Skip to content

Review of “A Modern Utopia”, by H.G. Wells

A Modern UtopiaA Modern Utopia by H.G. Wells

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As much as I admire H.G. Wells, I still always find myself struggling to finish utopian novels. What I love about good science fiction is that upon a few basic “what if” presumptions, which we must take on faith, a whole world of logically consistent and ultimately very human stories can be built. Despite his interesting ideas and the honorific of “classic” and “canonical”, I’m afraid that I fell into the same complaints with A Modern Utopia as with many others: it is dry, overly-reliant on description instead of humanity, and prone to far more hastily-accepted assumptions than the bulk of the rest of the genre.

Wells does, to be fair, answer the question that is skirted in most utopias, but central to my distaste for them: If we live in a utopia, for what shall we strive?

Worth a read for the clarity of thought and excellent writing, and for its own sake as a member of canonical collection of classical science fiction. I probably will not read it again or refer back to it, however.



View all my reviews

Posted in books and literature.

Tagged with , , , .

No comments

By Nalin – November 26, 2011

Who is Betraying the Troops?

I noticed in the Washington Post today that one of my congressmen, Rep Buck McKeon (R – CA 25), announced that defense cuts could lead to an increased possibility of reinstating the draft. In the linked article below, he goes on to talk about what defense cuts might mean for the pay and benefits for our troops.

I wonder if the Congressman would comment on what I see as a fallacy in this oft-repeated refrain by many on Capital Hill, that cutting defense is somehow the moral equivalent of betraying the troops… If all of that defense money (more than the rest of the world combined, and somewhere short of 10 times as much as the nearest competitor, China) is really going to the troops, then why do we have homeless veterans, Mr. Congressman? Why are there veterans who can’t find jobs or get medical and psychological care?

Because that money is not going to the troops. It is going to defense contractors, among the largest and richest corporations in the world, and ones who have both parties of our government by the balls. They are entities with a vested financial interest in perpetual war, and have enormous lobbying power. It would appear that the Congressman is suggesting that, if defense expenditures were to be cut (say, to a modest, barebones 4-5 times the nearest world competitor), that not only would we continue to have homeless and jobless veterans, but that their pay and benefits while in service might be cut, or we might have to conscript from the general populace, instead of slashing it from our outlays to these massive corporations.

Who is really betraying the troops?

Posted in politics and society.

Tagged with , , , .

No comments

By Nalin – September 20, 2011

Highlights from San Diego Comic-Con 2011

On the way to SDCC with Ken. Hit massive traffic around San Juan Capistrano, so we were late. However, bagels were acquired.

 

Finally got to San Diego a couple hours behind schedule.

 

My very own SDCC badge! I can see it! Touch it! Taste it! (Note: Con badges were found to not taste pleasant.)

 

In nerd heaven.

 

Marina Sirtis! (Who, in addition to having played Counselor Troi in TNG, would still look amazing in those non-regulation Starfleet Cleavage Division uniforms I was so fond of in the 90's.)

 

Michael Dorn! (Who, in addition to having played Worf on TNG, loves NASA Dryden and that's even cooler.)

 

Got the signed photos of course, but in addition... I will never be wearing this Starfleet TNG Tactical uniform again. Anyone know of a good sacred glass case supplier?

 

Ken trying out the new Twisted Metal for Playstation.

 

More nerd heaven.

 

ONE POINT TWENTY-ONE JIGAWATTS GREAT SCOTT MARTY.

 

Unidentified fellow Starfleet offiicers. Wish I could remember their names. Too much Romulan Ale.

Posted in nerding out, science and engineering.

No comments

By Nalin – August 5, 2011

Movement

The following is an excerpt from the latest issue (II) of Saturation magazine. Saturation is a venue for the arts in the Antelope Valley publishing essays, poetry, fiction, and fine art. Find submission info at the AV Arts Blog.

Full color issues are available for $4 at Sagebrush Cafe in Quartz Hill, CA, at plays and events by Antelope Valley Thespians, or by contacting Nalin Ratnayake at quantumcowboy@gmail.com.

