Fallen Angels (1991) is a science fiction novel by three American science fiction authors, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn, and published by Jim Baen. Winner of 1992 Prometheus Award, the novel was written as a tribute to the science fiction fandom and includes many of its well-known figures, legends, and practices. It champions modern technology and ridicules its critics, including, budget cutting politicians, fringe environmentalists, and the forces of ignorance.
The novel takes aim at several targets of ridicule: Senator William Proxmire, radical environmentalists and mystics, such as a character who believes that one cannot freeze to death in the snow because ice is a crystal and "crystals are healing." It also mocks ignorance in journalism (for example, one "expert" cited in a news article believes that the astronauts must have superhuman strength, based on a photograph of a weightless astronaut easily handling heavy construction equipment) and the non-scientific world in general. Several real people are tuckerized into the book in a more positive light, including many fans who made donations to charity for that express purpose and a character called "RMS" (presumably Richard M. Stallman) who leads a network of hackers called the Legion of Doom, connected by a series of BBS systems.
Setting
The novel is set in an unspecified "near-future" (one of the main characters has childhood memories of the Exxon Valdez disaster) in which a radical left-wing environmentalist movement has joined forces with the religious right through a shared distaste for modern technology. The resulting bipartisan conspiracy has gained control of the US government and imposed draconian luddite laws which, in attempts to curb global warming, have ironically brought about the greatest environmental catastrophe in recorded history: an ice age which may eventually escalate into a Snowball Earth.
The exact process is described: clouds are water condensation, and so cannot form without cloud condensation nuclei in the atmosphere. The emission laws have removed most of this, reducing cloud cover, meaning the ground loses heat faster. This in combination with the drop in greenhouse gases has resulted in the return and exacerbation of the Little Ice Age, which has become self-perpetuating as glaciers have a much higher albedo than other surfaces.
As a radical totalitarian environmentalist party now controls the US government, the scientific explanation is denounced as "propaganda from life-hating technophiles", and blame for the ice age is instead solely placed on the society surviving in orbit. Science fiction fandom forms the core of a pro-technology underground in the United States, working in tandem with hacker movements. Other technologists – accused by the government of pursuing "materialist science" – were removed from their jobs and forced underground, where they were generally unable to continue their work. This rabid distaste for technology has resulted in the collapse of the economy, and lack of education and a complicit media has left the majority of the population credulous and easily manipulated. The Greens have been in power for most of the lives of the characters.
As glaciers rapidly advance south, Canada and the northern United States are all but destroyed. Near the edge of the glaciers, in Milwaukee, barbaric feudal systems arise as the federal government and markets collapse, leaving violence and disease in their wake. In orbit, Mir and Space Station Freedom survive in tandem with a Lunar colony, but with no support from Earth. The city of Winnipeg is the last major outpost of Canadian civilization, warmed and inhabitable due to immense amounts of solar power beamed from the space stations.
Space station Mir, home to Russo-American Gordon Tanner
Astronauts from the orbital society fly a modified scramjet, redesigned to harvest nitrogen from the Earth's atmosphere. Government policy declares that these ships are responsible for the ice age, so the scramjet is shot down with a surface-to-air missile. The pilot and copilot, an Earth-born American named Alex MacLeod and a space-born Russo-American named Gordon Tanner, are forced to crash land in Canada atop the glaciers.
Upon hearing of this, the fan underground embarks on a rescue mission – a group of fans rides north through the Dakotas to rescue the astronauts before they can be apprehended by the Government. Upon reaching the Dakotas, the fans must travel largely on foot, as their van is unable to traverse the glaciers. However, they have a major advantage over their foes in the government – their relationship with the space station provides them with superior navigational abilities; following the fall of scientific society, the United States Air Force (USAF) no longer enjoys access to satellite reconnaissance. The fans are able to reach the downed spacecraft well in advance of the USAF.
Their escape is aided in a similar manner. Though the Angels are unable to walk due to their overexposure to weightlessness and must be dragged along on sleds, the microwave power transmission beam reserved for Winnipeg is diverted to warm the travellers as they return south to their van. In addition, a tribe of nomadic Inuit peoples shares supplies with them in thanks for the warmth provided by the microwave beam.
Upon finally reaching their van, the rescuers flee to a small science fiction convention of some 50 fans at a mansion owned by one of their own. Once there, one of the fans takes on the role of personal trainer to help the Angels adjust to Earth's gravity including various asanas from yoga. At the con, the fans brainstorm a daring plan - before the Greens had come to power, one of the Board of Trustees for the Metropolitan Museum of Boston by the name of Ron Cole supposedly refurbished a Titan II rocket. This rocket still exists at the Museum of Science and Industry at Chicago. The fans and the Angels leave for Chicago just moments before the mansion is raided by the Green police.
The trip to Chicago gives the reader a brutal depiction of American life without basic technology. A blizzard forces the fans to take shelter in a farm town - where at least one towns-person dies in each blizzard for lack of heating oil. After hitching a ride in a consignment of cheese, the fans are captured by the feudal inhabitants of Milwaukee who are burning the excess houses in the city for heat. One of their captors has the food swapped with moonshine liquor and forces the group into slavery to pay off a series of trumped-up "fines". They are assisted by a fellow fan amongst their captors, and are able to continue on to Chicago.
