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the force of external air pressure would be essentially buoyant when close to earth sea level the plan is for these sealed up asteroids to be delivered to the sahara desert where they would then be mined but miningcorp has a problem the government of the saharan hegemony is upping its landing fees and demanding a 100 increase in mining royalties stu mendez is miningcorp s man in orbit and the story is told through his first person perspective in a conference call with his boss a company lawyer and a suit from the state department mendez asks why the asteroid can t be landed in an american desert and is reminded that all the legislation that s paralyzing the mining industry so many contradictory laws in our country that it s hard to do anything say it can t instead the state department orders miningcorp to station the asteroid above the saharan hegemony s capital with the demand that it stick to the original numbers with the government also tapping all of miningcorp s private lines mendez isn t able to ask his boss directly what he s meant to do but he figures it out anyway the sphere is completed the retrorockets are ignited the encased asteroid is eased out of orbit on a long path that will take it over north america over the atlantic out to the sahara but the next set of retrorockets fire too soon and instead the asteroid stops descending over the appalachians and drifting straight toward washington it ends up directly over the united states capitol in fact for maximum symbolism mendez s threat is clear clear enough that i think it s worth quoting here congress the executive branch and i guess the judicial branch had better hurry and clear up this regulatory constipation that s strangling our nation in two days if the problem isn t fixed that rock is going to crush washington dc there s too much at stake for you to be arguing about this the only way that rock is going to move is if your country gets its butt in gear and starts getting serious about being competitive again the blue circle is two kilometres in diameter centred on the us capitol this was generated by the google maps radius tool at obeattie github io gmaps radius with his threat made mendez orders the us government to repeal seven hundred and thirty eight laws described only as every one of them senseless every one nearly overturned in congress but tabled because of pork politics and i can t help but be reminded of how so many legislators today think things like net neutrality medicare or the numberless programs being crushed by the latest trainwreck of a tax bill are senseless the writer reminds us that mendez isn t a bad guy really hell he even reminds them to evacuate the district of columbia because he really has no plan to keep from crushing the government into powder but even with a million metric tons of rock dropping onto their lap he says do you really think that will give them enough incentive to turn the country around the story ends with two news clippings one that between confirming that miningcorp got everything it wanted makes a zero crime rate in nation s capital for second straight month boast that really does not look good just for starters consider the consequences being suffered by the evacuated population of washington for example which was 595 000 in 1993 and who haven t been able to go home and one that establishes that the us is now using the vacuum spheres as weapons against an undisclosed foreign country because that what s the use of that sweet sweet hegemony without making the entire world serve you for me though what the story really ended with was an exceptionally bad taste in my mouth and the lesson if terrorism will enrich you you should do it and if you have a power that others lack you should force other people to do your bidding i m confident that s not the author s own reading of the story but that s the thing with stories as with anything else you can t put vacuum spheres around a story politics always find their way in and what s perfectly straightforward and normal and unremarkable to one person can very easily be horrifying to another as a story to bring down the steel is shot through with the sort of politics that continue to dominate in the right wing today it even has the same knee jerk recognition of the environment as a good thing i guess before hitting the whole we need to stop strangling economic development button again and again in talking to a friend about this story she remarked that it was something that could never have been written after 9 11 i agree with that assessment but want to go a bit beyond it as well this is a story that i think could only have been written in the 1990s like i said it was one weird as hell time previous short sf reviews 24 perspectives w r thompson 23 ministry of space warren ellis et al 22 when planets collide gold key comics 21 you source of tears andrew barton 20 the helix gerard rejskind 19 the thirst quenchers rick raphael 18 hackers rick cook 17 attached to the land donald j bingle 16 the great gizmo machine pierce rand and john forte 15 alien psychologist erik fennel 14 the frontliners verge foray 13 second chance walter kubilius and fletcher pratt 12 hades charles f ksanda 11 revolt of the ants milton kaletsky 10 blessed are the meekbots daniel f galouye 9 to make a new neanderthal w macfarlane 8 funnel hawk tom ligon 7 testing one two three four steve chapman 6 bite lawrence a perkins 5 no shoulder to cry on hank davis 4 crazy oil brenda pearce 3 the saturn game poul anderson 2 job inaction timothy zahn 1 roachstompers s m stirling posted by phoebe barton at 16 58 1 comment labels 1990s politics sf short sf review saturday december 9 2017 tunnel visions the helsinki metro every once in a while i hop out of toronto land in some other city with some other light or heavy rail transit system and look around at different ways of getting around by rail whether it s on the ground under it or above it all in the land of confusion that is this twenty first century it s almost comforting to know that there s a transit system where smiling is specifically allowed everywhere because who doesn t love commuting am i right it s a system that reached further than any other of a system orange like no other is orange where some stations have three names and where you can be connected to the world while in the middle of a tunnel i didn t know what to expect not really especially not from a language that was occasionally as reminiscent of japanese as it was english somewhere there s got to be someone spinning conspiracy theories from the similarity of the japanese kippu and the finnish lippu both of which mean ticket but no matter what language you re speaking metro means metro the helsinki metro was the newest of the nordic countries three metro systems the smallest and the least used at least until i remembered that denmark is also a nordic country and that by opening the copenhagen metro in 2002 denmark ruined everything but i m not here to compare so crudely i ve never even been to any of the other ones riding it was the first chance i ve had to evaluate rapid transit in a country outside the anglosphere some things caught my eye some things made me wonder and some things i d never even considered let alone see before but in the end every metro is meant to move people incidentally a note between taking the notes for this project and writing this post the near mythical länsimetro extension opened taking service west to espoo