An unfortunate roundup of passings....
I note the passing of a science fiction legend. My friend and colleague Eric Flint left us, after a long illness. Best known for his his innovative and way-fun slipstream SF novel 1632, Eric then used the enthusiasm of that readership to spawn the most successful and extensive exploration of a shared universe, ever, using it to mentor many rising talents, along the way, particularly through his publishing house, the Ring of Fire Press.
In fact, when it came to raw storytelling – utter devotion to character, consistency and gripping narrative - he was among the best since Poul Anderson. (I had the honor to supply a canonical novella for this vast and wonderful 1632 gedanken cosmos.)
Eric will be deeply missed.
- Alas, trailblazing actress Nichelle Nichols, who was unforgettable in portraying communications officer Lieutenant Uhura in the original Star Trek series and its sequels, has died at age 89. In later years she was active in recruiting women and minorities to NASA. She will be remembered...
- In addition, scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock, who proposed the Gaia hypothesis that all living organisms on the planet are inter-connected, died recently at 103 years old. I drew upon the Gaia concept in creating my novel, Earth. Lovelock remained active, publishing his latest book: Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyper-Intelligence a couple of years ago.
- RIP also Vangelis, best known for his film scores, e.g. the haunting score of Bladerunner. But also brilliant music that I’ve oft cited. For example, I touted this early work by him that recites visible traits of our planet.... including the last one that we are changing fast. He warned us.... so beautifully.
My favorite of his works... it gives me chills... is “The State of Independence.” The classic version by Vangelis himself offers incredible instrumentals including a spine tingling saxophone.
But then there’s the wonderful version covered by Donna Summer with elements of both disco and gospel. A dose of optimism you may be needing, right about now. In this video.
Oh, here’s one with slightly better sound plus a glimpse of the recording session when the backup group – including a very young (and still black) Michael Jackson shows some early sign of his moves.
And one more...
Amid all the kvelling on James Caan as Sonny in The Godfather. Meh, it was a solid role done very well. But many of us will always remember the beautiful, understated and poignant portrayal he gave – of a confused but soulful hero-athlete – in Rollerball, one of the most under-appreciated of all SF films and with a plausible warning!
Though he was great in the film Misery, with Kathy Bates. And let us not forget Alien Nation, which became a really rich social science fiction franchise, the first expressing real faith in our unusual civilization bent on flawed but improving tolerance.
On a more positive note…
To help motivate us...I happen (personal quirk) to be an absolute sucker for feminist anthems. Other than political/social motives, I confess I am simply jazzed by the pure sass and gumption of songs like “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” and “I am woman, hear me roar,” all the way across the spectrum to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun!” …. But my favorite is “Sisters are doing it for themselves!” - this version in which the great Aretha Franklin joins the Eurythmics simply kicks ass! How can you watch this and not tap your feet… and sing along and (if you’re male) say “yes ma’am! Tell me what you need done and I’ll help you get it done.”
And yes Helen Reddy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rptW7zOPX2E
Reba McIntyre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zplc4Ienkws
Loretta Lynn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoqErv8bdcI
And more… and more… and more…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IGVxBb5uYk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGiWITGArLI
Finally... A fascinating riff on how not just sci fi but children’s literature in Soviet times satirized how a people can kowtow to power.
93 comments:
Not being a country music type, I only came across "The Pill" a few years ago.
Daaaammmmmmmnnn!
That and those other songs of defiance are a welcome spit in the face of patriarchal backwardness.
I hope they turn up in a few campaign ads.
Tangentially related: The anthem for the 80s film "Working Girl," about a woman facing off against workplace challenges. "Let the River Run" also celebrates young people and the liberating environment of cities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv-0mmVnxPA
(Ah: "Simon has stated that she found inspiration for the lyrics by first reading the original script, and then the poems of Walt Whitman. Musically, she wanted to write a hymn to New York with a contemporary jungle beat under it, so as to juxtapose those opposites in a compelling way.")
