Book review: Starship Troopers

After the film, the book. Wiki has a decent article, apart from the criticism sections, which are largely drivel.

The good bits: there's a decent story, and some interesting political philosophy, which you don't have to agree with. To some extent the book manages to break out of it's own time: the starship pilots are all women, for example.

The bad bits: although the philosophy is interesting, it is one sided, and somewhat wodged in (though not as badly as Rand). And he doesn't manage to break out of his time as much as he'd like. See-also here.

Reading stuff like this - and, for that matter, the film, which is also very of it's time, just a different time - I'm reminded of a scene from Asimov, nominally set tens of thousands of years in the future, when a man corrects a woman's (Bayta's, I think) estimate of her weight by sight of her upper arm. In this one it is perhaps the scene where he is reconciled with his father, who explains that his mother just couldn't understand. It's all so 50s America. This is reflected in the grunt's view of women; by the strict segregation on the ships; indeed by the school scenes. However, his political theory has it that only veterans can be full citizens, so it is necessary for women to be able to serve, and so he allocates them a place as pilots. Given that his MI (Mobile Infantry) all wear power armour this makes no sense. I don't think it would have disturbed his story (in the film it doesn't) but perhaps it would have, to readers of his times?

Of the political philosophy, it is of a limited franchise, a topic perpetually recurred to by folks who dislike the excesses of democracy (among which I count myself; I've not I think suggested limiting franchise, which I think doomed, but more limiting governmental power). Ironically, this was in the 50s, a time that people now look back on as a semi-golden-age of quality politics and political debate. Never believe the myths of a golden age. We are "taught" this by our narrator siting in class: at school via flashback and in officer training. Disappointingly, though, when it comes to the explanation of why vets-only should be selected his ultimate justification is "it works"². Since this is in an imaginary society, this is unconvincing. He also offers "because people have demonstrated putting themselves between society and harm", which kinda works in a war situation but not in the peace situation where as he admits most recruits were given make-work. And then we're left I think with his "because it demonstrates that people have put group good ahead of individual good". This is better and rather more convincing; though undercut by the obvious: anyone power-hungry will hardly cavail at doing two years of service^1,3. In peace time, that would be a low bar; possibly he is arguing that even that low bar, by reducing the franchise to perhaps 10% of the population, would be effective? Perhaps, though not obviously so.

But we have to turn to the glorification-of-the-military component. It would be interesting, in a way, to have the same book about their society written 50 years earlier, with no enemies to fight, and see how things were justified; but we don't get that. Instead we get what I think reads very much like something written about USAnian servicemen in WWII would read like. Pretty well everyone in service is good, and he gets away with this because he has winnowed out the bad. The MI get to kill gooks because bugs-are-bad (or in another way, can be killed because not really sentient, being controlled by a "brain" caste). They are fiercely loyal to their own. So it is very hard to take his "limited franchise" not to mean "military only" franchise, and outside his strongly idealised view of said military, it's hard to see that making sense.

One of the scenes that I very much objected to when I first read it as a ?14? year old, was the discussion of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Now I'm much more sympathetic to RAH's views; though I'm disappointed he doesn't put forward the view that govt is instituted to protect rights, not give them.

On a trivia note, he calls HMS Shannon HMF Shannon, which is careless.

In the end, I think the book though flawed is significantly better than most of the stuff from those days; perhaps I should try to read Glory Road again (update: I did. It was disappointing). By failing to extricate militarism from service it fails in its fundamental purpose. That same failure has kept it read. Do most, regrettably, pay more attention to the militarism than the service? I suppose that I don't know.

2025/05: I wonder if I'm too dismissive of the limited franchise, as a theory? Perhaps even only a minor barrier would be good enough to keep the most thoughtless proles out.

Notes

1. The closest this gets to mention is the scene where one of his fellow trainees fails to "freeze" and is drummed out for hitting a superior; our hero overhears a sergeant and officer overhearing what a shame this is, as the chap had political ambitions.

2. Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Part II: Romans, Assemble! tells me that middle-republic Rome worked somewhat like this: voting in the law making assemblies was weighted towards those who had served in the army.

3. 2025: I should reconsider this. The issue is not the power hungry getting into politics, because obvs they would. The issue is whether it would keep the morons from voting. And I think it would. Doing 2 years of <public service> is a high enough bar that most people would not value their vote highly enough to do it. That then gets you a much smaller pool of the franchised; but is it any better?

