More notes. I'll bold the demographic stuff, since it's what I'm most fascinated with.
* In 2009 on Firstside there's a device named a scanner hood- it's used to monitor brain activity, but a variant of the same electronic process could produce an artificial analogue of natural sleep to hasten healing these days. (Sleep induction)
* In the 2009 of the book, there are display glasses that "looked like old-fashioned Ray-Bans" and have "tiny mirrors and lasers began to shine images onto his retinas." 3D-glasses. Professional movies would "would have given a seamless wraparound 3-D effect, with only the fact that you couldn't alter the viewpoint by turning your head to tell it from the real thing."
* Dueling among the Thirty was legal in New Virginia, but very rare; the Old Man could resurrect laws a hundred years dead, but even he couldn't erase what that century had done to the minds and ways of men. Not all at once, at least. It did happen every now and then—her grandfather said that there should be an ultimate restraint on discourtesy, a limit past which you could go only at risk of life and limb.
* By 1954, there were nearly twenty thousand people altogether in the Commonwealth.
* It's confirmed that they got Dutchmen from the East Indies to settle in New Virginia, and French from North Africa.
* The FBI had set up the system during the [War on Terror]; computers collating input from retina scanners, fingerprint and voiceprint scanners, and public surveillance cameras running face recognition software and reading things like license plate numbers. It had been extremely useful, but it had also never been popular—there were already calls for dismantling the whole system.
* This national grid is sufficient is able to track people's movements for years, realizing that Adrienne Rolfe spends large amounts of time in the warehouse to the gate. Big Brother wins again.
* Modern night-sight glasses are not much bulkier than sunglasses, and there was less of the green glow.
* A standard-issue FBI tool: looks like blank Yale with a miniature doorknob on the handle. It hummed a little as she inserted the key end, then went through a series of barely audible clicks before turning inert. Sensors of the key adjusts it automatically.
* neurotone: Think of it as a chemical equivalent of electroshock, which mimics the effects of a moderately severe concussion very closely," Adrienne said, working the plunger with her thumb until a bead of clear liquid appeared on the tip. "Developed for the GSF—the Gate Security Force—here on FirstSide; not that the developer knew who we were or what we wanted it for. Usually the subject wakes up with a splitting headache and no memory of the recent past. The past day or two."
* His data was burned into a file with some sort of read-only central databank; people had talked about that for years during the war, especially after the Charleston disaster, but the ACLU had always killed it.
* Nostradamus: the Commonwealth Information and Communications System. "… imagine that the U.S. government ruled the whole civilized world, that it owned AOL, and AOL was the whole Internet, everywhere. That it owned and operated every ISP, and there was only one type of modem and one set of software for it, and the super-AOL owned all the cables and servers and the whole communications industry and the telephone net and all the TV stations and online databanks and the public library as well. It's an intranet, a closed system. No computer-to-computer contact outside it at all, unless you use floppies, and those can be read anytime you upload to a computer in touch with the system. And you have to use your ID card and get a scan anytime you log on, even from a public terminal. ... It's been updated frequently since—all high-broadband fiber now" Floppies? Barbarians!
* The Commission—which we Rolfes and our friends run, more or less—believes in leaving a minimal footprint back there and limited expansion here; that's why our faction is called the Conservatives. The Collettas are more ambitious… Oh, hell, it's complicated, sixty years of politics. The Collettas are the head of the Imperialist party here. They want to conquer this world, more or less, and rule all the natives as slaves, more or less. They don't put it quite that way, and don't mention that they'd also like to be kings, emperors, themselves. They're buddy-buddy with the Batyushkovs, who I think still have political ambitions back FirstSide, not just here, ambitions in Russia.
* Rolfeston, Pop: 29,855.
* Most of the butchers in NV are Balts and Germans. A bunch of them entered in the forties and the businesses stayed in the same families.
* "Wait a minute," Tully said shrewdly. "What's a day's pay here? Entry-level, grunt work."
"Two dollars and all found," she said. "Three-fifty if you're finding your own eats and bunk. That's for a day laborer, a deckhand on a fishing boat, that sort of thing. The deckhand might get paid in a share of the profits plus fish."
Nickel a pound for filet mignon and three cents for shrimp still sounds pretty cheap , Tom thought.
"Where's the catch?" he said aloud. "Taxes? Housing?"
"You can get a two-bedroom house around here for two thousand," she replied. "And taxes are low; mostly local school taxes, that sort of thing. No more than a tenth of your income, less for the bottom of the pyramid."
* "Well, food and housing are cheap," she said. "So are clothes and shoes—most things made here in the Commonwealth are low-cost—except gas, which is kept expensive deliberately, ten cents a gallon. Stuff from FirstSide can get pricey, especially if it's big and bulky. Cars are a luxury—ordinary people in Rolfeston usually rent one if they want to get out of town, and use public transport or bicycles inside..."
* Central Committee of the Gate Control Commission, representing the Thirty Families—Thirty-two, strictly speaking—some of them men who served with him in the Pacific, the rest relatives from back in ol' Virginny, then a few more with each wave of immigrants. The Rolfes, the Fitzmortons, the O'Briens, the Collettas, the Hugheses, the Ludwins, the Carons, the Pearlmutters, the von Traupitzes, the Chumleys, the Versfelds.