******************

Essay and Photos by Nalin A. Ratnayake
February 2011

The sight of the 1909 Wright Flyer through the falling snow is enough to send my mind racing.  We take so much of modern life for granted that it is hard to imagine sometimes how far we have come in so little time.

The first controlled flight of an aircraft lasted a shorter distance than the wingspan of a modern 747 airliner. Yet just over a decade from that moment, the first fighter aircraft took flight over the battlefields of the First World War. Less than fifty years from that from the Wright’s first flight, humanity broke the sound barrier, for the first time traveling faster than the very air could move out of the way. Roughly a decade after that a man flew fast enough that gravity couldn’t pull him back to earth; John Glenn reached 17,500 mph to orbit the Earth. A decade after that, the Helios solar probes screamed towards the Sun for high-speed sensor flyby’s at upwards of 150,000 mph. The list of movement milestones in flight could go on.

It’s a cold, snowy February morning outside of Dayton, Ohio. I am on temporary assignment to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for a combustion modeling training course, as part of my duties as a research propulsion engineer for a long-standing Antelope Valley institution. The last eight years of living in Arizona and Southern California have dulled the winter sense I gained from growing up in Boise, Idaho… now I really have to think as I attempt to navigate unfamiliar roads in my rental car through the ice and snow and fogged-up glass.

The security personnel are friendly and talkative, despite the early hour and chilly conditions. They tell me to pull over into the visitor control area. As I wait inside while they look up my information, I gaze out the window at the marvelous sight of the 1909 Flyer which now captivates me.

My papers and clearances are in order, and the two-striper at the visitor control desk attempts to hand back my badge along with my visit authorization. But I am still staring out of the window, oblivious. Finally, a 2nd Lieutenant also checking in gently taps me on the shoulder to get my attention. Embarrassed, I thank them both and exit visitor control, walking as if in a trance towards the cause of my distraction. In the glass of the door I see the two-striper’s reflection rolling his eyes as the lieutenant smiles.

The 1909 Wright Flyer, the world's first powered military airplane, just outside Gate 1B of Wright-Patterson AFB.

In this age, it is easy to get caught up in the technology. This machine went faster, higher, farther, or more cleanly than this other machine. Progress and advancement is beautiful, for sure; you will be hard-pressed to find an engineer who would say otherwise. Yet I can still appreciate the simple elegance of the now-primitive innovation before me.

Though obsolete to modern eyes, the impact of the Flyer’s seminal moment can be felt in almost every aspect of modern life.  Two bike shop owners from Dayton, Ohio flew in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17th, 1903. The aftereffects of that day, enabled by aerospace technology, have allowed rapid transit of people and goods around the world. Our satellite system has made possible everything from GPS to the internet, weather forecasting, cell phones, climate monitoring, military reconnaissance, and celestial observation. Our cars are now safer because we went to the moon; the machining technology required to accomplish the most difficult thing we could imagine at the time did not exist, and so we invented it.

For the first time in centuries of dreaming of it, humanity flew. The benefits of that foray into flight diffused into all branches of manufacturing technology.

As these thoughts blaze through my head, standing in the cold and staring at the 1909 Wright Flyer, I realize that my life serves as a poignant example of how much of modern society incorporates transportation.

In just a few days, my life has crossed paths with so many different forms of transportation, blended together into one seamless weekend of visiting my family in Northern California and heading off to Dayton for the training.

From my hometown of Quartz Hill, I was dropped off at the Lancaster train station by my roommate in her car. I then boarded an Amtrak Thruway bus towards Bakersfield, the southern train hub of California’s central valley.

For those who look back on the Greyhound heyday with equal measures of nostalgia and nausea, I assure you that Amtrak’s modern thruway system evokes more of the former than the latter. Yet you certainly do meet all the types on mass transit — part of the fun, if you ask me.

