It's harder to decide if a heretical inventor—one who is no ordinary fool—isn't still fooling himself. This person is infectiously earnest in his belief that he has made a working, genuinely anomalous device. He will have spent years lavishing attention on it, building many versions, and will have refined it into a work of art that actually spins or pushes or generates power in a clean, repeatable way. It's also harder because guys like this tend to be guys like you. Inventive, clever, good with their hands, solid education, and you share a common interest in alternate views. You find yourself liking them and pulling for them on that basis alone, hoping that they really have that genuine, science-confounding article.
Nevertheless, odds are that the heretical inventor, who honestly believes that he has something—even when he can properly use test equipment and can build a pretty machine—really doesn't.
2.) Don't fool yourself into thinking you're not a fool yourself.
Really clever frauds have degrees and maybe a patent or two to their names. So too, sometimes, do fools. You must bear in mind while investigating that the process is often less about them and their claims than it is about you and what you know, can do, and have experience with. I went to Infinite Energy because I wanted to find weird things working as claimed. This made it extra important to study up on topics like, "How does this piece of test equipment actually work?" in addition to how to use it. And, "What kinds of phenomena is it unsuited for measuring?" especially in cases where it will still give readings that look legitimate.
Due-diligence demanded that I learn all I could about other weird devices that, however eldritch and esoteric, did not violate known science even though they appeared to. Consider the following scenario. Everyone knows how easy it is to make an electromagnet that will pick up a steel washer, even if few know how to make an electromagnet that will pick up an aluminum one (which is almost as easy). A scammer could have come to us with a working version of this latter magnet and a crock of convincing bullshit, and if I'd never heard of it before, he would likely have walked away with a significant development grant. By the time our story about the "anomalous arbitrary metal magnet" appeared in print, and the letters arrived from those readers who knew we'd been had, our scammer would have disappeared. Fortunately, no episode like this happened on my watch, but I've seen other odd gizmos since then that easily could have fooled me.
You must know the relevant accepted science yourself, in detail, before you can evaluate the ideas of the heretic. And you must never take the heretic's word for it on what that accepted science is. Do your own homework. I found out (the hard way) that many heretical researchers, even those with doctorates, often lack a clear understanding of what the accepted view really is: what it says and doesn't say and where the open questions lay. If you want some interesting reading, delve into the history of interpretations of the "twin paradox" from special relativity. The mere fact of a long history of divergence of opinion on the matter speaks volumes.
You also need to know your own weaknesses and blind spots. Not just weaknesses like rusty math skills or only one chemistry class from decades ago in your background, but weaknesses for, and hence blind spots toward, specific types of heresies and machines. For example, that aluminum magnet could have fooled me because electromagnetic gizmos float my boat. However, even though I worked for Infinite Energy, which was primarily a "cold fusion" advocacy magazine, I had no blind spot for cold fusion. I thought there was "something to it" and that it was worth investigating, of course. But I was certain that getting the effect to appear reliably was a complex problem in materials and condensed matter physics, which required expertise and a ton of work to do right, work which we were in no position to do.
3.) You must get your hands dirty.
There's no point in trying to understand and evaluate heretical machines if you can't, at least potentially, build one yourself. Though it is doubtful that you could duplicate a device an inventor has spent years working on, you can certainly approximate it, or parts of it, and by so doing get a "feel" for how it works. Nothing was ever as educational for me as building a slew of variants of Marinov motors (see my columns from February and April 1999, and June 2008). Only in that way did I come to understand how it really worked, and fully appreciate why it worked that way. The process was also invaluable in helping me understand just how wrong "valid looking" criticism done from an armchair can be. Hell, no day in my lab could be considered successful if I didn't invalidate at least one of my own armchair-conjured ideas from the night before.
