Quantum Rocketry

Elantris is Brandon Sanderon’s debut fantasy novel. It has a blurb from Orson Scott Card on its cover, to the gist that this is the finest fantasy in who knows long to catch Card’s notice. As my sister put it, this author must have died when he got that.

It’s an impressive debut, and certainly only of the more imaginative fantasies I’ve read. I really enjoy it when an author is able to construct a self-consistent, concrete world without falling into the overused Tolkeinian tropes. (You can’t see it, but right now I’m staring pointedly at every Vulcan-eared archer elf and bearded miner dwarf that has ever existed ever.) It certainly borrows from other fantasy mainstays, and it has a lot of commonality with some other things I’ve seen - Sabriel and its sequels, the Edeard storyline of Peter Hamilton’s Void Trilogy, even A Game of Thrones (though I actually like the characters in Elantris) - but Elantris is constructed in a very unique way.

The plot takes place in a land where the eponymous city was once the seat of magical powers that let its citizens live however they pleased, without worrying about any basic necessities or threat of invasion. A key aspect of the city’s magic was that only Elantrians could perform it – but anyone, anywhere in the kingdom, could suddenly find themselves struck by the transformation into an Elantrian. The culture of the kingdom is simultaneously elitist and egalitarian, and no one goes hungry or suffers from illness. And so life goes on, until one day a disaster strips the Elantrians of their power and turns the city, along with all its magical people, into decaying ruins. The remaining population of the kingdom throws down their now-impotent rulers and locks them all within Elantris’ walls, and the mercantile class become robber barons to impose their own feudal rule on the kingdom. Still…anyone, anytime can be struck by the transformation – but now they are shunned, despised, and imprisoned inside the fallen city.

The novel follows three key characters ten years after the disaster takes place. Raoden, popular heir to the new throne of the kingdom, finds himself turned into an Elantrian and immediately begins to unravel the mysteries surrounding the ruin after his father tosses him into the city. Sarene, a twist on the classic tomboy princess, is en route from another kingdom to join Prince Raoden in a political marriage when his transformation hits; with him declared dead, the treaty governing the kingdoms’ alliance makes their marriage binding as she remains ignorant of his true fate. She must get to know her new homeland while politically maneuvering to safeguard both kingdoms – as the alliance was an important move to present a united front against a third aggressor nation. Meanwhile, Hrathen, a high priest of that third nation, has quietly infiltrated the kingdom and seeks to convert its populace to his religion before his Emperor loses patience and decides to destroy them all.

A word of warning: minor spoilers follow. But I promise that they are tiny.

One of the things I particularly liked about this novel is how self-consistent the mechanism for doing Elantrian magic is. This magic is not vaguely defined – nobody “searches out with their feelings,” nobody “embraces the power rushing through them,” nobody practices the perfect flick of their magic wand. After reading this book, I realized that now I know how to do Elantrian magic, if I lived in this world. Going a step further, we readers actually get to see how research into magic would work in Elantris – that is, how to discover and construct new spells. It’s a very open-ended system, and very specifically defined, lending this fantasy an air of….well, perhaps “realism” isn’t the right word, so let’s go with “concreteness.” All this isn’t frivolous: the basis for and technique of Elantrian magic becomes a major plot point. And with us readers given the tools to follow along, I found myself able to solve the puzzle of Elantris before the characters did. (Fortunately, they were not very far behind!)

In fact, I’d have to say that this is one of the most economical novels I’ve read: Sanderson introduces very little into the book that doesn’t become important in some way or another. This is generally good, but at the same time, sometimes it makes events in the plot seem a little too easy to see coming. Of course the prince and princess eventually get together; of course the high priest’s overzealous acolyte causes his downfall; of course the autistic child we briefly meet has a super-important role to play in the book’s climax. This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of twists that are surprising – there are – or characters who die tragic deaths – there are those, too – or even unexpected relationships that develop – that also happens. It’s kind of amazing just how many events got packed into this book, for its relatively small size. I think I enjoyed the book more for being able to piece things together on my own: in a way, that proves the logic and consistency underlying Sanderson’s world and shows that his few basic principles go a lot further to move the plot along than a sudden “aha, reader! I bet you weren’t expecting me to throw THIS at you!” sort of forced “twist.”