Also add to the list:
- Bernard Cribbins
- Judith Durham
In follow up of last posts "science stuff". Alas, human ingenuity has always been directed to potentially destructive tech. And while I'm not much of a gun person this video was fascinating. It is an electromagnetic coil gun that operates off of a cordless drill battery. In fact you can in a pinch fire cordless screwdriver bits. So far it is along the lines of something you'd use to chase off bunnies on your lawn, but as a bit of "SciFi Weaponry" it is seriously cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwHRjgVWFno
Ah, the passing of SciFi writers and actors. The Greats have already left us (Asimov et all), the Near Greats are starting to go. Who in the current crop of new talent will take their place?
Tacitus
At least Buffy St Marie is still making music.
http://buffysainte-marie.com
When news of Ms Nichols' passing broke, the Star Trek Online community began holding torchlight vigils at Starfleet Academy and Earth Spacedock.
https://massivelyop.com/2022/08/01/star-trek-online-fans-hold-vigil-for-the-late-magnificent-nichelle-nichols/
She will be missed indeed. On the other hand, at least she got to see her legacy enshrined in the official Trek universe, with the Reliant-class USS Uhura and the Starfleet Academy museum display about Capt. Uhura's five-year mission to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud with USS Leondegrance in season 2 of Star Trek: Picard.
The Ediacaran Cylons: Our Biological Nurseries and Mentors
Superman had the fortress of solitude and we had the biological machines/nurseries of the Ediacaran.
Dickinsonia and the other Ediacaran were not uplift coded. They were supremely designed biological machines. Viruses and disease trigger “evolutionary” responses in the uplift coded. But the biological machines of the Ediacaran blocked these changes making them functionally immune to all bacteria and viruses. They were a machine designed to protect and nourish the lifeforms that we are now. They were not supposed to leave any descendants.
Where did you get the idea of for uplift?
https://www.marsemb.com/aliens/
Tacitus, see how I am nurturing new SF writing talents! The "Out of Time" (or "Yanked!") series: Only teens can teleport through time and space! Dollops of fun, adventure & optimism for young adults. http://www.davidbrin.com/outoftime.html
Ah, the passing of SciFi writers and actors. The Greats have already left us (Asimov et all), the Near Greats are starting to go.
I'm going to churlishly argue that there are still plenty of great SF&F writers. They don't stand out from the pack because there are so many more writers, writing better, than in the glory days of yore. It's easy to be a Great when your competition are hacks — it's a lot harder now when so many great writers are writing.
But there are amazingly great writers out there, way too many to read them all, even if (like me) you're limited to only English.
Tacitus asks Who in the current crop of new talent will take their place?
The sad answer is >No One<.
Science Fiction as it was once known -- the art of the possible, never the impossible -- no longer exists, having been replaced by impossible dreams & utopian schemes of human perfectibility.
The term 'utopia', as once coined by Sir Thomas More, was originally intended as a pejorative that described an impossible, nonexistent & farcical place, while the new crop of science fiction authors have all but forgotten this in their attempt to describe an impossible & inhuman future.
This new crop, they appear to hate humanity & the flawed human condition, and so they commit bait & switch, offering up (in lieu of Science Fiction) the theological doctrines of immaterialism, inclusivity, equity, equalism, social justice, selflessness & perfectibility.
Don't they understand that utopianism is anathema to storytelling?
And what's with all this spiritual self-improvement shit?
The sum total of all human progress amounts to an incessant struggle (conflict) for material improvement, empiric advantage & physical gain.
It's why some humans want to go into space:
To get rich off asteroid mining, to gain status, to meet green animal women, to get laid & to self-perpetuate.
Everything else is window dressing.
Best
While anecdotally there certainly are examples (many) of the kinds of fiction poor L describes, his plaint in general is typically mad. I could spend days and days reciting recent titles that fall into the Good Old Stuff category, including everything from Ring of Fire Press, until I was hoarse from the recitation.
Sure, none of that GOS will win any Hugos. That corner of the SF community is wholly captured and there you might find a bit of overlap with locum's whine.
