Books Ancient Rome Five Thinly Veiled Versions of Rome in SF  For some science fiction authors, all roads really do lead to Rome. By James Davis Nicoll | Published on November 11, 2024 “Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome” by artist Giovanni Paolo Panini (1758) Comment 0 Share New Share “Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome” by artist Giovanni Paolo Panini (1758) If there is one lesson science fiction teaches us, it is that just as non-crab crustaceans will eventually evolve a crab-like body plan, so too will every state eventually transform into a thinly veiled version of Rome (Republic or Empire). This outcome seems almost inevitable regardless of the state’s original political structure, its technological base, or even whether it is confined to one world or spread across many planets. Don’t believe me? Why, consider these five works featuring Roman carcinization. Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov (1950) A scientific mishap propels Joseph Schwartz through space/time to a desolate world. What at first appears to be an alien planet is none other than Schwartz’ native Earth, transformed by time and atomic war. A once-verdant world is now a dying planet, its impoverished population reduced to a bare twenty million people. As Schwartz discovers, the Earth is now a province of the Galactic Empire. Empire and Earth enjoy the same cordial relationship that existed between Vespasian’s Rome and the Zealots’ Judea. Earth craves independence. As the Empire has one populated planet for every human living on Earth, the balance of power favors the Empire… thus the crime against humanity that certain Earth extremists are now plotting. Asimov was kind enough to record his formula for success in the form of a poem: So success is not a mystery, just brush up on your history, and borrow day by day.Take an Empire that was Roman and you’ll find it is at home in all the starry Milky Way.With a drive that’s hyperspatial, through the parsecs you will race, you’ll find that plotting is a breeze,With a tiny bit of cribbin’ from the works of Edward Gibbon and that Greek, Thucydides. This approach worked out quite well for Asimov. One could say it was the foundation on which his reputation rested. The Day of Their Return by Poul Anderson (1973) Having reinvented Roman Imperial governance to end the chaos that followed the collapse of the Polesotechnic League, the Terran Empire faces the same dynastic instability that plagued the Roman Empire. Hugh McCormac’s recent attempted coup failed and McCormac fled. McCormac’s native world Aeneas has been occupied. Although the Terran Commissioner Chunderban Desai is surprisingly humane and competent for an Imperial official, Aeneas is a hotbed of discontent. It is an ideal planet on which Terra’s rival, the Roidhunate of Mersia1, can stir up trouble. And so, Mersia’s greatest agent, telepath Aycharaych, is dispatched to transform Aeneasian myth and legend into a weapon against the Empire. I bet you thought I’d use one of Anderson’s James-Bond-like Dominic Flandry novels2. I much prefer Aycharaych to Flandry and The Day of Their Return is as close as Anderson got to an Aycharaych novel. There is a very Bond-like element to this novel3: for some reason, Aycharaych goes undercover on Aeneas under his real name. The Myriad by R.M. Meluch (2005) 25th-century America prevails, much to the irritation of the League of Earth Nations. America’s only serious rival is the surprisingly Romanesque polity based on the former American colony Palatine. When Palatine requests American assistance with the alien Hive, the USS Merrimack is dispatched to aid the upstart colonists. AMERICA! Unless you’re from Palatine, in which case SENATUS POPULUSQUE ROMANUS. Investigating the Hive leads Merrimack to a globular cluster4, whose three inhabited worlds seemingly lack faster-than-light drives, yet clearly possess some superluminal means of transportation. The explanation to this paradox will put history itself in parallel. Palatine is surprisingly Romanesque because it is literally Roman. It seems some Romans spent 1800 years hiding amongst the post-Imperial barbarians until the opportunity arose to re-establish Rome. Surprisingly, that is not the most implausible element of the novel. With the Lightnings by David Drake (1998) Both Lt. Daniel Leary of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy and librarian Adele Mundy face professional challenges thanks to a common source. Having quarreled with his powerful father, Lt. Leary no longer benefits from his father’s influence. Adele’s family having quarreled with the senior Leary’s political faction, Adele is the sole survivor of the violent purge that eliminated the Mundys of Chatsworth. Despite the common cause of their problems, Daniel and Adele seem unlikely allies, let alone friends. Enter the wildly misleadingly named Alliance of Free Stars. The Alliance’s current project involves provoking discord on Republic ally Kostroma. Kostroma is the very world on which Adele is employed as a librarian. Kostroma is the very world Daniel is stationed. Bad luck for the Alliance. While most descriptions of the RCN series hammer the parallels with Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series (or if the reviewer has not heard of O’Brian, C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series), Cinnabar’s political culture appears to owe quite a lot to Rome. More specifically, there appear to be echoes of the Crisis of the Roman Republic, a terrible time to live but a wonderful time for adventures. But perhaps I read too much into Cinna and Cinnabar. First Citizen by Thomas T. Thomas (1987) Late 20th-century America’s bold repudiation of its debt and courageous