A pretty good sf story

[nancylebov]

Mine the Primes by Julian Todd. It's a cross between environmentalism and Atlas Shrugged-- not the sort of thing I'd expect to work, but it does.

It came up in a discussion at yhlee's about how much science you need to write science fiction.

I'm really not sure-- the problem may be that some authors are thrown off-balance by bad science or history or whatever. There are certainly stories that work very well for readers in spite of bad science or other nonsense. 1984_ has been a very useful horror story for the intelligentsia even if it doesn't make sense that O'Brian would put so much work into into breaking Winston. _Dune_ works nicely even though the still suits wouldn't. (They don't seem to have any way of getting rid of heat.) The still suits work very well as a way of underlining the scarcity of water.

I'm very fond of the premise of "Mine the Primes", but it's definitely a shiver-down-the-spine collision of coolness with only the smallest homeopathic nibble of truth.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Some spoilerish points. Did the narrator even try to get political influence? It didn't sound as though he did, though maybe it's just that he wasn't good at it and couldn't see any way to get better.

Does anyone think about the implications for other species of sucking all the power out of the large primes? I could see people writing it off because they aren't even sure the other species exist, or because if they don't care about what happens to other people, they certainly aren't going to care about hypothetical aliens, or because they think it's a gain for security if prime power is used up before aliens get to it.

Prime power would have been burnt out even faster if people used it wars, but I suppose that would have made the story too grim.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the sandworms' only food their own young? I'm pretty sure that doesn't work ecologically. :>)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

http://dunepedia.wetpaint.com/page/Sandworm

It would seem that the life cycle of sandworms starts with sandplankton, so maybe there's photosynthesis involved.

However, I'd forgotten that the reason Arrakis is so dry is that the sandtrout have encysted all the water on Arrakis. Even if it started as a relatively dry planet, that's a *lot* of water. Why isn't breaking into sandtrout reserves the highest priority?

[avram]

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, we don't know how common rebels like Winston and Julia are. We also don't know if the effort O'Brien put into breaking Winston is typical. As a Minitru editor, Winston may have been unusually resistant to Party propaganda.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Both reasonable, though I'm not sure how much Orwell implies that people haven't really changed, and the restrictions people live under are so severe that I'd expect a lot of rebels like Julia, even if relatively few like Winston.