Heh, parallel thinking.

[dvandom]

John Ringo was thinking along the same lines as I did in my Pranir backstory for part of Live Free Or Die, I am amused.

LFoD involves a "category 4.5" setting according to the spectrum I posted earlier this week. Humanity was contacted in the present day, and the story follows the protagonist as he does his damnedest to get us up to speed so that we don't need a protector anymore. At the point where I'm at in the story, he's leased a half-millennium-old mining tug in order to try to get orbital infrastructure jump-started, and because the robo-cook is crap, he has his people hire him a competent ship's cook who's willing to work in space.

He gets an MIT astrophysicist who happened to work as a cook during college.

Because working in space as a ship's cook is still working in space. Because working on a clapped-out mining ship that's older than the European presence in North America is still working on a spaceship.

And that's why, in my Pranir backstory, the snake-owls cleverly sold their brightest scientists into indentured servitude contracts, knowing that when the contracts ran out they'd get back comrades who had seen how alien tech worked and had a chance of understanding it. And thus the Pranir went from early Age of Sail to interstellar traders in a few hundred years. :)

Comments

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

In Phil Foglio and Nick Pollota's novel Illegal Aliens, on the first Earth spaceship, even the janitors and maintenance men have Ph.D.s. It makes for several amusing gags, where senior staff roll their eyes at the janitor's (seemingly logical and well-thought-out) suggestions, because he has only one doctorate and "thinks he knows everything."

[grant-p.livejournal.com]

It makes perfect sense to me. If you need to get outside tech and can't get them to sell it to you, get a job in the industry. That's how China got a lot of computer tech. We trained their engineers, and now have the rather strange situation of having technology that's not legal for export to China being made IN China. I've never figured that part out, and I really don't buy the whole "But those factories are carefully monitored!" line.

EDIT: There's also the older historical precedent of a swordsmith to the shogun in Japan who saw a dutch matchlock musket, and got a few to look at. He couldn't figure out how to close off the barrel properly, so he sold his daughter for gunsmithing lessons. A strange trade, but it made the ship's smith stay in the country for a few years to get permission to get her out, which was, of course, the entire plan.

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

I thought you didn't like John Ringo.