Fredericksburg, Virginia, archaeologists of the future may one day uncover a variety of urban footprints to rival the multiple levels of the ancient city of Troy.  There is an Old Town that is mainly mid-20th century, but with some buildings sprinkled in that date from the American Revolution and the Civil War.  Outside that time capsule, the later 20th century produced layers of subsequent urban models, including both an enclosed mall and a couple of immense big box commercial areas.  Both the mall and the big boxes are no longer what they were originally planned to be.  If the 80s-era boxes are beginning to show vacancy gaps, the mall is barely recognizable.  Its on-site duplex cinema is barely a memory, its anchor department stores have fallen away, and generation after generation of retail shops replaced each other to reflect lower and lower buying power.  Its main commercial hopes for the future are largely pinned to an immense Costco planted in one unused corner of its colossal parking periphery.  

     These developments appear to reflect a widespread tendency across the USA, if I am to believe some recent Facebook posts that confirmed my own more limited observations.  One in particular grabbed my attention, as it spoke of a more recent movement to build residential apartments directly into the physical body of malls in order to create an in-house clientele made up largely of millenials and post-millenials who might eschew the car culture and patronize walkable businesses adjacent to their abodes without braving the vicissitudes of traffic, road rage, and higher gas prices.  Indeed, our local mall is doing exactly this, as blocks of apartments rise from the ruins of a moribund Sears store.  Some see this new type of insularity as offering a type of freedom to the hipster generations.  But will "freedom" come only at the price of the access to movement?

     This set me to thinking of a favorite novel, Jose Saramago's The Cave.  Portugal's Nobel-Prize winning master of prose is not always considered as a writer of speculative fiction, but that is perhaps an oversight.  After all, one of his first best sellers, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, already revolved around a ghost (no less than that of its great modernist poet Fernando Pessoa).  Others concern events in Lisbon's gargantuan graveyard (All the Names), a mysterious malady that causes his countrymen simultaneously to lose their eyesight (Blindness), or a geological oddity that snaps all of the Iberian Peninsula off from Europe and sets it floating across the Atlantic toward the New World (The Stone Raft), to name but a few.

       The beginning of The Cave gives no hint of such speculation, or even of much magical realism, as it traces the banal life of a humble ceramist whose livelihood is threatened by the onset of capitalistic globalism.  He is later drawn into events on a different scale as family members are invited to move from their traditional village to a giant complex called The Center.  This place combines vast housing facilities with mass commercial interests that the potter had formerly dealt with.  It is a softer and quintessentially Portuguese version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.  Old Cipriano's unemployed rambles (he is now supported by his son-in-law Marcal, who works as a security guard) bring him finally to discover a darker side of reality, and his own destiny, concealed deep beneath The Center.

       Will tomorrow's hipster mall-dwellers collide with sinister consequences of a new urbanism as Cipriano does?  If so, will they follow him and his little family towards a new (or perhaps old) frontier experience?  Given that today's apartment complexes are hastily-constructed, minimally committed types of architecture, I have my doubts if they will be able to found a durable model for new urbanism, or even to adapt to the high-frequency technological and social changes that are under way.  Saramago seems an unlikely type for a prophet, particularly since he was remarkably heterodox in his spiritual ideas and actively opposed by at least one Pope.  Yet, we may do well to lend some thought to his works as late stage capitalism offers us a new spectacle (in the sense of the late Situationist Internationale) of mall settlements sprouting mushroom-like across the landscape.  It will be well worth watching.

Planetary Polarity is Getting More Complicated

     Some recent research on exoplanet TRAPPIST 1-c aided by the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed that this rocky, Venus-sized world orbiting a red dwarf star may have little or no atmosphere, dampening hopes that it might host some form of advanced life.  Prevailing sci-fi thinking might react to this situation by simply saying, "Let's terraform it and give it an atmosphere so we can settle there."  An example of this kind of thinking can be found in the Alien universe, where the moon LV-426 is subject to a terraforming project by the interplanetary Weyland-Yutani Corporation.  Of course, we all know how well that plan worked out once the colonists made contact with the vicious aliens.  Instead of becoming a new Earth, LV 426 wound up being nuked from orbit.  

     This brings us to the Earth's closest terraforming candidate, our solar system neighbor Mars.  One still hears occasional mentions of the idea that we might use machinery to generate an atmosphere permitting human colonization of the Red Planet.  Taken on a simple level, the project may seem to have merit, assuming we could economically transport enough machinery to its surface (via the Moon, most likely) to begin the long, slow process of turning Martian materials into nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen sufficient to support organic life that, in turn, could support a colony.  This scenario apparently could lend credence the recent hit, The Martian, were it not that another wrench has already been thrown into that scheme.  Based on Andy Weir's novel, Ridley Scott introduces us to the plucky astronaut Mark Watney, who manages to survive after being abandoned by growing potatoes in protected bits of local soil.  The problem is that subsequent research has discovered that Martial soil is probably far too toxic to permit this kind of solution.  If the nearest fertile soil has to be brought by rocket all the way from Earth, that poses a major problem.