The driver, a white ex-Marine sergeant, was talkative and tried to make conversation by telling us about himself and asking us where we were headed. A retired black steel worker with a grayed beard smiled and spoke of his daughter, about to be married in Fresno. A Hispanic farm worker mumbled in broken English of seeing his brother in Corcoran after five years. A woman of seemingly mixed race was on the way back home to Redding after taking care of unspecified personal affairs in Lancaster. And I, the South-Asian research engineer, was headed to Sacramento and then on to El Dorado Hills, to visit my parents.

Mass transit is the great equalizer — joining the lives of people from every corner of the American fabric, who may never meet otherwise.  We are in motion together for a brief time – by a bus route or those twin threads of steel we call rail lines. Movement is about connection, about people, about life.

The Wright Brothers Memorial, Dayton, OH.

Those who pass through the Bakersfield train station will always note a large, marble globe which is suspended on partially submerged gimbals. The globe appears heavy, impossible to move. Yet through engineering artifice, even a small child may impart motion to this orb, and rotate the earth to see the various oceans and continents etched into the black stone. Carved in the base are the words:

Riches through knowledge. Knowledge through travel. — Edward J. Hogan.

Movement, motion, travel — all of which ultimately result in experiences which make for a better-rounded, globally aware, and culturally conversant individual. I was very fortunate to have had the opportunity to travel at a very young age with my family, scattered across the globe. It is now a need inextricably embedded in my soul – I travel abroad or to someplace new every year.

After I rode the Amtrak #713 San Joaquin northbound from Bakersfield to Stockton, I transferred to another thruway bus which connected me to Sacramento. After my visit to my parents, I flew from Sacramento through Denver to Dayton, after which I picked up a rental car and made my way to the hotel.

And the next day, finally, here I am with that same rental car — standing at Gate 1B of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, checking in for a combustion modeling class which will enable better research methods of propulsion, which then, of course, will impart motion to vehicles in a ever more efficient and effective ways.

Movement is how I define my life.

My work is about movement, requires movement and enables movement. My escape from work is movement, in the form of travel. The machinery that allows me to communicate with family and friends around the world relies on movement for its very operation.

The journey of my being, the movement I impart, and the motion I experience, physical or otherwise, will take me to places of which I could never dream today — such is life.

T.S. Elliot said it best, in his poem “Little Gidding”:

 We shall not cease from exploration
 And the end of all our exploring
 Will be to arrive where we started
 And know the place for the first time.

No matter where my journey may take me, I will always be grateful for monuments like Wright Flyer. They remind us from whence we came, and make where we are and where we are going all the more poignant.

Posted in introspection, science and engineering.

No comments

By Nalin – July 31, 2011

A Political Goal for Space and Society?

Roughly two years ago, the Obama Administration released its new space policy and direction for the nation’s air and space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It specified canceling the Bush era’s Constellation program, which called for returning to the moon and sending humans onward to Mars and beyond using a vertical rocket + capsule system more advanced than, but reminiscent of, the Apollo era. Through Constellation, the space shuttle, a highly complex system with modest goals, was to retire and make way for a modest system with lofty goals. After the President’s cancellation of this program, as many rightly point out, we presently do not have any particular system planned for what’s next in human space flight.

This has led to much protest, especially from the more operationally-focused NASA centers such as Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center, with whom I certainly sympathize. The most ardent of human space flight proponents have gone so far as to claim that American dominance in space has ended, and that NASA has lost its primary purpose. Why, they ask, are we not driving full steam ahead to establish permanent human bases on the moon?

The desire is, in summary, that human space flight should be a goal in and of itself, and that the agency’s purpose is to technically implement this goal. In this respect, the President is often negatively compared to President Kennedy, who, as we all fondly remember, set a very clear goal and deadline for landing on the moon. If Kennedy could set such a clear goal and fund NASA appropriately, the result of which was clearly a boost for American image and technological advancement, then why should the current President do any differently?

I propose that this perspective is… not wrong, but limited.

Let this sink in: NASA is not a technical agency. It is, fundamentally, a political agency that happens to use technical people… and always has been.

