"Gingrich and at least several of the others are actually from Jackson's Whole."

Or possibly Mesa. Compare and contrast PNAC and the Mesan Alignment....

* Uterine replicators wouldn't solve the abortion debate, but they'd sure change the dynamics, for example, if it was possible to terminate a pregnancy but keep the fetus viable. Not to mention what magic would do as a source of energy -- is it sustainable and ecologically friendly (and will we care, if it's cheaper and safer than current sources?)

Plus, he'd like immortality via the Time Vault.

Beside which, as Hari Seldon said, in the Dutch version, for Abi: "De geschiedenis van elke tot nog toe bestaande maatschappij is de geschiedenis van klassenstrijd." Newt's on the wrong side of that.

"I got better."

"Gingrich and at least several of the others are actually from Jackson's Whole."

Now that is a great insight. House Fell, indeed. If only he'd go back there.

Or maybe he's in league with the Nameless Ones...may their temples fall.

It's an old trope. It was widely said of Reagan. It was even said of Nixon in 1968 (how widely I don't know).

Typing this out, I wonder if it's older than that. Or is it all based in simplistically extrapolating what happened with Goldwater in 1964?

Dr Ledgister was there well ahead of you.
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009448.html#218580

(Ryoval Publishing...)

I have a twisted mind. Why did you ask?

Actually it reminds me of Karl Marx. Just saying.

Possibly Stranger in a Strange land is closer? Charismatic stranger brings peace to the world and disappears bad guys, whilst preaching a hippie-ish love and peace to all people idea. See Blair and his wife's dalliance with various new age types when in office.

Certainly a lot of people associated with him and his government thought that 1984 and Animal farm were manuals.

In my mind this produces a picture of a man in khakis and a solar topee leading a regiment of others similarly attired, on horse and camel-back, charging Fuzzy-Wuzzy in the Soudan around 1889. If this is Dr Gingrich's self-image, I am both alarmed and appalled.

Yes! And a monocle.

How are we to take him seriously as a defender of civilization if he won't dress the part?

Given his ideology I suspect that Newt actually has 1898 in mind, and his Mary-Sue is a certain British Army captain and frelance journalist.

The Raven #33: True:

Charlie Stross #31: I think you have it.

Somehow, I can't imagine Mr. Gingrich staying on his horse, not with the 21st Lancers.

Well yes, but Oscar Wilde said, "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means." And therein lies the distinction.

I'll have you know that we pigs resent that!

I advised Meacham via Twitter that he should read Gingrich's science fiction.

To my knowledge, he is the only Speaker of the House to have attended, and been a program participant at, two Worldcons.

Virginia Postrel wrote that in 1983 in Baltimore, "He was the only member of Congress who thought the WorldCon worth addressing."

Here's a photo of Newt speaking at the Atlanta Worldcon in 1986.

Really, you should ask Tim.

Or was that just working for him?

Tim worked for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R, CA) for many years, including the period of Gingrich's ascendancy as Speaker in the mid-Nineties, but Tim did not, so far as I know, work for Gingrich.

Bingo. And any organization set up to control sociopaths will be run by a sociopath. I know this because I've read Slan.

As for psychohistory, I found the idea depressing when I was a kid, because I took it to mean that nothing I could do would make any difference.

Aside from not registering the difference between a cool idea for science fiction and the real world, I'd call this a hint that I was inclined to depression.

Eventually, I developed a button business, and it seemed to me that it was making a difference on a small scale, and I decided that maybe institutions developed predictability with time, but it really was possible to start something new.

There was less emotional effect to thinking (possibly even early on) that psychohistory requires an implausibly low rate of invention.

Anyway, chaos theory came along (and the later sequels tried to incorporate it, but I don't remember the details), but what really put the last nail into psychohistory's coffin for me was a bit from Nassim Taleb (the black swan guy)-- the more people you have, the less predictable they are. They invent things.

That will forever be stuck in my brain now. Thanks, I think.

Stephen @15, there are pitfalls in reasoning from historical parallels. I grew up watching the Watergate hearings, so I was stunned when Reagan was allowed to retire in peace, and that he is to this day regarded as some kind of hero by many.

Antonia @20, I am gobsmacked that I haven't heard that one before. I may make it the new quotation in my signature.

Heresiarch @42: At least he isn't speaking of Civilization with a capital C. Then he'd be envisioning himself with a shiny red Homeland Security all-in-one surveillance device/lie detector/Taser/revolver strapped to his wrist.