Sanderson creates a colorful cast of secondary characters, but for the most part he seems to enjoy exploring the relationships that develop between them more than he likes looking at how the characters might evolve. In the cases of Sarene and Raoden, in particular, the plot is an affirmation of being true to oneself in the face of an adverse situation or heckling from others. They come out of their experiences richer, but that is more because they shaped the world around them than the reverse. Hrathen, though, is a much more interesting case: over the course of the plot we see him struggle with his faith in an attempt to reconcile its “convert or die” mentality with his personal belief that he is genuinely trying to help the people of the kingdom. The particular manner of his fall and transformation at the climax is a little surprising, yet makes perfect sense – like much of this book. Sadly, Hrathen’s part in the climax of the plot is also the subject of the novel’s most moralizing speechifying; Sanderson manages to stop just after making his point, though, before he gets overbearing.

The author closes Elantris not with a complete triumph of good over evil, but with the balance of power restored. Elantris leaves the door wide open for a sequel, with antagonists clearly still extant in Sanderson’s world and new facets of Elantrian (or other) magic yet to be learned. I will be happy to find out what those facets are when I can. For now, though, Elantris is a fine standalone novel that provides a fresh look at a lot of fantasy themes in a thoroughly imagined universe.

It’s interesting to re-read a book that made a huge impression on me the first time around. Some of them seem less exciting, while some hold up amazingly well upon multiple reads. (The best example I can think of for the latter case: Dune. Despite identifying the traitorous character by name on page 28, before we ever set foot on the eponymous planet, Herbert still surprised me with the betrayal…and when I re-read the book six months later, it happened again. I was getting all, “Aha! The Atreides are figuring it out! Duke Leto has a chance, maybe he’ll get away this time oh NOOOOOOOO” but I digress.)

The first time I read C. S. Friedman’s In Conquest Born, I was incredibly impressed. I immediately classed the book as one of my favorite science fiction novels. On my mental tally, it went right up there with Dune.

The novel explores the kinds of societies and personalities that might evolve in an environment of endless conflict. Two interstellar nations, the Azean Star Empire and the Braxin Holding, have been locked in a galactic-scale war for such a long time that, though the original antagonism is recorded, none of the combatants really care why the war started in the first place. The war has become a way of life for both sides, and both cultures have evolved along parallel – but mutually exclusive – courses in response to the war and to each other. The Azeans, determined to make themselves into the perfect fighting race, have started genetically engineering themselves – gunning not just for a specific “ideal” phenotype but for telepathic abilities, which the Braxins specifically abhor. The elitist Braxaná rulers of the Holding sought to preserve, by all the means at their disposal, the ancient warrior culture that first brought them to successful dominance over the other tribes of their planet; they hope that their traditions and ideals will carry them to victory in future conflicts as well. As Zatar puts the distinction between Empire and Holding: “While your people developed Civilization, we developed Man.”

In that environment, both nations accidentally produce a representative who embodies everything their culture has been evolving towards. The first half of the novel chronicles the formative years for Anzha lyu Mitethe, in Azea, and Zatar of the Braxaná. They both become renowned commanders in the Endless War. At almost the exact midpoint of the book, they meet each other in a room – and in the second half, the galactic war becomes an obsessive personal vendetta for both characters. They seek to manipulate their societies’ political and military goals towards their personal objective of destroying their counterpart.

The story is both epic and intimate, with references to more than enough planets, cultures, species, and events to establish a credible universe. Like Friedman’s other science fiction, major themes include self-discovery, the interplay of sexuality and power, and descriptions of characters and cultures that are neither fully good or evil.

Maddeningly, Conquest was Friedman’s first novel and not only did she send the manuscript to a publisher unsolicited, but that publisher accepted it.

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On this 40th anniversary of his launch to the Moon, Buzz Aldrin wrote an excellent opinion piece in today’s Washington post. (Speaking of the anniversary, check out the HD restored videos of the landing on NASA’s web site!) Reading it motivated me to go to the Augustine Commission‘s web site and leave them the following comment:

I have had dreams of space ever since I can remember, and grew up watching documentaries about the space program of the 1960′s. Now, I am pursuing a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering – and am working at NASA JSC this summer. I just turned 25 years old.