The goal of the Apollo program was not “land on the moon by the end of this de-cayde”, despite that phrase being the one central to Kennedy’s famous speech. The moon landing wasn’t actually the ultimate point; the goal was really “beat the Russians by whatever means necessary”. Though an incredible amount of technical advancement resulted directly and indirectly from the fact that we went to the moon, it was only a means to a political end.

NASA was and is but one piece in a very complicated game the U.S. Government is always playing.

One could say the same about the International Space Station… post-cold-war, the political goal is unifying a fragmented world of emerging powers that was no longer polarized between USA-USSR. NASA heeded the call and banded together with 15 other nations, some of which were not necessarily friendly to the United States, on the collaborative challenge of what was possibly the most complex construction job in the history of our species. The kind of diplomacy and bridge building is something the State Department can’t even get close to. It certainly is nice that the world gets it for research now, and I do hope that we get as much research out of it as practical, but… that wasn’t the point.

“Establish a permanent human presence on the moon” is not a political goal. It’s a technical one. Something like “beat the Russians” IS a political goal, out of which “land humans on the moon” merely follows. What is the political reason to establish a permanent human presence on the moon or Mars? While I personally agree that it’s a good idea, I think it would be difficult to make a serious political case for why the American public or U.S. government should care enough to justify the cost in the present environment. They cared a lot about beating the Russians… by whatever means. I see no such strong, passionate political or social motivation for… well, anything these days really. Do people really care anymore? If not, should they? If they should but don’t, how do we address that?

Saying “the public should believe in human space flight” or “the administration needs to value the space program” are empty statements, and dangerously insular. Instead, I believe our energy would be better spent to 1. frame human space exploration (e.g., “land on the moon first”) in terms of a broad national goal that does not actually explicitly require it (e.g. “beat the Russians”), and then 2. make the case for why human space exploration is the best means to that end.

I think the majority of us are trying to do (2) before we do (1). That is, we are saying that human space exploration should be a goal in and of itself, starting from that as a given. That would work on me pretty easily; but for the majority of government and society, that is really not the case. Landing on the moon was but one tool in the box for a much much broader political goal that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with human space exploration… we beat the Russians through all sorts of things, using all kinds of different methods, agencies, departments, ideas, etc.

Can we do that with starting a manned program for Mars now? I feel like most space advocates are saying “hey, we have a great solution here!”, a manned program which is good enough for us as a goal in and of itself, but without identifying clearly to those who need to know why anyone else should really care or what political problem it would be most effective at solving.

Because that’s why NASA actually exists. As an executive agency, its purpose is to implement the policy (all of it… national security, environment, energy, education, diplomacy, etc) of the President of the United States. Civilian air and space assets are simply the means by which it is authorized to do so… they are not the objective themselves.

Hypothetical example, for illustrative purposes (not advocacy).

Political goal: “Energy security and climate change demand that we research and develop alternative means of generating and transmitting energy in a clean, sustainable, and secure manner.”

Technical implementation: “Therefore NASA is directed to develop an orbital solar power station of X gigawatts generation capacity, associated delivery of energy to the ground (via beaming, space elevator cable or what have you), and all associated construction, supply, operational, and logistical considerations. NASA will work with the USAF to design and implement the most appropriate means of securing this national asset from foreign attack or influence, while maintaining its essentially civil nature.”

Note that the political component is totally independent of air and space. An air and space solution is proposed that addresses a much broader political problem, for which many possible solutions may be available.

Now… in those terms: Why establish a permanent human presence on the moon or Mars? Why continue independent government access to the ISS (whose initial primary purpose was to partner with emerging nations on a challenging project in a post-Soviet world, not to do research)? Why send humans to explore the solar system when robots are much more cost effective?

Let me re-emphasize: I love all of these things. I simply think we as a space advocate community are neglecting to put them into the one framework that will actually make them practical: political. The strong contempt that we nerds feel towards the political should not blind us to the real meaning behind the oft-quoted phrase: “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”

If we can’t put it in those terms, it won’t happen, and that’s the hard truth as I see it.

Posted in politics and society, science and engineering.

2 comments

By Nalin – July 3, 2011