I think what's going on here is the old idea that science fiction readers are immature crackpots in propeller beanies. Gingrich, so worth attacking for both person and politics, tends to bring this prejudice out. Wasn't there an old article in the New Republic that namechecked Chris and Janet Morris?

I ran into one of them, the latest, at Barnes and Noble the other day. It's about the Battle of the Crater, surely one of the greatest debacles in US military history. But the teaser info on the dust jacket implies that it wasn't the massive flail that everyone thinks it was, and that, wait for it, Burnside is the unsung, unfairly castigated, hero of the piece.

Given that Burnside proved his utter incompetence on several other occasions, and that the whole idea of making the crater happen was objectively and clearly quite resoundingly stupid, this attempt to do rep rehab on a complete idiot seems timely. When will Gingrich find the champion that he has been to Burnside?

By the way, I did not buy the thing, and I didn't even thumb through it enough to confirm the impression left by the dust jacket blurb, so if I got the wrong impression, please inform my ignorance. I'ld hate to think that Gingrich is an idiot for the wrong reasons. I'm sure the right reasons put any idiocy I could imagine in the shade.

"THANKFULLY: I cannot imagine an egregious twit like Newt getting elected. (I mean, if Obama was found drunk and naked in the lamb & baby goat pen by the morning cleaning crew of a petting zoo, maybe then.)"

Easy. The ECB takes the Euro into the trashcan of history, and Europe into Great Depression II, along with us.

And after a GOP sweep in 2012, it would *be* the Great Depression II, with full membership. The only hope would be that it wouldn't earn the title 'Greatest Depression', and that we wouldn't start saying 'World War __' again.

There was an ex-Speaker named Newt
who thought himself brainy and cute.
Unlike Hari Seldon
the future he looked on
included a face and a boot.

His history is a joke. And filled with fantasies such as Pickett's charge at Gettyburg led to a confederate victory. While in history the confederate invasion of Pennsylvania was a pillagers' dream. It wasn't only food and everything else the army stole, they and slave catchers grabbed every black person they could, which included huge number of free black people, to sell when back down south. You can understand why he and his alternative Civil War books can make a reader who knows her history physically ill.

Love, C.

The article you're probably thinking of is Thomas M. Disch's essay about Gingrich and the writers for Baen: "Speaker Moonbeam" published in The Nation.

It was collected in Disch's "On SF" but the publishers have made it available at:

http://press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472068968-32.pdf

Yep. That's something it's really important to remember: Our whole political system is built around the two parties, and so no matter how awful one candidate is, he can still win under the right circumstances.

Whoever the nominee is for the Republicans--Romney, Gingrich, Perry, Paul, Bachmann, Huntsman--Obama can self-destruct through some stupid scandal (think about the bomb John Edwards was sitting on!), or can be creamed by events beyond his control (Euro meltdown leading to Great Depression 2.0, terrorist attack).

That's one reason why it's dumb to cheer for the worst candidate on the other side to win the nomination.

I'm hoping someone will primary Zero but I don't think it's very likely.

Because we _KEEP_ the good parts. The things of the past that are WORTH keeping generally can stand on their own merits without having to be propped up.

Lest we forget, James Earl Carter unfortunately had two disqualifying characteristics among the power brokers, either of which, for many of the same reasons, would lead to a motion to strike from a jury pool:
1) his substantial educational level (as a nuclear engineer)
2) his anachronistic interpretation of Christianity as motivating a perversely unAmerican concern for the poor (evidenced by his dedicated participation in Habitat for Humanity)

Anyway, I'm seeing lots of references to SciFi/Fantasy and would love a fix. George R.R. Martin is okay, but comparisons to Tolkien are overblown, imo.

I liked Piers Anthony, Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert, Ursula LeGuin (sp, I know), those Dragonsinger books, and lots of others I'm forgetting. I came across the 1970 book 'Science Fiction Hall of Fame' a few years ago and it's a truly awesome set of short stories by early luminaries.

I have a hard time in the SciFi section of B&N because so much is just so formulaic and self-indulgently overdone.

Throw me a bone! Give me a few suggestions of some great writing out there, new or old.

[Oh yeah, and Bush (the coward, not the wimp) has lowered the bar so much that a Gingrich candidacy isn't out-of-the-question, scary as that may be. It says more about the Right's descent than anything else. I used to be able to respectfully disagree with politicians on the conservative side; now I can't even respect them. A NY Times op-ed piece on the anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall sort of crystalized it for me: today's Republicans are like Communist Party members from 50 years ago, so locked into partisan sophistry that there's not much point in engaging with them. There's a great article in 'New York Magazine' from a week ago in which a Bush speechwriter and solid conservative admits that his party has gone off the deep end. Really, it's worth reading and citing!]

