It is possible, but is a long-term unstable situation. Peace as posited by C.L. Anderson requires constant maintenance by dedicated AND competent people. Sooner or later either corruption or laziness will spoil things. Not necessarily on large enough scale to cause an all-out war — in fact, a small breakdown leading to a localized conflict is far more likely, — but here is the kicker: the longer is the period without breakdowns, the bigger is a breakdown when it does come. The longer peace lasts without obvious problems, the more time there is for “watchers” to become complacent, stuck in routine, or used to “skim off the top” because “nobody will notice”. And hence the bigger is the crash.

Which is very similar to earthquakes and stock market crashes — the system is mostly stable, small adjustments happen fairly often, and the bigger “adjustment” is, the less often it occurs. Problem is, given enough time really big “adjustments” are inevitable. AKA, war IS inevitable, it may just take a long time for before it happens.

Thank you Scalzi for featuring this book – never would have picked it up otherwise.

Although you could do a lot worse than seeking out more by CL Moore. I highly recommend “No Woman Born” and “Shambleu.”

(I’m a doofus, sorry!)

I’ll certainly be seeking out more by CL Moore, too.

I’m normally very slow to try new authors. Even Scalzi’s (brilliant) Old Man’s War series took consistent haranguing on the part of my sister, and a visit to a DC reading, before I relented and plunked down cash.

I don’t know that I agree with the entire premise, and the conversation in the comments is fascinating, but I am sure it’ll be an interesting read.

I just wanted to share that with you. CL Anderson, if you’re still checking these comments, this Big Idea earned you one tick on your royalties chart. It’s not much of an ROI, I’ll admit, but hey, every little bit helps, right?

Not exactly. What is difficult is to get most people to kill a stranger on behalf of another stranger. That requires significant effort to induce, usually focused on making the soldier-to-be identify with his unit as early man identified with his tribe.

At that point, however, human nature takes over. The standard mode of interaction between human hunter-gatherer tribes (or, indeed, between groups of chimpanzees) is hostile territoriality which regularly breaks into lethal violence.

This is why soldiers (beyond a few outliers) fight for their “buddies”, not for their country.

We’re dealing with a repressive regime in a colonized system that is a series of moons in orbit around a gas giant. Only one of those moons has naturally occurring H2O. Now, there is FTL, so technically, anyone with access to an FTL ship or a “jump gate” could import water from elsewhere. However, access to FTL in all its forms is also severely restricted by the government/ruling corporation, so the general population only has (relatively) easy access to what’s on their world of residence or available within the system.

This raises the question of manufacturing water. As I understand the physical requirements, this is a fairly resource intensive process and the still-suit variants are not such a great idea after all. And, of course, as the ruling corporation wants to maintain a monopoly on water, any large scale H2O manufacturing operation would be shut down. Which in turn raises the possibility of water sellers operating like meth labs, which I have to admit, I didn’t think of when I wrote this, which is why discussions like this are a Good Thing.

Could you expand on this statement?