In my opinion, my generation has lost the focus on science and exploration – but we have more of a fixation on the latest and greatest high-tech gadgetry than anyone before us. We line up to get new smartphones and mp3 players, and then line up again to get the very latest model when it’s released. We are focused on the “new.” To us, who grew up with the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and the legacy of Apollo, the Constellation program does not look “new.” We look at the plans for Orion, Altair, and Ares, and think, “If the mission of NASA is to go to the Moon, why don’t we just dust off the old blueprints for the Saturn V and Apollo CM/LM and get there in just as long as it takes to build those things, instead of by 2020?” My generation has grown up seeing an ever-shorter development cycle on high-tech products. This leads us to wonder how getting *back* to the Moon from our current Shuttle/ISS position is going to take more than a decade, when in the social tumult and limited technology of the 1960′s America went from no human spaceflight to landing men on the Moon in less than a decade. We want to see something NEW, and we want to see if SOON. Something that looks like technology has evolved from the Apollo, Space Shuttle, and ISS stepping-stones rather than backpedaling from Shuttle and ISS. To us, that evolution looks like it is much more like SpaceShipOne than Orion.

If I may be so bold as to offer a suggested solution, I would say that, first, NASA needs a strategic focus on doing something obviously new, something that obviously leverages the latest technologies, something with obvious returns to our lives on Earth. NASA should be pioneering new technologies and actively exploring the Solar System. To me, this means human colonization of Mars, with all the development for a self-sustaining habitat and all the spinoffs to green high tech that entails. My generation is ever more concerned about social justice, energy policy, efficiency, and climate change; and given the similar challenges facing manned spacecraft, this is a perfect opportunity for NASA. In today’s Washington Post, Buzz Aldrin articulates a case for Martian exploration under a Unified Space Vision far better than I could: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/15/AR2009071502940.html

Second, NASA needs to look to new technologies and techniques in accomplishing its goals. Something experimental, something with a high rate of return. It would be fine if it requires a higher up-front investment if it lowers costs in the long term, unlike the Constellation architecture. To that end, I think funding should be restored to NASA programs developing next-generation lifting-body reusable spacecraft rather than capsule spacecraft. NASA needs to show that it can do more than what Scaled Composites did with a $20 million budget. The next-generation spacecraft could even leverage existing Constellation development by using Ares rockets and Shuttle boosters to achieve orbit. The focus should be on correcting the expenses and inefficiencies of the Space Shuttle, not entirely abandoning the architecture of that highly capable spacecraft.

Thank you.

If you are similarly motivated to support the space program and get ourselves kicked up out of low-Earth orbit, leave a comment yourself.

It is definitely beyond the scope of the Commission to designate a specific technical solution, but I had to throw in a plug for my favorite next-gen spacecraft idea. The concept comes from, again, Buzz Aldrin, and I first read about it in his novel The Return, which I picked up at a recent Ithaca library book sale. The basic idea is this:

Take two or three Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters. Modify the SRBs into lifting bodies, put little wings on them, or change the parachutes to paragliders. Then leverage existing UAV technology for all its worth to turn the SRBs into “flyback boosters” that return automatically to their launch site, where they can immediately go into refurbishment between flights. Voila: no ocean recovery means instant savings.

Now take those two or three flyback boosters and put them on something like an existing Atlas V/Centaur booster. (I favor using the Ares design here.) This liquid-fueled booster would be expendable, and provide sustained thrust through the second stage to get the payload into orbit. Of course, the payload could be much bigger than a typical Atlas V payload, such as MRO, thanks to the additional SRB-derived boosters.

Finally, what goes on top of this 2 1/2 stage booster? A manned spaceraft that’s half Space Shuttle and half SpaceShipOne. It would be a craft purely for orbital and reentry operations, so it needn’t be as large as the Shuttle, which incudes powerful main engines for the ascent to orbit. This craft could probably fit a small crew compartment and cargo bay along with an orbital maneuvering system; however, there’s a lot of sense to having a separate crewed version and cargo version. The key thing is that the aerodynamics of the spaceraft body need to be designed with a nice, smooth reentry in mind, and allow the craft to be piloted back to an airstrip. Leverage composites (a great new technology that matured mostly after the Shuttle was first designed) for all they are worth, and again, avoid the expensive water landing.

The result should be something with the range of capabilities of the Shuttle, lots of reusability, little expense compared to both STS and expendable systems, and a pretty big safety factor. I plan to run through some of the calculations when I get back to Ithaca, but I imagine that Space Shutle-sized crews or substantial cargo lifts should be possible.