I am strident about this principle because it is the most personal to me. While working for the magazine, I constructed a Marinovesque motor of my own design. The shell and stator form was a disposable coffee cup, chosen because of shape, weight, and availability. I called it the "cup motor." When suspended from above on a single monofilament line and turned on—though crude in construction and jerky in performance—it behaved in the hoped-for anomalous way, like the enigmatic motor I described in my last published short story ("Nova Terra," Analog, January/February 2005 ). I expected to build an improved version that would be presentable, run smoothly, and better show the effect. Which meant doing what? With so many variables involved and my understanding of it far from mature (not to mention the overload of other unrelated work on my plate), it made no sense to "bend tin" for an improved version until I was confident that the changes I made would in fact be improvements.
To make a long, bitter story short, I never made them another one. After I was fired, the folks at Infinite Energy, unwilling to soil their own hands with it, paid someone skilled in the art of motor-making to build an improved version. It didn't work right. Despite the fact that I had explained, numerous times and in person with a chalkboard, exactly why the improved version would not be easy to execute, they ignored or forgot what I told them. Their clean hands had left them unequipped to appreciate my words and reports. Their guy produced a nice little motor that behaved like an ordinary motor, which they then "tested," and subsequently concluded that I never knew what I was talking about. It being in my own best interest to keep my mouth shut, I never told them how they screwed up.
If you're curious about where they went wrong, here's a hint. Their "improved" motor had three hundred windings on the stator. My original had ten. The ideal version would have had one, maybe two.
This column and the earlier ones barely scrape the surface of what I learned in those days. I'll tell more. You may be wondering if I was ever fortunate enough to come across "the real deal," a heretical inventor with a heretical device (or two) that worked as claimed. The short answer is, "Why, yes; yes, I did."
* * *
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY
Don Sakers | 2303 words
Mars has been a favorite subject of science fiction since before there was science fiction.
As early as the sixteenth century, scientist-philosophers such as Johannes Kepler and Emanuel Swedenborg wrote about journeys to Mars. It wasn't until Schiaparelli's observations, during the so-called "Great Opposition" of 1877, that awareness of Mars began to spread in popular fiction. Percy Greg's Across the Zodiac (1880), perhaps the first modern space-travel novel, tells of a trip to the Red Planet and an encounter with its small inhabitants (who refuse to believe that their visitor is from Earth, since life on other worlds is patently impossible). Journey to Mars by Gustavus W. Pope (1894) seems to be a precursor of things to come: a shipwrecked Navy man is kidnapped and taken to a Mars populated by three races of humanoids who live in a feudal society that nevertheless is technologically advanced. Pope's hero Frederick Hamilton falls in love with Princess Suhlamia and strives to save the Martians from destruction. In the end, he returns to Earth with his Martian bride. In the next book, the happy couple goes to Venus.
We're all familiar with H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds (1898), but perhaps less so with its immediate (unauthorized) sequel by Garrett P. Serviss, Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898), in which Edison led an expedition to wipe
out the Martians.
Gullivar of Mars (Edwin L. Arnold, 1905) was another romantic story of a single Earthman on Mars. In 1909 French author Gustave Le Rouge brought us a novel whose theme would be right at home on today's bookshelves: Le prisonnier de la planète Mars (Vampires of Mars). And of course there was A Princess of Mars (1912) and its many sequels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which brought the "planetary romance" fashion to science fiction.
The legendary Stanley G. Weinbaum wrote "A Martian Odyssey" (Wonder Stories, July 1934), arguably the first story to feature a truly alien being. Over on the literary side, C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet (1938) was a philosophical answer to H.G. Wells and showed peaceful Martians of several species living in harmony with one another.
Ray Bradbury addressed a similar theme in The Martian Chronicles (1950), turning Wells on his head by showing Martians corrupted and destroyed by the arrival of humans from Earth.