amendment forbidding federal taxes transformed the economy, although perhaps not in the positive manner Americans would have preferred. Economic turmoil was accompanied by nuclear terrorism and a wave of presidential assassinations. At least Americans did not have to worry about being bored. Calamity for America is opportunity for James Corbin. Ambitious and amoral, Corbin uses military adventures and political gambits to claw his way up the American hierarchy. Of course, his ascendance makes Corbin a target… but that only means Corbin must strike first and far more ruthlessly than his rivals, something Corbin is willing and able to do. It’s no mistake that James Corbin and Julius Caesar share initials. Corbin’s career maps onto Caesar’s (although Corbin has more tactical nukes at his disposal than Caesar did). This suggests that Corbin is right to be optimistic about his odds of winning. But it also hints that his lifespan5 once he becomes First Citizen may be rather short…. There are hardly the only Roman reenactments SF has to offer. In fact, I hear Megalopolis owes something to Rome. The above may not be your favorite examples (Megalopolis does not seem to be anyone’s favorite example, although as I have not seen it, I cannot comment further). Feel free to mention your favorites in comments below.[end-mark] Mersia’s ambivalence towards Terra can be traced back to a particularly dickish ploy by star trader David Falkayn and company some centuries earlier, as described in 1967’s Day of Burning. Terran-Mersian rivalry eventually led to the death of billions and a millennia-long dark age, but at least Falkayn’s quarterly report looked good. ︎The first Dominic Flandry story pre-dated the first Bond story, so really James Bond is Dominic Flandry-esque. ︎The Day of Their Return also features a very Poul Andersonian element. The planet Aeneas is lovingly, extensively described. This, for a planet featured in a single short novel. As far as I know, Anderson never revisited this setting. ︎The globular cluster mostly contains metal-poor Population Two stars, but there are also three metal-rich Population One stars. Wandered in by accident? ︎Canadian Content laws compel me to suggest that people unfamiliar with Caesar’s career consult Wayne & Shuster’s “Rinse the Blood off My Toga.” ︎The post Five Thinly Veiled Versions of Rome in SF  appeared first on Reactor.

Inflation has pulverized Americans’ finances over the last four years, and a new study shows that’s especially true for the nation’s seniors, whose retirement accounts have been walloped. The losses have been so severe that would-be retirees need to work an extra six years on average before they can hang up their work boots—and they can blame Washington for this financial disaster. Much of the damage to senior’s retirement accounts has been hidden by the stock market rally of the last several years. The S&P 500 increased 45% from the first quarter of 2021 through the third quarter of this year, but almost half of that was just inflation driving stock prices higher, not an increase in real value. The inflation-adjusted increase over that same period is 22%. Still, that’s not a bad rate of return. The problem is that people don’t put all their retirement savings into the stock market, especially as they get closer to retirement. They rely more on fixed income assets, like bonds, which have been decimated recently. The rapid rise in both inflation and interest rates has been a one-two punch to bond returns, which have had their worst four-year run in at least a century. Ironically, seniors who thought they were being responsible by shifting their retirement savings into bonds as they got older ended up taking the worst losses. Although positive stock returns have technically countered negative bond returns over the last three and a half years, that doesn’t factor in the lost purchasing power of retirement savings due to inflation. Because prices have increased roughly 20% in less than four years, everyone’s dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to. Now it’s only worth 80 cents. That’s forcing seniors to reevaluate their retirement plans or risk outliving their savings. If a person was planning on retiring with a net worth of $1 million, they now need to add almost $200,000 to their savings if they want the same standard of living they previously planned on enjoying. The typical senior nearing retirement will now have to work longer to rebuild the lost value in his or her nest egg. Sadly, many people aren’t aware of this problem because they confuse dollar amounts with fixed value. The worst inflation in four decades is a stark reminder that the dollar is not guaranteed to hold its value at all. For example, the average 401(k) balance has risen more than $11,000 over the last three and a half years, but it’s worth $12,000 less because of higher prices. People with pension plans are in no better shape. In fact, inflation is driving many funds to insolvency. Although total pension plan balances increased about $2.3 trillion over the last three and a half years, their inflation-adjusted value fell by $2.5 trillion, or more than 9%. Pension plans that pay out defined benefits to retirees with a cost-of-living adjustment are now shelling out more benefits than previously forecasted but have fewer assets. That’s the fast track to bankruptcy and the dissolution of the pension plan, leaving young people who paid into the fund nothing to show for it. It did not have to be this way, but reckless politicians in Washington created the perfect storm that sunk senior’s retirement savings. The big spenders in Congress and the Biden-Harris administration spent the better part of the last four years spending trillion of dollars