When the fans finally meet Ron Cole, their hopes are crushed. The rocket is a decaying wreck, and Cole is a shadow of his former self due to invasive "reeducation" treatments. However, Cole is able to put them on another path – a privately constructedsingle-stage-to-orbit spacecraft at Edwards Air Force Base, disguised by the simple and effective method of its designer, Gary Hudson, declaring it non-functional.
Spacecraft propulsion is any method used to accelerate spacecraft and artificial satellites. In-space propulsion exclusively deals with propulsion systems used in the vacuum of space and should not be confused with space launch or atmospheric entry.
Charles Sheffield, was an English-born mathematician, physicist, and science-fiction writer who served as a President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and of the American Astronautical Society.
Lucifer's Hammer is a science fiction post-apocalypse-survival novel by American writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle that was first published in 1977. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978. Two issues of a planned six-part comic book adaptation were published by Innovation Comics in 1993.
Artificial gravity is the creation of an inertial force that mimics the effects of a gravitational force, usually by rotation. Artificial gravity, or rotational gravity, is thus the appearance of a centrifugal force in a rotating frame of reference, as opposed to the force experienced in linear acceleration, which by the equivalence principle is indistinguishable from gravity. In a more general sense, "artificial gravity" may also refer to the effect of linear acceleration, e.g. by means of a rocket engine.
Tuckerization is the act of using a person's name in an original story as an in-joke. The term is derived from Wilson Tucker, a pioneering American science fiction writer, fan and fanzine editor, who made a practice of using his friends' names for minor characters in his stories. For example, Tucker named a character after Lee Hoffman in his novel The Long Loud Silence, and after Walt Willis in Wild Talent.
Jordin T. Kare was a physicist and aerospace engineer who researched laser propulsion. He was responsible for Mockingbird, a conceptual design for an extremely small reusable launch vehicle, and was involved in the Clementine lunar mapping mission. Kare also conceived the SailBeam interstellar propulsion technique. In the science fiction fan community, he was a composer, performer and recording artist of filk music.
Dandridge MacFarlan Cole was an American aerospace engineer, futurist, lecturer, and author.
The Assiti Shards series is a fictional universe invented by American author Eric Flint. It is a shared universe concerning several alternate history worlds, related to a prime timeline. The defining characteristic of the fictional universe is the existence of the "Assiti Shards effect", and the impact that strikes by Assiti Shards have on characters in the stories. The series is rather large and expansive, having started publication in 2000, and as of 2008, consisting of 15 print books, and 21 e-magazine anthologies, in two different published timelines of the same multiverse.
Freehold is a military science fiction novel by Michael Z. Williamson, published in 2004 by Baen Books. The book tells the story of Kendra Pacelli, a young soldier who begins the book in the service of a world-dominant, authoritarian United Nations. Accused of a crime she did not commit, she flees Earth for the Freehold of Grainne where she struggles to adapt to the climate and culture of an ultra-libertarian planet. She eventually joins the Freehold military and fights in a war against a UN invasion.
Non-rocket spacelaunch refers to theoretical concepts for launch into space where much of the speed and altitude needed to achieve orbit is provided by a propulsion technique that is not subject to the limits of the rocket equation. Although all space launches to date have been rockets, a number of alternatives to rockets have been proposed. In some systems, such as a combination launch system, skyhook, rocket sled launch, rockoon, or air launch, a portion of the total delta-v may be provided, either directly or indirectly, by using rocket propulsion.
Robert Buettner is an American author of military science fiction novels. He is a former military intelligence officer, National Science Foundation Fellow in Paleontology, and has been published in the field of natural resources law. He has written five volumes of the Jason Wander series, three volumes of the Orphan's Legacy series, the stand-alone novel The Golden Gate, numerous short stories and novellas, and the afterword to an anthology of stories by the late Robert Heinlein. Buettner currently lives in Georgia.
Weightlessness is the complete or near-complete absence of the sensation of weight, i.e., zero apparent weight. It is also termed zero g-force, or zero-g or, incorrectly, zero gravity.
Ancient astronauts have been addressed frequently in science fiction and horror fiction. Occurrences in the genres include:
Space architecture is the theory and practice of designing and building inhabited environments in outer space. This mission statement for space architecture was developed in 2002 by participants in the 1st Space Architecture Symposium, organized at the World Space Congress in Houston, by the Aerospace Architecture Subcommittee, Design Engineering Technical Committee (DETC), American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
Space research is scientific study carried out in outer space, and by studying outer space. From the use of space technology to the observable universe, space research is a wide research field. Earth science, materials science, biology, medicine, and physics all apply to the space research environment. The term includes scientific payloads at any altitude from deep space to low Earth orbit, extended to include sounding rocket research in the upper atmosphere, and high-altitude balloons.
RocketShip Tours is an American space tourism company founded in 2008 by travel industry entrepreneur Jules Klar and which planned to provide sub-orbital human spaceflights to the paying public, in partnership with rocketplane developer XCOR Aerospace. Klar created RocketShip Tours to act as General Sales Agent for XCOR Aerospace.
Seveneves is a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson published in 2015. The story tells of the desperate efforts to preserve Homo sapiens in the wake of apocalyptic events on Earth after the unexplained disintegration of the Moon and the remaking of human society as a space-based civilization after a severe genetic bottleneck.
The year 2021 broke the record for the most orbital launch attempts till then (146) and most humans in space concurrently (19) despite the effects of COVID-19 pandemic.
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