The colonization of Mars took hold of science fiction's imagination in the 1930s, and never really let go. Until the era of space probes, we continued to read of noble Martians haunting the ruins of ancient cities on the banks of drying canals. Just about every SF writer of the time wrote about Mars. Notable examples included Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein (1949), "Omnilingual" by H. Beam Piper ( Astounding, February 1957), The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke (1951), Lost Race of Mars by Robert Silverberg (1960), and "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" by Roger Zelazny ( F&SF, November 1963).
Beginning in 1965, the Mariner probes returned spectacular results that changed our perception of Mars, with huge impact on science fiction. It soon became clear that there were no canals, no ancient cities, no intelligent inhabitants at all—and that the environment of Mars was more hostile than we thought.
Martian colonization was still the name of the game, but the technological challenges were greater. Mars stories, by and large, moved into the nuts-and-bolts realm of hard SF. The notion of terraforming Mars was in the air, and several authors riffed on that theme.
Major appearances of Mars in science fiction included Frederick Pohl's Man Plus (1976); Gordon R. Dickson's The Far Call (1978); Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996); Ben Bova's Mars books (beginning in 1992); William K. Hartman's Mars Underground (1997); White Mars by Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose (1999); Geoffrey A. Landis's Mars Crossing (2000); and John Barnes's The Sky So Big and Black (2002).
Mars has always been popular in film; Thomas Edison actually produced a 1910 silent film called A Trip to Mars. Other notable Mars films include Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), the awful yet ever-popular Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (also 1964), Mars Needs Women (1967), "The Martian Chronicles" TV miniseries (1980), Total Recall (1990), and a trio of unrelated Mars movies in 2000/2001: Mission to Mars, Red Planet, and Ghosts of Mars.
On television, Mars was visited frequently by "Doctor Who," appeared on "The Twilight Zone," and played major roles in "Babylon 5" and "Futurama." Of the dozens of Martians who have appeared on TV, special mention must be made of Ray Walston's "My Favorite Martian" (1963-66) and Bugs Bunny's nemesis Marvin the Martian.
Mars, Inc.: The Billionaire's Club
Ben Bova
Baen, 240 pages, $25.00 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3934-6
Genre: Mars
Before the Apollo Project, science fiction generally assumed that space travel would be accomplished by business and industry, not government. Government played a support role. Only when there were enough people in space to govern, did government step in— usually in the role of police or military.
Robert A. Heinlein's 1950 novelette "The Man Who Sold the Moon" epitomized this view with the story of billionaire Delos D. Harriman and his efforts to finance and launch the first expedition to the Moon.
Now Ben Bova—who has been writing about Mars longer than just about any other living SF writer—pays homage to Heinlein's story with a twenty-first century tale of a billionaire determined to launch the first trip to Mars.
Art Thrasher, billionaire CEO of Thrasher Digital, is a man with a dream: to see humans on Mars. Angered and disgusted by continuing budget cuts to NASA, he conceives of a different way to fund the effort: a billionaire's club. Members would pledge a billion dollars a year to the Mars mission, as long as it takes to get boots on Martian ground. He figures that a group of about twenty could make the project a success.
Of course, convincing twenty billionaires (as well as their assorted boards of directors) to commit to his plan isn't going to be easy. It will take every ounce of charm, persuasiveness, guile, and sex appeal Thrasher possesses.
And signing up the backers is just the first step; there are all the complications of the Mars mission itself—finding and hiring the best personnel, overcoming legal and social barriers, building infrastructure... and of course there's opposition. From bureaucrats to politicians to oil barons, a lot of people have reasons to stand in Thrasher's way. Some of them are even capable of murder....
Mars, Inc. is one of those curious books that stands on the boundary between SF and mundane fiction. The technology is pretty much all off-the-shelf, primarily virtual reality and nuclear propulsion. While perfectly enjoyable as an SF book (could Bova write anything that wasn't enjoyable?), Mars, Inc. has that torn-from-the-headlines vibe that's obviously intended for a larger audience. As I write this, real-life billionaire Elon Musk is busy advocating his plan for a Martian colony. It's very tempting to read Mars, Inc. as an inspirational tale for all involved in such private-sector endeavors.