But I worry about any person getting one step away from the presidency; even Bachman, even Palin.

You want your mind blown? Last and First Men and/or Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. That's an old one.

Newish? Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge.

Cool and new? Boneshaker by Cherie Priest (zombies! zeppelins!)

I read Tom Disch's piece with interest.

Disch and The Nation were hostile to Newt Gingrich. I began to wonder whether Gingrich's friend and ally, Jerry Pournelle, had written anything about his presidential run. Indeed he had; here's a brief excerpt. Last May, commenting on a quote from Peggy Noonan claiming that Gingrich had bad judgment, Pournelle wrote:

Newt has always had a very great deal of the Great College Professor in his makeup. The mark of the great teacher is that when a student asks a question the great professor answers not the question that the student asked, but the one that the prof thinks ought to have been asked. That makes for great classes. It does not make for great politics, and Miss Noonan is quite correct in pointing out that being really smart is not the same as having great judgment. Judgment generally comes from practice, particularly from executive experience. Judgment is the ability to deal with problems and crises without committing yourself to a disastrous course of action.

More recently, Dr. Pournelle has commented on the child-janitor thing and on recent campaign events.

Sure there are pitfalls. But one of their strongest uses is giving reasons against asserting impossibility. I was not saying, from the Nixon/Reagan/W examples, that it was therefore impossible that Gingrich would be judged so loony as to be (in some fashion) denied the nomination. Of course it could happen. Rather, I was asserting that those examples proved (as much as one can prove anything about the probability of a unique event) that saying that it is *impossible* that he *might* be nominated, simply because so extreme, is overconfident. And I think that will remain true even if he is in fact defeated (which is to say, his actual defeat would not prove that his victory had been *impossible* -- merely that he hadn't pulled it off.)

Saying "X will happen because it's like this historical situation where X' happened" is iffy. But saying "X *might* not happen since in similar situations X' has happened, so the alternatives have some precedent" is less so.

So in this case I stand by the historical reasoning.

(As far as Reagan goes, my sense is that he wasn't impeached in part *because* of Watergate, i.e. various people didn't want to do that again for various reasons.)

Lots of good stuff, obviously, but given what you've said, a few places to look:

Dan Simmons, Hyperion

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (sequels are Green Mars and Blue Mars)

And if you like fantasy, Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

A random, destabilizing element who's skill at manipulating the human mind plays merry hell with the predictions and theories of the Foundation.

That sounds like the way Rand described her role, as tiding civilization over between Aristotle and the future, or between Aquinas and the future, I forget which.

- the Telzey Amberdon stories by James Schmitz [1]
- the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane [2]
- the Mageworlds series by Doyle & Macdonald [3]
- the Changed World series by S.M. Stirling [4]
- the Neanderthal Trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer (Hominids, Humans, Hybrids)
- HellSpark by Janet Kagan
- The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robertson [5]

[1] These have been conveniently re-released by Baen in 2 omnibus collections, Telzey Amberdon and TnT: Telzey and Trigger.
[2] These are YA fiction, in a very well-realized universe. Start with So You Want to Be a Wizard.
[3] The Price of the Stars, Starpilot's Grave, By Honor Betray'd, The Gathering Flame (prequel), The Long Hunt (next-gen), The Stars Asunder and A Working of Stars (much-further-back prequels, dealing with one of the secondary characters from the original trilogy). I recommend reading them in that order.
[4] Alternate history. The first 3 books (Dies the Fire, The Protector's War, A Meeting at Corvallis) lay out the (more-or-less post-apocalyptic) universe and how things settle out after the world as we know it comes to an end. The books after that are next-gen and have an overall Sacred Quest arc, but there's still plenty of action.
[5] Very ambitious alternate history -- what if the Black Plague had killed off 90% of Europe's population instead of just 30%? Done as a series of interlocked vignettes.

Stephen Frug #72, yes indeed, as I remember it was well understood that Reagan escaped at least in part because people were afraid of repeating the Watergate experience. Which shows that there's always a worse case coming.

But, Stephen Frug #73, I can't agree about the very disappointing Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which never came to any conclusion.