and adding eight new stations to the map as much as i d like to incorporate the new bits into this work flying from toronto to helsinki is a bit expensive having a system update itself while i m still evaluating it isn t something i ve ever had to worry about for one of these but i feel like it s appropriate here out of all the metro systems i ve touched on in this series the helsinki metro took me further than all of them system a train crosses the vuosaari bridge near rastila station bound for the western end of the line the helsinki metro is the northernmost rapid transit system in the world and unless reykjavik gets ambitious that record isn t likely to fall any time soon its northernmost station mellunmäki sits at 60 degrees 14 minutes north but you d never know it just standing on the platform there it s simple straightforward unpretentious much like the network as a whole finland isn t part of scandinavia but i can see echoes of that clean no nonsense scandinavian design in the shape of the metro at the same time there s an appealing roughness to it exemplified to me by stone strewn trackbeds that look like what you d find on a regular surface railway european systems tend to have a reputation for complexity look at the multicoloured spaghetti plates of london paris or berlin but the helsinki metro is easy to wrap your head around even if you can t tell the difference between finnish and quenya it s shaped rather like a tuning fork with trains running on two services m1 and m2 but between tapiola in the west and itäkeskus in the east there s a substantial service overlap all trains service rautatientori connected to helsinki central station and one of the city s gateways to the rest of the world and the monolithic kamppi centre a bit of a change from when i was there when the overlap ended at kamppi and only half the trains continued on to ruoholahti which was the westernmost point in the system for twenty four years it reminded me of boston s blue line with one end of the line still in the central city to be honest speaking as an anglophone the most complex part of the helsinki metro was getting the names straight names like rautatientori were easy for me to stumble over with my english language brain and i often found the stations swedish names easier to remember but that will only take memory so far while kamppi s swedish name is kampen not much of a stretch a lot of these stations are named not for streets but neighbourhoods with actual meaningful names to an english speaker ruoholahti and gräsviken may look like they have no relation at all but they both mean the same thing roughly grass bay helsinki s nature as a bilingual city makes it clear why the stations were named like this but it s an interesting counterpoint to the other bilingual city metro i ve covered the montreal metro if helsinki s naming policy was used there côte vertu station might be known in english as virtue coast in the interest of keeping things straightforward i ll use the finnish station names throughout this article no what s really striking about the helsinki metro is that more so than a lot of other systems i ve used it feels almost like a system of wormholes from what i understand helsinki didn t start developing in earnest beyond its 19th century core until the 1970s and it shows take sörnäinen station only a few stops away from the central railway station deep enough in the core to be connected to helsinki s streetcar network two minutes east puts you at kaisatama an infill station surrounded by what feels like a completely new urban district under construction two minutes past that takes you to kulosaari which serves a leafy green island with a quiet suburban feel it s a significant difference from toronto where subway lines built under former streetcar routes gives a certain continuity to the shape of the city and where big divergences come mainly from past city boundaries or line extensions helsinki central station rautatientori and kaivokatu looking east if only i d thought to take this picture on a day that wasn t overcast the metro is well integrated with the rest of helsinki s transit infrastructure from rautatientori for example you can catch a ring rail service to the airport one of the commuter trains that reach across much of southern finland or long distance trains to rovaniemi or even to russia seven of helsinki s streetcar lines serve rautatientori as well connected to the underground station by a transferway in the median of kaivokatu similar to the transferway that existed at yonge and bloor in toronto before the construction of the bloor danforth subway every station from ruoholahti to sörnäinen is served by streetcars and beyond them bus connections are available the level of integration between services is closer to vancouver s style than toronto s though whether transferring to a streetcar or a bus from a metro station there were fare paid zone lines in between incidentally one issue about that transferway it s not entirely prepared for the sudden drenching rain that seems to be no stranger to helsinki because otherwise my encounter with it during my time there must have been an extremely lucky roll hell if there s more than one streetcar waiting at the stop and yours is the one parked behind the one in front of the shelters you d better be ready to get wet nevertheless this integration helps ensure that a lot of people use the metro in 2016 it carried 64 1 million passengers in a service area with a metropolitan population of 1 4 million or 45 7 passengers per person per year this is close to toronto s figure of 51 3 passengers per person per year it s not a system that s easy to get lost in and with only nine stations not served by both lines if you do take a wrong turn it s easy to correct it in my experience the helsinki metro didn t demand much cognitive effort to get around it was only when i was aiming for mellunmäki or vuosaari that i ever had to pay attention to where i was going at all and that s one of the critical tests of a transit system people have enough to worry about in their lives without having to negotiate a maze of a metro still if you need some help finding your way you won t lack for information this wasn t the first time i d been on a system that used more than one language but in many places the helsinki metro is trilingual beyond the translated station names the signage is provided in finnish swedish and english i even saw one or two that were quadrilingual with russian being added into the mix but these tended to be of the danger do not touch variety you can get around easily while knowing barely a word of finnish because i did and i do though i d recommend at least anteeksi because it s better to excuse yourself if you have to navigate a crowd you ll likely also pick up kielletty within the first twenty four hours considering how often it shows up in signage my only regret is that while an english speaker can tease an understandable meaning out of the metro s swedish signage swedish doesn t play by the same pronunciation rules kulosaari s swedish name is brändö but no matter how much you might want it to be otherwise it only has electric lights and not electrolytes stations daylight and shadow meet on the rastila station platform i have my suspicions that if i do ever end up accidentally killing myself it ll probably be in a subway station rushing for a train see in toronto a lot of the system is still not only grou...
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