Vegetable samosas from the street stall, mince pie from a local bakery and coffee for lunch and another crack at this story which has an sf plot idea:
"The perfect dielectric."
- in common with another early story that we have just read, "Snowball."
(Meanwhile, in town, I have bought a hardback Complete Sherlock Holmes which will be wrapped and deposited under a Christmas tree.)
If the space station for the secret project had been constructed using valuable materials ferried up from Earth and if the expensive equipment needed for the project had been sent up after it, then this would have required a massive governmental bureaucratic exercise that it would have been impossible to conceal from subversive spies so instead the station has been improvised around a wrecked freighter that had fallen into a skewed orbit.
When weapons are so cheap and simple that anyone can make and use them, governments are loose whereas, when weapons become expensive - like (obviously) atom bombs and missiles - , governments are powerful. Security suspects that a cheap and easy "equalizer" is technologically imminent and wants to develop it first. Hence, the secret project. This "equalizer" concept is common to Poul Anderson's "Snowball," "Security" and Psychotechnic History.
The paragraph that we are about to read next summarizes the significance of superior deielectrics and energy storage, as in "Snowball": all aspects of Poul Anderson's imagiverse.
10 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
That "equalizer" idea was used by other SF writers as well, such as A.E. van Voght's "The Weapons Shops of Isher."
Btw, Anderson moved away from simplistic ideas about cheap easily accessible weapons being a check on tyranny. He wrote in one of his letters to me that wide distribution of small arms are not going to be of much use against heavy weapons.
Merry Christmas! Sean
The "equalizer" concept was key to the plot of a later Anderson story "Shield".
Kaor, Jim!
I don't think that equalizer concept applies to SHIELD. The device invented in that story created a kind of force field around anyone holding it, making it impossible for his enemies to attack him. And those enemies could starve him into surrendering if they were patient. The "shield" was defensive, not offensive.
Merry Christmas! Sean
Making defense easier for the little guy is an equalizer too. If there are *many* rebellious people each with their own shield, those enemies can't afford to be patient about starving out each rebel.
Jim: though they could just pour concrete around him and drop him in the ocean.
Kaor, Jim and Mr. Stirling!
Jim: Another weakness I thought of was this: if we had to we could survive a long time inside that shield on short rations. But lack of water would soon force anyone besieged in a shield to surrender far more quickly.
Mr. Stirling: Ha! That was grimly amusing, just pour cement around an enemy inside a force shield and dump him in the ocean. Problem solved!
Happy New Year! Sean
Yes. The shield doesn't make people inside it *invulnerable*, it just makes them *harder* to hurt. So a tyrannical government can easily take out one rebel with a shield. If a few percent of the population want to defy that government & have shields, taking them all out would likely exceed the capabilities of that government. So the equalization effect of the shield matters.
Kaor, Jim!
Possibly, despite me still having doubts such a shield would be truly effective.
Happy New Year! Sean
Of course, if you decreased the efficacy of a government's force, you'd be opening the road to chaos and blood-feuds.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
A good point. Another reason to be cautious about protective force shields. Remember the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Happy New Year! Sean
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