E55 #68: I admired A Fire Upon the Deep for its brilliant idea, which I hope will be developed more completely. And there's lots of old SF/fantasy that's simpler but very enjoyable and even stimulating, much like the Foundation trilogy. Try Lest Darkness Fall by deCamp for ingenuity. Also deCamp and Pratt's The Incomplete Enchanter (a.k.a. The Compleat Enchanter, a.k.a The Complete Compleat Enchanter) for wit and cleverness - but do not read the pastiches by deCamp et al. Try most of the Heinlein juveniles, especially Starman Jones and The Rolling Stones. Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. Back to Asimov: I'm inclined to think The Caves of Steel is his best novel, followed by its sequel The Naked Sun, though not as grand as the Foundation. And even more ...! but it's late.

Robert E. Howard's Conan. Accept no substitutes! :D
Glen Cook's Black Company novels - epic fantasy told from the point of view of a band of mercenaries...who happen to be working for the Evil Overlord.
John Bellairs' The Face In The Frost - a novel about two wizards facing an ominous threat from an old colleague of theirs, with the help of some very eccentric spells and a magic mirror that shows modern-day baseball games.

I hear the sequel's about to come out, or has just come out. "Children of the Sky", I seem to recall is the title.

Whereas the rest of us remember the old saying "Ein Volk, ein Reich, Ayn Rand."

Actually I just saw that on Facebook the other day, but I really like it.

heresiarch 81: Psychohistory is the fond fantasy of the quantitative revolution, dead before arrival.

Which would, to close the loop, be why Paul Krugman turned to The Dismal Science instead.

I have giggled
at the notes
that were on
your blotter

and which
you were probably
saving
for a Science Fiction novel

forgive me
they were egregious
so smug
and so droll

Also, he seemed to realize that if Hari Seldon himself was capable of affecting the course of history by application of psychohistory itself, then things couldn't be all that insensitive to Great Men. So you couldn't have just anyone messing about with psychohistory.

Revolution is pending

The sequel is out; I just finished reading it yesterday. Very good work in its own right, as well as advancing the original story considerably (and deepening the ideas behind the Tines). (Un?)fortunately, I think a third book is now required to carry some of the themes out to their conclusions. I sure hope there's less time between books 2 & 3 then between 1 & 2. Anything else we say about it should be rot13 for spoilers.

I never finish anyth

They can't hit the broad side of a barn at this dist

At this point I'm guessing you were suddenly called away, and someone else hlepfully clicked Preview and Post without reading your comment. Now that I've said that, of course, I will see the point as soon as I've posted myself, because the universe moves to maximize me looking stoopid.

Now someone will tell us it's all a myth anyway. :)

E55:

In addition to Lee's recommendation, I'll tout these by Schmitz: The Demon Breed and The Witches of Karres.

Also:

Poul Anderson's Brain Wave (and so much else.)

Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination.

Glen Cook's Starfishers trilogy (He's best known for fantasy and mystery, but his SF is good.)

Timothy Zahn's Spinneret

(Lee: that Neanderthal trilogy has always looked interesting; maybe I'll get around to it soon.)

I bet the Earth doesn't want to swallow Newt. I can understand that attitude, what a bad taste he would leave.

He was right, too. They didn't hit an elephant, they hit him.

Nancy Lebovitz #49
But if I understand my psychohistory " :-) ", the more people you add, the more the ensemble is constrained by statistics and the emergent large number phenomena.
We can have all of the invention that we want (though there could be limits to that) and people will still be faced with the same fundamental challenges and choices that they have had throughout history. So maybe the task psychohistory faces is just incredibly monumental, but not impossible.

The seeds of this world were sown by a poster I had once of just such an aqueduct soaring over a tiny little thatched-roof town, and my amusement at the fact that the 'money' in the post-apocalyptic videogame Fallout is bottlecaps, mined from our landfills. In a post-Fall world, even the disposable commonplaces of the lost Great Empire are incredibly valuable.

It seemed to me a fertile ground for adventuring. I've not worked out all the details about how it fell or why, but 'now' magic is taught by individual crackpot hermit weirdo wizards who are feared by the countryside around them.

Psychohistory is the ultimate "statistics über alles"; but nonlinear dynamics is the ultimate Achilles' heel.

Yes, that's one of the problems of psychohistory, and by itself serious enough to prevent it from being useful. The other problem is that while we can be pretty confident that properties will emerge from a system as it grows and evolves, the nature of those properties is contingent on the evolutionary path, and there's no way to predict what they will be. As an example, think about the political boundaries of the states of the US. It was pretty much inevitable that some sort of subdivision of US territory would occur, but the lines on the map that we have today are contingent on the movements of populations, the meanderings of rivers, the actions that were taken by the US military to sweep aside the native population, and the whims of local politicians and surveyors.