Book review: The Guermantes Way

Well, what can one say? Wiki has a decent section on it, and for a summary it's fairly good, capturing most of the "events" and some of the tone. I put events into quotes because of course very little actually happens; and one of the frustrations of the book is turning over yet another page to discover that still nothing has happened, but we get some more descriptions of things.

This is the volume that contains the beautiful scene in the restaurant where Saint-Loup, in order to bring our narrator a shawl, leaps up onto the back of the seats. It is charming.

The Dreyfuss affair comes in. I don't understand it (I mean, the DA itself; how it fits into the book is perfectly sensible); perhaps it is a simple proxy for anti-semitism, or perhaps for patriotism, or some other mixture that you'd need to understand the affairs of the time.

This volume charts our narrator's rise from the fringes of society to being invited to the highest levels. He himself seems somewhat surprised by his entry and there's nothing obvious to explain why he would be so invited (most of the conversation reported is of others; when our hero speaks it is usually indirect, as "I ventured to say that..."; we rarely learn what he said). But that society is described as shallow; the narrator, whilst sometimes admiring one facet of, for example, the Duchesse de Guermantes's character, invariably notes how, errrm, well, how shallow her understanding is. So we can perhaps suppose that he has literary merit; and probably there is some autobiography in there. Along the way there's a good deal of anecdote-imparting, name dropping, and generally introducing people like me who know nothing about it to the society of the time. Which I find it's chief virtue.

Film review: Starship Troopers

I drifted into watching this. It's fun. It isn't quite like the book, though clearly based on it; wiki has some words. I think I'll re-read the book. It's currently on Youtube, though doubtless will be taken down soon. I watched it at 480 rez so perhaps didn't get the highest quality view; some of the mass bug scenes looked just a touch odd; but overall, fine. The special effects were doubtless top-notch at the time but seem rather crude by today's standards, though the bugs are generally good especially the big ones.

The film annoys by falling into the usual silly tropes. For example, spaceships when damaged or colliding burn as though they were in air. Spaceships when hit begin to change course and eventually fall to the planet below. During the invasions, the motherships mass for the cameras so closely that they risk hitting each other; in reality they'd be 100's of kms apart; more likely, they'd be nowhere near the planet at all (compare fighter guncam video). Whenever the soldiers kill a bug, they pause and go "yeah" for the cameras and their comrades, and then get killed by the thing they're not looking at. When they go into combat, they do so in an ill-disciplined mass in each other's lines of fire. And so on.

Apparently, sez wiki, it is satirical; "Verhoeven stated in 1997 that the first scene of the film—an advertisement for the Mobile Infantry—was adapted shot-for-shot from a scene in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will". And so on. But, it is all a bit crude for that. It is more plausibly seen as a military action movie.

Book review: Bring up the Bodies

Mantel has a third in the trilogy coming, and so Waterstones has the first two out on display, and so I re-read Bring up the Bodies (I re-read Wolf Hall late in 2018). For reasons that I can't recall I didn't quite like it the first time round. I still don't like the title; it carries none of the force or subtlety of WH; but never mind that. The Graun has a decent review; and as usual Goodreads has some words.

Life must have been difficult in those days for those who needed to interact with the king or his works; and since he was dictating the religion of the country, that could be almost anyone. HM points this out as Cromwell tries to persuade Harry Percy to testify: previously, he had obliged him to say that he had had nothing to do with Anne and had certainly not contracted any secret understanding with her; now he seeks to force him to reverse, so that Henry could say she was pre-married. Cromwell is presented as excused by only seeking to serve the king; and as having learnt from Wolsey's downfall; but nonetheless the problem in the realm where everyone has to remember whether Mary is today a Princess or a Lady and getting it wrong can be treason is terrible. As before in WH, Henry remains mysterious, but thinking about it now the aura of kingly omni-kingness cannot be right. By which I mean, his excuses for doing things are always turned on his honour; or on what god might mean. They come out so neatly that they could not have come from one man alone, but would have had to come from a coterie (update: or, be traditional?).

A thing I find surprising: Cromwell has no exit plans. No-one had. It doesn't occur to anyone to flee abroad (well, apart from Tyndale, and it doesn't look like he fled abroad, though he fled while abroad, but was got by the Imperials anyway) perhaps because of revenge-on-families if one tried; perhaps because people just didn't think like that. I mean of course that in real life he didn't flee, and the book doesn't describe any plans; it does briefly I think show him considering it. Perhaps it is just that London and the Court were the centre of life, and none of these people could bear to leave it. Sitting quietly contemplative in the wilderness would have taken them out of the stream of history and been equivalent to death.