* "Blackfoot is a translation of pied noir . North African French, like the folks who own this restaurant. When-we's are"—she nodded toward another party at a nearby table, three generations in khaki shorts and bush jackets, from a white-haired elder down to a clutch of tow-thatched children—"that comes from 'when we were in…' Kenya or Rhodesia, usually, which they're always going on about. You've met some of our Afrikaners, quite a few of those over the last fifteen years, and Russians and some Balkan Slavs—all of 'em with reasons to find a bolthole, the biggest groups of immigrants we've had in my lifetime. It was the same back in the forties, Granddad got Germans and Balts with, ummmm, a strong incentive to go somewhere they'd never be found; a fair number of Italians; east Europeans running from Stalin; and Brits tired of rationing and things going downhill. Plus we've always had a steady trickle of Americans; they're about half the total, and much the largest single group."
"There haven't been more than a few hundred Involuntaries all up, and most of them settle in well enough. Meanwhile, all the original groups have been intermarrying enthusiastically, the melting pot in action. The ones in the first twenty years were the most numerous; by now three-quarters of the Settlers were born here, and nine-tenths of the Thirty. I was, and my father was too, and my nieces and nephews, and some of them have kids already. With our rate of natural increase we double every generation even without immigrants. And of course, nobody leaves."
* P-63: an immunosterilizant the Chinese had developed back around the turn of the century. It made the body's immune system sensitive to some of the proteins on the surface of sperm, programming it to treat them as foreign tissue. It was quite popular back on the other side of the Gate because it didn't have any other symptoms; in fact it mimicked a common natural cause of infertility that had been a complete mystery until the 1990s.
* "In 1947, some Latvian refugees recruited as Settlers brought over viral hepatitis and typhus both. They got flown in and shoved through the Gate quick to avoid trouble about visas."
* "The [Southern] Agrarians thought laissez-faire capitalism was a dastardly subversive plot, and that Adam Smith and Karl Marx were six of one and half a dozen of the other. Things were different back then—real conservatives like the Agrarians worried about pollution and thought factory smokestacks were ugly and wanted people to be in touch with the land and nature. Commies and leftists and liberals loved steel mills and coal mines and wrote folk songs about building dams and bridges."
"That's a switch," Tom admitted, a little startled. His brows knitted in thought. "That explains a bit of what I've seen here."
"It does. Just don't think the Old Man's a Green. Some of the results are the same, but the attitude's completely different. Anyway, Granddad was quite taken with the Agrarians back at VMI. Considering that for us Rolfes everything had been going to hell since 1783 or so—we were the ones who wanted to keep the Articles of Confederation and reject that newfangled Constitution—it's not surprising. Most of the people the Thirty Families brought in here agree with him, roughly. So do most of their children, and the grandchildren, my generation. They came here to get away from modern life, remember, and they raised us here with not much of an outside world to offset their influence. Even the Thirty Families don't live FirstSide anymore. We visit, we shop, we do business there, but this is our home."
* "[Total population is] About two hundred thousand, according to Nostradamus," she said. "Just over three thousand in the Thirty Families, a hundred and fifty thousand Settlers, and fifty thousand nahua; there may be ten thousand or so wild Indians left in what you'd call California, say thirty or forty thousand between the Rockies and the sea from Baja to Alaska, but we don't have much contact with them. More than half of us live around the bay; there are pockets of settlement down the coast to San Diego—we get our oil from the Long Beach field—and another outpost up around the site of Portland in Oregon. A few thousand in Hawaii and the Australian colony near Adelaide. And a chain through the Sierras to Nevada, with some small outposts further east; that's the hardest to keep up, so far from the sea."
* Tom was in the Rangers and Tully was in the Tenth Mountain Division.
* "The farmers are tenants, allod tenants. The way it usually works is that the head of the Family, the Prime, keeps a seat—a home place—from his domain, and hands out the rest in estates of a few thousand acres to his kids and collaterals—everybody but the Prime and the eldest of the firstborn's line are collaterals... I'd need the Prime's approval to sell. I can't subdivide it or alienate it outside the Family. The landholders rent to farmers on shares; they provide the land and fixed assets, buildings and fences and irrigation and so forth, pay any taxes, and get three-tenths of the crop. The farmer finds the labor and working capital, the machinery and livestock, and keeps the other seventy percent."
"Allod? It means 'inalienable'; I think it's a German word originally. As long as the tenant keeps the land in good heart and pays his share, he can't be turned out, nor his heirs; the landholder only gets a say and part of the price if the tenant wants to sell it outside the farmer's bloodline. Not that anyone would lean on his tenants anyway—good ones are too hard to find! Most landholders rent their land except for a home ranch around their country house..."
* "A large majority had been born in the Commonwealth, and many were second or third generation; a majority of their grandparents had come from America, with a bias toward the upper South, and the rest had ancestors who were German, French, and Italian, with a scattering from all over Eastern Europe. The immigrant minority included Russians, Afrikaners, and a few Croats and Serbs."