the nation didn’t have, while the Federal Reserve created the money to cover all that excess spending. That devalued the dollar and spawned 40-year-high inflation, which in turn drove up interest rates—also at the fastest pace in 40 years. Until the profligate spending is reined up, people’s life savings will continue being pummeled by violent changes in prices and interest rates. Sadly, there’s no relief in sight right now as the Treasury just announced they anticipate borrowing more than $800 billion in the first three months of 2025 alone. Seniors should be furious that they’re having to work years longer to foot the bill for Washington’s financial dissipation. ©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC. The post Seniors Are Getting Crushed by Washington’s Recklessness appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Chinese and US multinational giants Tencent and Visa have teamed up to produce a novel method of identity authentication during the process of payment and picked Singapore as the testbed. The pilot introduces palm recognition, which combines palm prints – and what reports refer to as “vein recognition.” This is touted as more reliable than facial recognition since that can reportedly be tampered with more easily. Meanwhile, palm recognition of the kind Tencent and Visa have come up with seems to take into account even some morbid scenarios, in terms of preventing attempts to circumvent the system: namely, in order to carry out authentication, palm recognition “requires the presence of living tissue.” This is yet another of Singapore’s efforts in the same vein (no pun), which is to use sophisticated technology to identify, track, and mass surveillance people, under a scheme known as Smart Nation, while the pilot was announced during the Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF). Those who choose to participate in this phase of the project will include palm scanners in their payment terminals, while this method is advertised for – wait for it – convenience, since it does not require the use of physical devices. That may seem like a poor deal since clearly comprehensive biometric data is being surrendered in exchange for saving a few seconds by not having to whip out a card or a phone. Nevertheless, these biometric payment systems are spreading in Southeast Asia, as other major players, like Visa’s arch-rival Mastercard, already have one in the works (Mastercard is collaborating with Japan’s NEC, and this scheme is based on facial recognition). Back to all that biometric data that is harvested thanks to Visa’s new payment solution – who’s responsible for handling it, and what happens to it once authentication is done? Customers in Singapore may or may not be happy to learn that it’s the job of China’s Tencent (via the local subsidiary). Tencent is in charge of the palm recognition infrastructure and promises that Singapore’s data protection (PDPA) rules will apply. Additionally, the said data will be stored in Singapore, Tencent said. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post China’s Tencent and Visa Have Partnered To Introduce Palm Recognition Payment Technology in Singapore appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is offering a total of $16,000 to help officials in Georgia identify a man who dragged two dogs he tied to the back of a car, which resulted to the death of one. In a press release on Wednesday, October 30, the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office have asked the public’s help to help identify the man. The press release reveals more information about the man and the incident that happened on Friday, September 13. Photo credit: Office of the DeKalb County District Attorney “Surveillance camera video showed a man pull into the parking lot of the Redan Recreation Center on Phillips Road in Lithonia dragging two dogs behind his vehicle,” investigators reveal. “The man got out of the car, untied the dogs from the bumper and then left them for dead.” A witness called the police after seeing the dogs in the parking lot. The officer who responded to the scene discovered the two dogs with ropes tied around their necks. The press release reveals, “One of the dogs—a medium-sized, black, mixed breed male between one and seven years old—was deceased.”  “The other dog—a medium-sized, brindle, mixed breed male around nine months old—was treated for severe injuries and is currently in the care of DeKalb County Animal Services/Lifeline Animal Project.” The man hasn’t been identified yet as they have appeared to back out of the parking lot to avoid surveillance cameras from recording their car’s license plate number. Photo credit: Office of the DeKalb County District Attorney However, investigators believe that the car used to drag the dogs is a 2008-2012 Chevrolet Malibu. And that the driver is wearing dark pants, a white baseball cap, and a dark gray top with a white logo on the chest and white writing across the back. PETA has now stepped in to help investigators by offering a reward of up to $10,000 and an additional $6,000 from local animal protection groups. According to PETA’s statement, “animal abusers are often repeat offenders who represent a threat to the entire community“, hence the reward they have put out. PETA President Ingrid Newkirk also said, “The agony and terror that these two dogs must have endured as a cruel person bound them to a car, sped down the road, and left them to die in a parking lot is unimaginable.” PETA and the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office are asking anyone with information regarding the animal abuse to call the DeKalb County Animal Enforcement tip line at 404-294-2939.

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