Irritatingly, HM feels obliged to say "he, Cromwell" a few times; tut tut.

On the delicate matter of whether Anne was actually sleeping around, HM manages to preserve ambiguity: she never says definitively, and neither do her characters. This feels correct.

Why is it good? It is well written, and delightful to read for all that. The subject matter is grand (shades of Thucydides). I think she does a good job of presenting at least one version of how the kingdom was run; not just the day to day business but the direction: how the whims of one man came to distort so much. In that sense, it is anti-monarchical, for all its shades of mysticism about Henry contemplated by Cromwell. And Cromwell's wistful recollection of his dead children, his dead wife, of Christmas past, of incidents from his time in Italy, all fit well.

Family film night: the Matrix

Overall: good. Might even watch again. Wiki.

M suggested we watch this and all concurred; none had seen it before. It's decent: high production values, fast-paced, interesting, decent effects, and not too absurd a storyline.

There are problems: for example, harvesting people for energy is just dumb; it doesn't make sense on any level, and if it did make sense, it would make more sense to do it with cows or rats. But they don't dwell on it, so it's kinda fine. That exit from TM is via phone booths is never really explained, but it's the sort of thing other films have prepared us for so it doesn't grate; but that you can only leave this way does force on you the mysterious conclusion that their "souls" have somehow "entered" TM, whereas it would be more natural for it to be a souped-up 3D VR show, that you can leave any time. But that wouldn't suit the plot at all. Also, The Oracle makes no sense.

In almost all respects the humans and the agents respect the normal rules of reality as portrayed within TM. True, the agents can move instantaneously, but only by taking over people. Otherwise, they run, at perfectly normal speeds. There's never any discussion of "well it's just a software construct, so we ought to be able to break the rules of physics", except in stylised ways: being thrown into concrete walls and breaking them. But never just vanishing (you're a SW construct: why do you have to look like a human being? Why do you have to "reflect" light at all?). This is a thing that pretty well all similar movies and books also feel obliged to accept. Phoenix Cafe makes some attempt to deal with this, not entirely successfully if I recall correctly, and isn't nearly as good as White Queen / Northwind (Goodreads).

Most of the fight scenes kinda work; the one that doesn't really is them in the lobby with dozens of guards against them. What saves that one is that it degenerates into enough dust and rubble flying around. But it doesn't look like them moving quickly enough to avoid the bullets.

Afterwards, we all had a vigorous and interesting discussion of the nature of reality and consciousness. This is all good fun, but doesn't actually matter. See-also Zombies, the movie.

Running a Linux shell on AWS... and more

Yes, another tedious noob post about exciting adventures in AWS. My desire was simple, I wanted a Linux console to run Python so I could play adventofcode. I can run Python on my Windoze box but any number of deeply irritating things then occur, so I abandoned that. I them played with Virtualbox which is nice enough but I had trouble choosing a distro, and then was faced with downloading too much and waiting forever or too little and not having what I wanted. And then I found that setting up "shared folders" was Really Painful and gave up, thinking that it was about time I learn something of AWS anyway.

So I created a (free) account wmconnolley, and there's also a bucket by the same name which you probably can't see, and some credentials, and then "spun up" (as the Kool Kidz say) an instance, and uploaded stuff into the bucket, and worked out that "aws s3 cp s3://wmconnolley/day1-input.txt day1.txt" works, once the credentials are installed, and I'm away. Woot.

My dashboard is here (but I'm pretty sure that if you follow that you'll get to your dashboard).

Just as a check I stopped the thing and restarted it, and my files were still there. But my IP address had changed.

Connect to it with something like ssh -i c:\users\william\.ssh\MyKeyPair.pem ec2-user@18.222.108.197. I think the tutorial I followed was this one.

All this is free. I guess I'm getting an el cheapo machine but I really can't say I've noticed. It tells me it is good practice to shut down the server to save money when I'm not using it, I wonder if I'll remember to, and anyway how much would it cost just to leave it running?

numpy isn't installed by default. pip install numpy works, if you have privilege, so it needs to be sudo pip install numpy.

A website

There's a tutorial on building a website. So I thought I'd try following it. I get http://wmconnolley-mm-bucket.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/. The steps are given there; they're fairly simple. The IDE allows you to use vi.