"The blessing/curse of American government is that either party can pretty much guarantee gridlock, so even on the off chance that the Newt took the election, he's limited in the amount of damage he can do."

The lessons of 2000 - 2008 and beyond been that there is no limit to the amount of damage these ilks can do.

Hari Seldon wasn't from Trantor either.

“Elections are won not by converting the opposition but by getting out your own vote, and Scudder’s organization did just that. According to histories I studied at Boondock, the election of 2012 turned out 63 percent of the registered voters (which in turn was less than half of those eligible to register); the True American party (Nehemiah Scudder) polled 27 percent of the popular vote… which won 81 percent of the Electoral College votes.”

“In 2016 there was no election.”

–Robert A. Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, 1987

Steve C. "The blessing/curse of American government is that either party can pretty much guarantee gridlock, so even on the off chance that the Newt took the election, he's limited in the amount of damage he can do."

Aside from the counterexample which we just lived through, do you really think that the Blue Dog Senators who were Oh-so-manly against Obama will not get back down on all fours with the next GOP president? Do you think that the Democratic Senators will pull filibusters like the GOP Senate does? What's the relative power of a President who accommodates the elites (Obama) vs. a President who wh*res for them shamelessly?

And that's before we get to events. Bush looked relatively harmless, and then 9/11 happened. Newt/Romney will almost certainly have a war, since the right wants one - probably with Iran, although picking one a small country with no trouble-making power at all has advantages.

There's damage, and they're damage. Despite Bush and the GOP, the country is still here, we're still having elections, and we are not doomed.

If you want to see what history can really throw at us, look at 1861. Or 1929. Or 1941.

As far as predictions go, I threw away my crystal ball. What will then next congress do? What will the next president do?

Beats the hell out of me. I have enough trouble figuring out what I'm gonna do.

I wonder which one will be softer on slavery...

Cletus, Donal Graeme, and Hal Mayne all worked for the progressive historical force. Gingrich is on the side with the Others trying to freeze history. And not Bleys Ahrens either but more like that sniveling little phychohistorian who was working for William of Ceta.

There's no reason why you would know this but I spend my life looking at everything leading up to 1861 and what comes after.

I've never in my lifetime seen anything that looks so much like that last trainwreck of the secessionists to get their way as I have seen now, including the same rhetoric. Including the same pusilanimous bend-over by the Dems of that time to the southern slaveholding power elite. Which forced a new party, the Republicans into being, which provided then the final excuse for them to force through secession, since Lincoln was black abolitionist -- meaning he had made clear there was to be no EXPANSION of slaveru into the territories, while the secessionsts trumpeted he was going to take away their slaves. Big difference. Lincoln told the truth. They told a Great. Big. Lie. Which oddly enough then, did lead, via the war they made and were determined to have, because that way, they were sure, they'd Get. It. All., which meant they indeed did lose their slaves. (Though they immediately went to work to not only reinstitute slavery by another name, but to rewrite all the history that led them to make the war in the first place, including THEM making the war.)

Love, C.

Does anybody care?

Does anybody see...what I see?

Gingrich wants a Lincoln-Douglas debate with Obama. I'm hoping he gets a Lincoln-Douglass debate.

Yeah, Serge but the corollary to that is Rutledge's comment to Hancock, which seems eerily prescient of the current Republican no tax strategy:

Most [Americans] would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich, than face the reality of being poor. And that is why they will follow ... US!"

"Mr. Adams, you must believe that I will do what I have promised to do."

Rutledge is willing to hold the entire (nascent) country hostage to getting his way. Sounds an awful lot like that last budget debacle, doesn't it?

By the way.... I watched the Alastair Sim "Christmas Carol" last night and I couldn't help but think about the Newt, especially the scene where the junk man has very-underage kids sorting thru piles of rags.

I think Newt may have another SF echo in the Pournelle-Stlrling
novels set on the planet Sparta in the CoDominium timeline.
I believe Sparta was founded by intellectuals/politicians on a
somewhat Randist model, and the novels involved its successful
defense against collectivist insurgents led by a woman of
Jamaican ancestry.

World War II planes could do 400+ mph.

What do these nitwit pseudo-intellectual economists say about what the world has lost on the depreciation of automobiles since the Moon landing? Before 1960 did Asimov ever predict a date for that landing?

So Krugman and Gingrich are full of crap.

http://www.toxicdrums.com/economic-wargames-by-dal-timgar.html

[A Gnote from the Gnomes: Released even though it tripped multiple filters. Happy Holidays from the Gnomes. -- Raul Flugens, Duty Gnome]