     Furthermore, another area of research may have uncovered an even more daunting obstacle.  Japanese researchers using the latest data from probes have formulate a theory about how and why Mars lost its ancient, moisture-rich atmosphere.  It has long been thought that the air was stripped away by radiation streaming from our own sun, a fate that would await our own world under various circumstances, such as the loss of our ozone belt.  But the Martian catastrophe probably came about because of a different root cause: the weakening of Mars's magnetic shield.  The Japanese researchers have determined that evidence relating to the Martian molten core beneath the planet, which generated an early magnetic shield, shows differences from Earth's core chemically.  This difference could have caused the Martian core to homogenize and "clot," weakening the field to the point that the Solar Wind would erode the atmosphere.  

     If this hypothesis is correct, the loss of the Martian magnetic field would be all but irreversible.  Any attempts to rebuild a new atmosphere would be doomed because any new gasses would continue to be stripped away as fast as they were generated by machinery.  So how could humans "jump-start" the core of Mars to protect such new gasses?  The scope of the challenge is staggering, beginning with the absence of a plan to get such a process started.  Consequently, terraforming a distant planet like Trappist-1c seems even more remote if we cannot envisage doing something similar with a relatively near neighbor.

     "Impossible" is a very weighty word to apply even to the most unlikely of prospects.  The more we learn about the cosmos, the more we realize how little we actually know and how much more knowledge is still out there.  Skepticism is central to the scientific method, but we must not allow caution itself to immobilize our imagination or our ingenuity.  As we watch the skies, we have to be just as wary to spot new opportunities as to appreciate difficulties that arise to block our aspirations.   

 

Hello, Singapore!

Greetings to our new visitors from the other side of the Earth.  it is always a pleasure to welcome new adepts of science and fiction, especially those who take the trouble to tune in from far away.  We know Singapore is one of the modest modern and vibrant places on the planet and one that is not afraid to experiment with new things, be it in architecture, business, or all other fields of human endeavor.  Hope you will stayed tuned to new posts and share some of your own observations.

 

Will We Learn to Listen Before We Speak? 

     It's exciting news that there are now plans to expand the Very Large Array in New Mexico to almost four times the present number of antennas.  This will make one of our most important receiving stations for various forms of electromagnetic diffusion in the universe far more sensitive and extend our understanding of new cosmic phenomena being discovered by our space-based units like the James Webb Telescope.  It will supplement existing Earth-based facilities such as the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia and hopefully make up for the abandonment of the giant Arecibo structure in Puerto Rico, which has been allowed to fall into irreversible disrepair.  

     This step forward brings us back to the question of whether, as a researching planet, we should rely a bit more on "passive" research before broadcasting our presence to the universe with increased radio signals sent into space.  After all, some of our earliest televised emissions were of Hitler's speeches, filled with genocidal hatred and conquest!  More recently, the late Stephen Hawking, arguably the Einstein of our age, warned that we might not want to attract the attention of space-faring intelligence, especially if its intelligence was artificial rather than organic.  Perhaps we should take a hint from Native American culture, which stressed the great importance of observation as a prelude to any kind of confrontation.  Or even from the old carpenter's adage: "measure twice, cut once."  Work with vast amounts of data involving the search for Earth-like exoplanets suggests that a good deal of time and effort on the analytical front is necessary before we can properly digest the importance of the amount of observation we are already receiving.  Let's hope that the new Very Large Array will aid us in better understanding what we see and hear as we "Keep watching the skies." 

 A Great Break at the Beach

There's nothing like a few days at the beach to refresh the mind and body.  Kids playing in the sand, wind surfers, kite fliers, parasails, dolphin searchers, beachcombers, ospreys diving into the surf, everything is full of fun and relaxation.  And of course, there's great seafood to be enjoyed.  

CRRLCon Was Fun!

It was great to meet new fans and readers at the CRRLCon this Saturday, May 20th, at the Howell Branch Library in Stafford County.  Especially important were all the young new readers getting familiar with all the great experiences that await them in the library system.  They sure did clean out my candy dish a couple of times!  I promise to stock up with different flavors before the next event. Many people grabbed up our brochures and cards, and of course the sales topped off the whole day for us.  Kudos to Central Rappahannock Regional Library for organizing such a great series of activities to keep all the visitors smiling.