Tag Archives: science fiction

Alt-history: British Haiti

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What if Toussaint Louverture had switched his allegiance from the French to the British during the Haitian Revolution?

My (optimistic) idea is that, after he joined forces with the British against both the French and Spanish, Toussaint would have helped secure a British foothold on the island. He would have won a guarantee for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade from the British, and maybe the British would have kept their word, extending abolition of both throughout the British Empire over the next two-three decades. In all likelihood, however, political enfranchisement of the majority-black populace would have taken much longer.

The furthest that people of color got in enfranchisement at any point in the 19th century was Dominica’s legislative assembly from 1835, when the first three men of African descent were elected, to 1896, when the by-this-time-half-elected-half-appointed assembly was abolished in favor of directly-controlled crown colony status. Throughout the British Caribbean, even after slavery was abolished, the British maintained a racial caste system which favored a minority of white planters against the black and mixed-race majority.

I fear that a Haiti which was autonomous from Britain would not have been too different from these other British colonies, beyond the most crucial gains of the colony’s violent separation from French rule. Questions remain:

  • Would Toussaint and his generals have helped lead this autonomous polity as viceroys?
  • What would Britain have brought to Haiti which 1) was common in other colonies like Jamaica and 2) was not endemic to former French colonies like Haiti?
  • What about Westminster-style parliamentary government? Would Haiti have adopted this instead of the big-man presidential system of the United States? And who would have been allowed to participate at the time, or would they have also been allowed to participate by the 20th century?
  • Whither Spanish Saint-Domingue? Would the Spanish side have been taken over by the forces of Toussaint et al? And if so, how would that have unified the island?
  • Would the Westminster system and other British mores, unified by the abolition of slavery, have helped the citizens of this island and their political system up to the present?
  • How would a British Haiti have impacted Simon Bolivar and his independence movement?
  • What impact would this have on African-Americans? Or on Afro-Caribbeans?
  • What impact would this have on the Louisiana Purchase?

I think this is worth looking into.

One of my fave sci-fi short stories is “Flash Crowd” by Larry Niven. Written in the 1970s, it depicts much of what the world would be like if we had teleportation as a main mode of personal transport. Replace “newstaper” with “blogger” and you’d essentially update this short story by a bit. And smartphones, definitely need those. Meanwhile, we are on the cusp of autonomous, self-driving taxis. These may be the closest thing we have to personal teleportation.

The original comic took place in Tokyo, but to make it their own, Hall and Williams decided to set the story in a brand new yet familiar city, melding the original locale with a near-future San Francisco. “It’s a very high-tech city that blends Eastern and Western culture, so we wanted it to be a mashup, just like the movie is a mashup between Disney and Marvel,” says Hall.

The resulting animated metropolis—which truly is its own character in the film, although people say that a lot—is a celebration of futuristic urban life and the high-tech culture that drives its residents. And it’s brought to life thanks to several new animation technologies developed in-house by Disney itself.

via A Tour of ‘San Fransokyo,’ the Hybrid City Disney Built for Big Hero 6.

I’m rather enamored of the trailers, and the city looks freaking amazing so far. I want to see it.

The Unprogrammable: The border between “Simulation fiction” and “simulation fantasy”

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Since first watching the Digimon: Digital Monsters series in 1999, I’ve been fascinated by the appealing science fiction and science fantasy behind the series.

But with growth in the application of virtual/augmented reality since that time, the number of works of fiction which dramatize virtual/augmented reality has greatly expanded.

One thing I’ve noticed is how a growing number of anime series are set in the drama of players logging into and playing inside MMORPGs. Most often, these series are intended as vehicles for the accompanying MMO franchise, while others are more interested in dramatizing the impact of the MMO – and the means by which the MMO is accessed – impacts the players’ offline lives and relationships.

But it is in this setting that one can find an interesting two-fold phenomenon:

  1. even though a debatable majority of MMORPGs like those depicted in these anime series are “fantasy”-oriented, the series themselves rarely lend themselves to what would quantify as “fantasy” plotlines; and
  2. it technically would not take much for such an anime series to cross the threshold to a “fantasy” plotline, only needing some event or manifestation which does not arise from, but interferes with, the MMO setting.

As far as genres are concerned, the specific niche occupied by works like Sword Art Online, Log Horizon, the .HACK series, Accel World and others which have straddled the fence between fantasy/sword-and-sorcery and science-fiction genres should be allowed to occupy their own specific genre of fiction. These works involve the trappings of sword-and-sorcery fantasy, except that they take place on a real-world-located server or network of servers which allow for programmed (and programmable) “acts of magic” or defiance of the laws of physics to take place.

At the same time, the configuration-centric and usually gameified mechanisms of the virtual world may serve as the means of propulsion and motion for the plot, the presence in-world of artificial intelligence with self-operative autonomy and the means of accessing magic adds a degree of unpredictability and complexity which pushes this niche away from too much of an overriding real-world basis.

It is this combination of a virtual world hosting a sword-and sorcery setting with autonomous AI which makes the border between “simulation fiction” and “simulation fantasy” such a seemingly-random, but critical border.

Breaking it down

With the above, I’m saying that we should understand and appreciate this border within our fictive depictions of virtual reality.

Through works of simulation fiction, we understand that MMORPGs demonstrate the capacity of our ability to program fictional universes of our own making into a virtual existence, to have control over how a virtual universe operates and affects the players, and – in the instance of our losing control over the functions of this universe through bad code or security flaws – how we try to correct errors in the universe through the coding of solutions or the “patching of the hull” of the MMORPG universe.

But through works of simulation fantasy, we could entertain the thought that MMORPGs could have moments in which an agent or event can manifest inside the MMORPG environment without originating from an outside player or being coded as an NPC, agents which are not programmed nor programmable by human fingers but which will affect the human players in mysterious, indelible ways.

And we could entertain the fact that a work from the former genre transforms into the latter as soon as that non-programmed agent, that uncontrollable force, enters the picture.

It could be an alien, or a highly-evolved and suddenly self-aware AI, or even a ghost of a dead player?

What else would potentially constitute the “unprogrammable” in a programmed environment?