At first I thought that said "Young Russia" and I did a double take. Although, that would be a good name for a band. Do you play bass?
I play the organ, accordion, and recorder.
Young Rissa is part of the Hulzein Saga, a series of space opera novels by F.M. Busby. The series takes place in a not-that-distant future in which the U.S. government could no longer afford to govern, and so the multinational conglomerates took over. Every four years they would bid for the right to govern, and when the Synthetic Food & Combine won, it annexed Canada and Mexico. That conglomerate was later defeated by United Energy & Transport (UET), which promptly canceled all future elections. Later on, they literally took over most of the world (the only holdouts are Australia and Argentina, which are Hulzein-controlled territories).
One of the things it did was institute Total Welfare. If you were in debt, UET would pay them off, and you would go into Total Welfare - with the idea being that you could work off your debt and start over. In practice, however, hardly anybody was able to work off their debt. When only a small amount of money went into your account and you're charged for things like food, the system was pretty much set up to guarantee that the "clients" would fail. UET essentially turned the clients into government-owned slaves that would be forced to work at whatever menial jobs existed within the Welfare Centres and in the outside world.
In later decades, the Welfare system is expanded to not only apply to people who can't pay their debts, but also to political prisoners. Annoy anyone with enough pull and you could find yourself in Welfare, on trumped-up charges.
There's much more to the books than that, of course. But the thing is, the Welfare part of the series could actually happen. This is something I said in a conversation with F.M. Busby himself, when I met him at a convention in the late 1980s. He pooh-poohed it at the time, but I have to wonder what he would think now. Not that anything like this has been instituted, but it would actually be pretty easy to do with our current technology. All it requires is a government willing to suspend or cancel citizens' rights and use the military to enforce that.
Wikipedia said:
In the
Rissa Kerguelen and
Bran Tregare series of Hulzein family novels, Busby's theme was one of human brutality on an institutional scale and how it inevitably affects the very people who will eventually fight against it. Additional themes included the worst extremes of corporate power, the oppression of minorities (particularly homosexuals), human rights in totalitarian regimes and the dehumanization of those who serve totalitarian states. Busby was also known for his strong female characters, so much so that many readers assumed that his initials indicated that he was a woman himself.
Although Busby's setting for the series initially lacked
faster than light travel and substantial contact with aliens, the series clearly qualifies as "
space opera" by the treatment of the characters involved - especially after the end of first trilogy, where both FTL and intelligent aliens were introduced.
Busby himself was a longtime
science fiction fan and may have been influenced by many writers and artists, though it is difficult to identify any one influence in his writing. The Hulzein series of novels is essentially the story of an evil empire defied by a small number of heroic but all too human characters.
Source.
Some of my NaNoWriMo projects in the past few years have been Hulzein saga fanfiction. Busby left so many story threads unused, had just brief mentions of a lot of interesting characters, and he stopped writing in the '90s (he died in 2005). I did a search several years ago to see if any fanfic existed, and came up with nothing other than a plaintive post on someone's LiveJournal, asking if any fanfic existed.
Since I believe this series deserves to be continued and the gaps filled in, I decided to do it myself.
My fingers have been acting up lately. There's this joint pain in my fingers that has been troubling me for many years. Not arthritis, don't know what the hell it is, neither do my doc. Anyway, last couple of years it's been very manageable. But before that it was worse and it was very handicapping for a spell of a few years. Typing on a keyboard was right out, unless it was very short texts. I really don't want to go back to that so I'm hoping it's just a temporary flare up of some kind.
Have you asked your doctor if you can be tested for fibromyalgia?
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and I want to go to Mars.
