McAndrew's weird science

I've gone through the first two parts of Stephen Baxter's Bronze Summer and am fed up with it; so I'm off to try Charles Sheffield's McAndrew stories again.

McAndrew is Scotty. Seriously: here's the "Mac" and there's North Britain's patron saint. Sheffield uses McAndrew and his assistant and pilot Jeanie Roker to explore kewl syfy idears.

Sheffield in 2000 collected these tales into The Compleat McAndrew, which has an appendix defending the sciencyness. The science is from the middle 1970s and mostly held up as of the writing of the appendix. The speculations derived from those earlier years are faring... less well, today.

The first story (and appendix) propose "kernels" roaming about the Oort Cloud. The "kernel" will be the Kerr-Newman [black] hole but we're using the term "Cornhole" for other things these days. Anyway you spin up a black hole, to store energy in its ergosphere - the oblate bit - and get that energy back when you slow it down. Needless to say: there aren't any kernels out there. Cornhole-afficionado Baxter in Proxima instead had it that kernels were being made (somehow) on Mercury, where the energy is greater.

"Moment of Inertia" designs a spaceship with its 50km front plate made from squishing an asteroid down to near-neutronium density. Er. Okay; I suppose lots of kernels could get you the same effect. That story's mission is to Planet X, then posited to be affecting Neptune's orbit. We now know that this Planet X doesn't exist. We are, however, on a new hunt for "Planet Nine" and/or a Mars-sized comet affecting Sedna et al. so, we'll call this a wash.

As notes the appendix, the main problem in the high-density dinner plate is moving this monster in a timely fashion. Sure, the crew won't feel inertia. But the overall ship does; McAndrew even gets annoyed with someone calling it an inertialess ship. Might this be a comment on the EM Drive? It might!

Third story in, "All the Colors of the Vacuum" throws physics by the wayside in proposing how to push his ship without removing all its mass as propellant. That solution is Zero Point Energy, which will later be Stargate Atlantis' magic fuel-source. This isn't just a handwave in the story; its inventor will be a macguffin whom McAndrew and Roker must rescue. From the forbidden asteroid of philosopher-kings.

Also in the appendix are string-theory, axions, dark matter, and supersymmetry all of which we still haven't found and are rapidly constraining off the textbooks.

On the social side, Sheffield is just a better person than is Baxter so nobody is getting raep'd. Sheffield clearly belongs to the Robert Heinlein school of SF: where men and women all get together in a cuddle puddle, engineers are awesome, and "political correctness" is stupid. Sheffield, accordingly, in 2000 chose Baen as his vehicle to get The Compleat McAndrew out to the bookstores. Truman / Kennedy liberalism, then; which became the neocons. Also around here, maybe a little Righter, are Niven and (in earlier, happier times) Pournelle. As for Frank Herbert, that one exudes the incense of NRx. None of this makes for a worse story; Abraham and Franck are FAR on the Left but also (like Herbert) supreme cynics, so The Expanse has been a classic for most of its first three seasons. Sheffield, by contrast, might be too good a person to work in transplanetary SF.