A Tale of Two Writers

One of the sci-fi writers I read, Richard Morgan, raises some interesting questions for me. His pony is the idea of re-sleeving. A human body is easily re-placed, it is a sleeve. The important part of a human is the 'stack', an implanted hardware device that contains a back-up copy of the Self of any human.

Thus, in Morgan's world, you can be re-implanted, or 're-sleeved' as another gender, or in a synthetic body, a cloned body, a specially enhanced body, the options are great.

But say you had yourself cloned. Presumably you could use a copy of your own body at the optimal point in its life, and potentially un-poisoned by the myriad little abuses we inflict upon the vessels of our being.

Or maybe, in replication, we might incorporate a fatal flaw that wasn't there before.
Morgan is a really good writer. He's not an easy read, he uses all sorts of made-up words and his subject matter is sometimes hard to stomach. Were he NOT such a good writer, I can see that this could be distracting, whereas in fact it flows well.

I have just finished a book by another sci-fi writer that I like, Ben Bova.
Bova writes about the colonisation and exploitation of the solar system and the potential of going beyond. His ideas and the exploration of them are fascinating, but he really is not a good writer, and I must admit, that although I like his books, the writing itself does interfere with the flow.
For example, Bova describes what people wear, but all this does is to convey the idea that in the future we will be wearing what people wore in the 1950s. The dialogue is stilted, and in the most recent book I read, the bad guy could easily have been one of the evil Arabs out of a Tintin story.
Bova's character also swear unconvincingly and his dialogues in general are often equally unconvincing. It is a pity, but it is true that it doesn't stop me either buying or reading his books.

So Pakistan is a powder keg. It's difficult to know what would be a good outcome. President Musharraf has been an ally against Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, but he has also failed to silence Islamic militants or has he succeeded in keeping them from rising up ?
And he has been promising an election for the past five years.
It was wonderful to see Ms Bhutto riding back into Islamabad in a car with a rather random hole in the roof, smiling at happy, rose-petal throwing throngs. Who couldn't think of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on an ass, people strewing his way with palms.
But it's not just about ruling Pakistan, it's about keeping the people of Pakistan free, keeping it secular and resisting the evil forces who mis-represent the nation's main religion.

There is a superbly written and well-balanced article in today's Guardian about the dilemma faced by Metropolitan Police Chief Ian Blair, over the wrongful shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes. He makes all the points and gets it spot on. It is good to question, good to probe even, but if we want the police to do their job, to protect us, we must stop treating those who make mistakes in good faith like criminals. And frankly, the same goes for our soldiers.
Any of us, doing any job at all, taking all the care in the world, can make mistakes and especially in emergency situations.
This is not the same as someone doing a shoddy job under ideal circumstances.
And if you treat good officers like criminals, then they will stop doing a good job.
For pity's sake, let's be British about this.

Tonight, Kevin and I are going to the winter celebration of an Indian company that supplies his with electronics. You might say it's for Divali, but they couldn't possibly since that would be to make a company do a religious one.
In any case, it was fun last time. Good food and dancing to Bhangra and the host company are a nice bunch of people.