May 29, 2012

This is a new idea I came up with to force myself to post more on my own website. Take 15 minutes and write about what’s on my mind before I launch into the day.

Today, I find myself focusing on an audiobook I’m listening to called “Star Carrier: Book Two – Center of Gravity.” This book is set well into the future and the author paints a dark future for mankind where American government has fallen and global warming has destroyed costal cities. That is the great thing about science fiction in that..well, it’s fiction.

The government that author Ian Douglas speaks about in the book is of course, a world government with no party affiliations. Rule of law is drafted by consensus. All must agree or most must agree; you get the idea.

The aliens in this book are hostile. In fact, the alien species introduced in book two make Star Trek’s Borg look like infant children. In the first few chapters, the aliens are streaking towards Earth at incredible speeds and it seems that nothing can stop them.

At the last minute, the break up into parts and flee. Huh?

I get the feeling that these books were written by someone with little or no combat experience. The easiest way to write about a military you weren’t in is to invent your own system as Ian Douglas has here. A little digging into his biography at Harper Collins reveals that Ian was a Navy Corpsman. Point made.

It seems to me that the only way to get global warming to work, the only way to get a world government to work, the only way to get socialism to work, is to create it within a work of fiction.

We all know from experience that those things just don’t work in the real world.