Elite Forces?

jgnfld wrote:

McGuiness wrote:...
"Ender's Game" was much more about finding and nurturing those talents in children who had the intelligence and flexibility to learn those skills and then achieve the symbiosis of becoming a true team to fight those battles. Ender would have failed without Bean there to point out enemy weaknesses and to act as his second in command when he collapsed, so although Ender got all the screen time, victory would have been impossible without Bean.

The movie "Starship Troopers" was despised by critics, who thought it showed a completely fascist state, when the government was based on people being required to serve a tour in the military in order to have the right to vote. That resulted in a government that could certainly organize and fight an interstellar war, but Hollywood botched it badly. (Where were the mech suits? They didn't show up until the THIRD movie, which nobody saw because it was a straight to DVD release.)

2 quibbles:

1. re. Ender: I'm not sure "nurturing" is quite the correct thought. "Developing through any means necessary and cynically using" is closer.

2. re. Starship Troopers movie: The state depicted in the movie was pretty fascistic. Ctitics were quite correct to see that.

Considering the director/producer admitted that they TRIED to mock Heinlein's vision by making the Federation "over-the-top" fascist... shocking that they succeeded.

Isilith wrote:

jgnfld wrote:2 quibbles:

1. re. Ender: I'm not sure "nurturing" is quite the correct thought. "Developing through any means necessary and cynically using" is closer.

2. re. Starship Troopers movie: The state depicted in the movie was pretty fascistic. Ctitics were quite correct to see that.

Considering the director/producer admitted that they TRIED to mock Heinlein's vision by making the Federation "over-the-top" fascist... shocking that they succeeded.

1. Considering that the Earth was in a genocidal war with the Formics at the time, I'll cut Orson Scott Card some slack in using the talents that some hand-picked super-intelligent teenagers developed during their training. Plus if you've read the books, and not just seen the movie which botched it as usual, the characters and their motivations are made much more clear.

2. The director/producer basically sabotaged "Starship Troopers" by trying to make it look like "The Nazis fight the Bugs," which is clearly not the book Heinlein wrote. As noted, they succeeded in ruining a movie I'd first seen clips of years before it was released and was salivating to see!

Plus where were the mech suits? They should have been in the very first movie, not stuck waiting until the 3rd which went straight to DVD! Those suits were what made the concept of war with aliens on a planetary surface feasible - as the sorry excuse of the first film made quite clear when the bugs slaughtered almost the entire human brigade!

There are books Hollywood simply shouldn't be able to get their hands on. I didn't know whether to cringe or jump for joy when I heard that Peter Jackson was going to do the entire "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. The fact that it was done so masterfully (despite going off the rails during "The Two Towers," but the director's cut fixes most of that) gave me hope that we might see more Tolkien brought to the big screen in a form of which the professor would have approved. Instead we got a 3 movie epic loosely based on "The Hobbit" which wasn't as entertaining as the cartoon version made in the 1970s! (Which had better music too!)

I wish they'd made just one Hobbit movie and moved on to the Silmarillion...

Keep Hollywood's hands off of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress!" I can only imagine the havoc they'd raise with the lunar colony's marriage arrangements...

McGuiness wrote:Keep Hollywood's hands off of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress!" I can only imagine the havoc they'd raise with the lunar colony's marriage arrangements...

Nah, the Lunar colony's marriage arrangements are pretty tame by Hollywood Standards, but keep them away from To Sail Beyond The Sunset, Number of the Beast, and basically any of the Lazarus Long books.

McGuiness wrote:
2. The director/producer basically sabotaged "Starship Troopers" by trying to make it look like "The Nazis fight the Bugs," which is clearly not the book Heinlein wrote. As noted, they succeeded in ruining a movie I'd first seen clips of years before it was released and was salivating to see!

Glad someone else knows that they deliberately tried to torpedo the story.

Has any one seen the Rifftrax version of "Starship Troopers"? Hilarious! the Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys had a field day riffing this movie.

That aside, I would love to see an honest attempt to make a movie out of the book.

Isilith wrote:

McGuiness wrote:
2. The director/producer basically sabotaged "Starship Troopers" by trying to make it look like "The Nazis fight the Bugs," which is clearly not the book Heinlein wrote. As noted, they succeeded in ruining a movie I'd first seen clips of years before it was released and was salivating to see!

Glad someone else knows that they deliberately tried to torpedo the story.

How many PICAs could be made if the material bottleneck got solved? I bet the Charisians would be happy to sell Merlin raw materials that he doesn't have on hand.

Can he keep making copies of Nimue's memory recording, or would he need new personalities?

Could a terminally ill volunteer be recorded using a less rushed and better planned variant of the Nahrmann process, one that would produce a good enough copy to download into a PICA?

Pushing the ethics out of the safe zone, there might be disabled people willing to die if they could reincarnate in an immortal and highly capable body. Come to think of it, the terminally ill volunteer is an ethics problem too, since the Cave of Wonders could probably cure him or her instead.

Expert snuggler wrote:How many PICAs could be made if the material bottleneck got solved? I bet the Charisians would be happy to sell Merlin raw materials that he doesn't have on hand.

Can he keep making copies of Nimue's memory recording, or would he need new personalities?

Could a terminally ill volunteer be recorded using a less rushed and better planned variant of the Nahrmann process, one that would produce a good enough copy to download into a PICA?

Pushing the ethics out of the safe zone, there might be disabled people willing to die if they could reincarnate in an immortal and highly capable body. Come to think of it, the terminally ill volunteer is an ethics problem too, since the Cave of Wonders could probably cure him or her instead.

Without the materials bottleneck, they could probably set up an assembly line in the cave. How rare the materials needed is another question, however.

They can keep redoing Nimue, although Merlin and Nimue might start getting bored with themselves!

For other personalities, you probably have to wait for neats.

You are right on about the moral and ethical questions although what you mentioned was happening in the TF.

Don

Didn't Merlin say that salvaging Nahrmann would have violated tons of TF laws?

Expert snuggler wrote:How many PICAs could be made if the material bottleneck got solved? I bet the Charisians would be happy to sell Merlin raw materials that he doesn't have on hand.

Can he keep making copies of Nimue's memory recording, or would he need new personalities?

Could a terminally ill volunteer be recorded using a less rushed and better planned variant of the Nahrmann process, one that would produce a good enough copy to download into a PICA?

Pushing the ethics out of the safe zone, there might be disabled people willing to die if they could reincarnate in an immortal and highly capable body. Come to think of it, the terminally ill volunteer is an ethics problem too, since the Cave of Wonders could probably cure him or her instead.

How many PICAs Merlin could make is somewhat irrelevant to the story. There is no good reason for Merlin to do it. See "Why doesn't Merlin use SNARCs to sabotage the Church's war efforts?" in the FAQ at the top of this page for some reasons why Merlin isn't using TF technology more fully to win the war.

A bodyguard corps, if nothing else, would be good reason. Sharleyan and Cayleb would both be dead if a PICA hadn't intervened. Several of those incidents were too close for comfort because there was only one Merlin and he can't be everywhere.

Archbishop Maikel is not expendable and should have protection by someone with fiber-optic nerves and SNARC-assisted situational awareness, just as Nimue is covering the Corisande rulers.

Another good reason would be psywar. The story of a planetwide network of seijins going to war to purify the Church is a powerful one. It's a story that undermines the Temple mafia's legitimacy. Feeding it would be useful.

Merlin may also need to have some immortal friends in the long run just for his own emotional well-being.