Book review: Rendezvous with Rama

I've just re-read this for the first time since childhood - at least I don't recall reading it since. Links: wiki, Goodreads; Graun. I won't trouble you with the story since you'll find it there.

As usual this contains spoilers so read no further if you haven't already read the book.

In contrast to Transition, I liked this. It's good old fashioned (literally...) "hard" sci-fi. What it does rather well is keep the mystery going for as long as possible; in that, it's kinda like 2001. The problem with almost all sci-fi is that ultimately there are no answers. Of course there aren't; if there were, it wouldn't be fi (alternatively, there are answers, but they're dull). So the trick for the author is to keep up the sense of wonder for as long as possible. So, ultimately, there are no answers and we never learn what Rama is for or who built it (some people find this dreadfully disappointing, but they're wrong). In a sense the book is just an exploration of what a space-ark might be like from the point of view of the people it was going towards; and Clarke just mechanistically goes through the various steps; but he does it well.

Some niggles: if you find a circular sea in a cylinder and the bank on one side is much higher than the other side then the very first thing that will occur to you is that the high side is where the engines are, especially if there's a six km spike pointing out from that end. It's kinda necessary for the story that this isn't realised for a bit, I guess for the non-physics-competent readers, but it annoys somewhat (having just posed the question to E it turns out that she couldn't think of the answer). Exploration: they walk everywhere; well, they didn't bring bicycles. But then when it's necessary to cross the sea they have a wheeled cart to transport the raft materials, and an electric engine for the boat (where did they get the propeller from?). So the idea that they wouldn't have constructed some kind of powered cart seems implausible. Also, I got the idea about jumping into the sea, after some thought.

The idea that Rama was detected so late now seems rather implausible; I suspect even our level of tech would probably see it way out. But, I forgive that, as it very nicely leads to there being only one ship able to get to it, and we're spared all kinds of tedious complications that would have added nothing to the story. Others note that it's implausible that they wouldn't have done metallurgical analysis of the outside, and that's true, but on the other hand that too would have added very little to the story. It's also implausible that they wouldn't have got some kind of powered flight going. Towards the end, in the "missile" episode, they suddenly have a space scooter. Surely they would have disassembled that, taken it through the air locks, and used it inside to get to the South Pole  much earlier.

There's an implausible tech-level mixup I think. For most of the book Rama is mysterious, but doing physically obvious and comprehensible things: moving in accord with the laws of physics, taking 200 kyrs to move between stars. But then suddenly at the end it starts to acquire new powers: a reactionless drive, the ability to produce a vast mirror shield, and affect the sun. This seems curiously unnecessary. If you have that level of physics tech then the entire idea of a generation ship starts to look less plausible.

Lastly, this huge mysterious thing that's travelled for 200 kyr and presumably intends to voyage much further is nearly nuked by the Mercurians. There's no hint that the skin is nuke-proof, and the nuke-not-going-off is entirely contingent, so this was somewhat careless of the builders. And it becomes clear that anything this big and predictable is actually rather vulnerable. In which case not-very-much-thought points out some counter measures that you'd take: don't allow anything to approach carefully. In the book, Rama kinda springs to life and warms up as it goes around the sun, but really there's no reason automatic systems wouldn't wake up somewhat earlier (the book maintains for as long as possible the uncertainty about whether the things are alive, biological, or robotic; and to be fair in those far off days computing power was weak; but, still). Like, outside Neptune's orbit. And you'd scan the radio spectrum and... what? Know that there were people there? And you'd shoot down - or at the very least attempt to warn off - anything approaching. Just trusting that all would go well is not believeable. You'd also in all probability have sent ahead a swarm of probes, and so on.

Ah, and lastly, it seems unlikely that it would spend 200 kyr voyaging to the sun just in order to use it for a course correction/ boost; surely there would have been somewhere nearer to aim at. I'm not sure why he felt it necessary to make it so long; perhaps just to increase the sense of awe. Oh, and one very last thing, while it's most efficient to do boosts near a gravity well with a conventional reaction drive, I'm not at all sure that would be true with the Raman non-Newtonian drive. Sadly the book doesn't explore this point (Rama instead sucks up some sun material, so it does have another reason for getting close).

Another thought added later: one reason the book is fun is that effectively it's a puzzle book; a bit like a murder-mystery, but with (physics) puzzles throughout, like the cliff; it is possible to reason about the situation (even when it goes wrong). One reason that books like Transition disappoint is that they can't be thought about or reasoned about, because the plot twists are arbitrary.