Quote:Which is not, in and of itself, a bad decision. Certainly I'll agree that many, even most, of those behind it were acting out of the most selfish interests, but civilization itself is, in every way that matters, an established power structure itself.
This, combined with its inherent unreliability makes it more fundamentally inimical to the entire *concept* of established power structures than any other tech anywhere ever. Whatever else you may have heard, *this* is why the law was passed - so they could take obvious use of the stuff as a crime in and of itself, and deal with people before they started really *exploiting* it.
Total acoherence is nonexistence just as surely as total rigidity. Complexity, life, humanity, require established rules and patterns to work from - this is true in the physics sense and the social one.
In the long run, one of two things will happen: One, Earth will grow more fluid and adaptive as 'wavetech penetrates and acts on its society, at the same time as the greater understanding of the gunk that makes that possible causes fennish culture to grow more rigid and established - IOW, they will remain seperate, but gradually grow so similar that the only remaining differences are cultural rather than, um, elemental or procedural. Or, two, the entire concept of seperate 'Fennish' and 'Danelaw' factions will be revealed as a delusion - that is, the Fen are the lab rats that human society is using to gather the knowledge it needs to act on the matter of wavetech.
Quote:Personally, I'd expect every major nation to follow the model you attribute to the Japanese - there are simply too many potential rewards to pass up if there's a way of controlling the risks - which, well, there is. Especially when you have individuals and ships who are willing to play the game your way and do business respectably; now that my edited rewrite of the original draft is in place, I see Moondance's economic niche as being exactly that - a cargo carrier who will sign contracts, make garantees, take out insurance, etc, rather than playing everything by ear as the fennish tradition usually does.
Australia is becoming *rich*. It's likely a bit more dangerous than it had been, too, but that's Australia for you. It is also likely that there are a few other relatively small countries here and there that have decided to take the risk vs reward gamble and throw wide their arms to the Fen. None as big, and none as famous, but they're out there. I would expect Japan, for example, might pick one of the smaller islands as its Fennish Hong Kong. Taiwan would look to the skies, look to the mainland, decide that the fen were the lesser of two evils, and invite them in. Things like that.
...Come to think of it, Natalie and Stacy and the Dancer are likely known to, at the very least, ECSNorway's character - since they'd've been handling a large share of the back-and-forth runs between the asteroid mines and the surface, when that enterprise was first starting up... unless all of that was handled 'in house', as it were?
Ja, -n
(Clutch FTW!)
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