OPR's 1 of ?

OPR’S

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note: that book whose title I couldn't remember?  On climate change and immigration?  It's "Tropic Of Chaos".
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note: this article is three parts.  I kind of have a small voice in the back of my head whispering that it kind of veered off topic and died towards the end ( I should never write part one then wait two days before resuming as my train of thought derails ).  I could be too critical, or I could be spot on.  If it ends up sucking for you, please don't hate on me.  Sometimes an occasional article is less than brilliant.
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note: I had a comment yesterday dropping multiple "N" Bombs.  Of course I did not publish it.  Please remember, and respect, the fact I could lose this no charge publishing venue if I were to allow that kind of objectionable material.  The simple fact of the matter is that I don't have enough readers to have the monthly expense of hosting a site.
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I normally have close to zero luck reading anthologies.  Those mostly come along in fiction  but even the non-fiction ones usually blow rabid monkey ass.  To me, and perhaps I’m just the odd one out in the entire universe, an authors style is very important.  Not the plot in a novel or a subject in a reference book, as important as they are, but mainly in the way he ( sorry, most female writers suck to me as a male reader-the exceptions barely fill on hand worth of fingers, one of those being Paylee Roberts who I hope is still one of my minions ) presents his material.  So, if I avoid certain writers because of their style, then it stands to reason that an anthology has good odds of being styles you don’t care for-the guiding principle for inclusion seeming to be sales in publishing.  No matter the subject, no matter my age, anthologies have always been a waste of money for me 19 out of a twenty times.  A wonderful exception to this was J.E. Pournelle of Lucifer’s Hammer fame with his “There Will Be War” series.  But not the whole series, just book eight and nine, Armageddon and After Armageddon. 

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I read those two when they first came out in the Eighties, and read them repeatedly until my countless moves disappered them ( as they say, three moves equals a fire.  I moved about nineteen times just in that decade.  Some might have been minor, moves across town but many involved continental and intercontinental distances ).  Recently by accident they came to my attention again when I read the first book in the series ( not very good ) when it was offered on Kindle Unlimited.  I procured both paper copies of #8&9  and have been slowly savoring them since ( I have “work” books that I use to kill time when I am in my “hurry up and wait until these morons get their head out of their ass because even though I show up every friggin day at the same Gott Damn time they can’t have donations waiting for me for some unfathomable reason” mode.  They are Already Read books since I can read a half page at a time and not lose the train of thought when I pick it up days later ).

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If you like QUALITY post-Apocalypse fiction, these are Ver Gut, Wunderbar and other excited foreign phrases gushed admirably.  If you like one story you should love almost every single one of these in the two books.  One thing I have noticed from reading his own contributions and story introductions is that Pournelle is a bit of an incurable optimist.  I’m talking, he is so sickly sweet happy about the future, reminiscing as of old Beaver Clever Happy Hour With Super Scientist Sidney joyous ejaculations about “electric power too cheap to meter” or the “mankind shall travel, colonize and rule the planets and all we need is a few more funds from Congress to do it” fantasy or “radiation is tasty and safe” wishful thinking that it is all I can do to stop myself from selling everything I own, traveling to Los Angeles and throttling the bastard until he admits life is more like a puppies smeared fecal waste on your shoe than a glittery rainbow shooting out of unicorns rectums.

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The thing that stood out to me was his utter disdain for pessimists, bad mouthing them freely.  To him, happy survivalists joyfully embraced the nuclear winter as an opportunity to rebuild and make all the Bad People Problems go away in their new society while anyone holding any fear about the future might as well curl up at ground zero and have their sniveling extinguished so that the Future Pioneers can get on with life without distraction.  Well, as you might imagine, that crap pisses me off.  Pournelle is a talented and very smart individual, but he is also a near Baby Boomer puke who fully drank the grape kool aid of infinite growth on a finite planet ( using colonization of space as way of bypassing the “finite” part, he can safely claim that if the FedGov had just listened to him and Other Very Smart People, it could have happened and his optimism would have been justified.  Of course, two problems emerge from that.  One, you really expect the government to do what is best for the country rather than the Elite-really?  And two, a few untried theoretical inventions such as an orbital elevator were needed to get all the rest to work and there were no guarantees even if funding had materialized ).  He confuses the one off carbon fuel bonanza with progress and unlimited opportunity.

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Was this excusable way back in the day?  Perhaps.  I dare say that none of us had much inkling of things darkly this way to come right after we were the worlds biggest petroleum provider ( remember, the place no one associates with oil, California, at one time drilled 20% of the GLOBAL petroleum supply ).  The research was out there even then but hardly anyone knew about it.  We can label Pournelle a Specialist and excuse him.  Can we excuse his being an optimist?  Well, a pessimists would say not just no but Hell No!  We’ve talked about optimists and pessimists before.  An optimist can, literally, see no dark clouds.  A pessimist is incapable of seeing any good coming out of anything.  Both viewpoints are limiting.  Which is why we’ll label a mixture of the two as a “realist”.  Not because the name fits perfectly but because of the joke:

An optimist sees a glass half full.

A pessimist sees it as half empty.

A realist asks Who Pissed In My Glass?

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Hence the article title, OPR’s.  Optimists, Pessimists and Realists.  In the above joke, the Realist might better be described as a cynic.  Perhaps.  It is funny, as is, because it suggests ( at least to me ) that the pessimist wasn’t half paranoid enough.  For the purposes of this discussion we’ll just call the realist someone who is trying to avoid being blinded by being too optimistic ( Pournelle ) or equally blinded by being far too pessimistic ( such as myself ).  They try to see both sides.  Knowing it is going to be far worse than we think, but knowing the human species is a minor miracle in its ability to survive and thrive.  Continued on Monday.

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