One of the fun games to play with this book is to identify some of the public figures who appear in disguise: the Koch brothers and certain Walmart heirs leap off the page, but there are many others.
So what's (excuse the term) the bottom line? Mars, Inc. has inspiration, excitement, thrills, romance, a dash of satire—and it's a good, fun read solidly in the Analog tradition.
Ghost Spin
Chris Moriarty
Del Rey, 555 pages, $16.00 (trade paperback)
Kindle, Nook: $9.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-553-38494-9
Genre: Far Future/Clarke's Law, Transhuman SF
Series: Catherine Li 3
In 2003 Chris Moriarty's Spin State introduced us to UN Peacekeeper Catherine Li and her far-future world of star-spanning civilizations and transhuman tech. Li is transhuman, with her memory backed up and various abilities enhanced. She's also a brilliant detective and master troubleshooter in a vast and largely lawless universe. Li's partner is Cohen, an AI with multiple lifetimes of experience across many host bodies. Together, the two fight the clone-led Syndicate, the major opponent of the UN.
In Spin Control (2006), Li and Cohen return. Expelled from the Peacekeepers, the pair is involved with the Artificial Life Emancipation Front, and deal with rogue clones and genetic weapons.
Now Chris Moriarty has returned to Catherine Li, with her most difficult assignment yet.
The quantum teleportation network that knits together the galaxy is failing. Colonies, cut off from civilization, are in danger. The answer seems to lay in a strange region of space called the Drift. There, faster-than-light travel is still possible, if dangerous.
Amid growing chaos, everyone heads to the Drift: UN, Syndicate, free mercenaries, pirates, and other unsavory characters. Cohen, leaving Li behind, dives into the Drift—and dies.
Li heads off to investigate, and finds that Cohen's death has left fragments of himself— ghosts—all over the Drift. Some are helpful, some hostile, some utterly mad. One of them possibly carries the secret that Cohen died for, the secret that could save humanity.
Trouble is, others are after Cohen's various ghosts. Some want to use them, some want to be rid of them, and one shadowy presence wants to eliminate them all... whatever the cost.
Like the previous two books, Ghost Spin is a heady experience of total immersion in a strange and wonderful universe. If you're not familiar with the series, it may take a fe
w chapters to get your bearings—but the experience is worth it.
On the Razor's Edge
Michael Flynn
Tor, 352 pages, $25.99 (hardcover)
iBooks, Nook: $12.99; Kindle: $11.04 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3480-0
Genre: Space Opera
Speaking of total immersion in strange and wonderful universes....
The January Dancer (2008) introduced Michael Flynn's League/Confederacy universe—millennia in the future, the United League of the Periphery and the rival Confederacy of Central Worlds have for lifetimes been locked in an interstellar cold war called the Long Game. The agents of the two— Hounds and Shadows—contend with each other across a starscape of shifting alliances, proxy wars, espionage, double and triple agents, sabotage, betrayal, and assassination.
In a story that continued through the next two books— Up Jim River (2010) and In the Lion's Mouth (2012)—readers have followed the course of Hound Bridget ban, ex-Shadow Donovan buigh, and their harper daughter Mearana as they struggled to navigate both the Long Game and a deadly civil war within the Shadow organization.
Now it's all come down to this: Donovan buigh, captive of rebels, is taken to Old Terra, to the Secret City where the Shadows rule. Donovan has information that will allow the rebels to take the City, and the rebels are perfectly willing to use torture to get it out of him.
Meanwhile, Mearana has been kidnapped by the treacherous Shadow Ravn Olafsdattr. Bridget buigh puts together a pack of Hounds for a rescue mission—while knowing that this is exactly what Ravn wants her to do.
All the pieces are on the board, all the players are in the game, the long struggle is at last coming to an end... and the stakes are very personal. But one thing is sure in this universe: nothing is what it seems.
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