Alas, that's irrelevant. A self-cauterized ghetto. Meanwhile, his whimper about seeing no GOS only shows one thing - how LAZY he is.
In the coming 'referendum to join Russia' that's planned in some parts of Ukraine for next week, there will be no polling places or secret ballot boxes. military government officials will geo to door interviewing orally to tally 'votes.' I recall nothing like it, even in Orwell.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-conflict-updates
Good video on comparable strengths and US aid in Ukraine. Good stuff. But Cappy leaves out one major thing. Yes, both sides are suffering huge equipment attrition. But what of rapid change in the relative numbers of infantry on each side? One hears credible stories of 500,000 or so eager Ukrainian volunteers, who have by now had 4+ months of training. Sure, they are not qualified or equipped to go toe-to-toe with fully equipped RF BTGs. But those BTGs are way winnowed-down, by now. And that's a lot of men to spread along the front. And then to on-signal apply pressure at every point. At minimum they will expose RF assets for counter-fire strikes. But somewhere along that front, RF defenses will collapse. Could this all com,e down to thousands of... 'average infantrymen'? Or am I just blowing smoke?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkgRJqij4k
" on-signal apply pressure at every point."
Dr Brin, re UK potential offensive...
Stosstruppen tactics would apply. It works if the infantry squads are trained to bypass enemy fire and push further on, and if they are well supported. If not, you have Ypres and the Kindermord.
Locum, some humans want to meet green animal men instead. Also, humans are not motivated only by money, sex and power.
As Lois Bujold has written, there are also elephants.
Pappenheimer
From Petersburg to the later Iran-Iraq war, WWI tactics seem to be a default when the higher tech isn't available or working.
Pappenheimer
I've also noted a change in SciFi over the last twenty years or so. Less outward looking, more introspective. Less optimism, more post apoc nihilism. I think this reflects a degree of pessimism in the younger generations as manifested by the ultimate societal No Vote....so many opting to not have families.
That being said I should point out several caveats.
1. I'm naturally optimistic.
2. We all self select in our reading. There were dark, dismal viewpoints in the Golden Age. There are sunny places in the current dystopian landscape.
3. The old always kvetch about the young.
As I'm not averse to criticism of OGH when I think he's got it coming neither am I going to shirk on praise. The Uplift Universe was darn near the last interesting construct in mainstream scifi.
Just my opinions of course.
Tacitus
Tacitus, try Iain M. Banks. Rob Sawyer does lots of fun stuff. Nancy Kress. ...
...And my The "Out of Time" (or "Yanked!") series: Only teens can teleport through time and space! Dollops of fun, adventure & optimism for young adults. http://www.davidbrin.com/outoftime.html
@Tacitus,
What happened to "Tacitus2"?
We all self select in our reading. There were dark, dismal viewpoints in the Golden Age. There are sunny places in the current dystopian landscape.
While that is certainly true, it did seem to me that as far back as the 1980s, the genre began to shift its focus from speculation about technology to speculation about the fantastic. It actually might be the fault of Star Wars, or maybe Dungeons and Dragons.
Regards my nom de cursor I'm just reverting to the original. Long, long ago when I wandered in here someone raised the objection that there was "another" Tacitus out there. And a prickly argumentative chap he was. So I added the 2.
Perhaps like being the Dread Pirate Roberts it is a title one just assumes.
More on the sea change in sci fi when time permits.
Tacitus
"...it did seem to me that as far back as the 1980s, the genre began to shift its focus from speculation about technology to speculation about the fantastic."
That may well be because from the viewpoint of the pre-'80s, technology has become fantastic. You, for example, likely have in your possession (and may even be reading this on!) a handheld pocket computer that operates without a separate keyboard, and links easily to a worldwide computing network that can present to you any information that has ever been digitized - and thanks to the efforts of a number of people who do it just for fun, that's the majority of all information ever gathered. From the writings of Plato to this morning's headlines, it's all available to anyone who can spare a minimum of ten bucks (the price for a disposable smartphone with a month of service from Walmart, and the fact that there's such a thing as a "disposable smartphone" is pretty goddamn fantastic, too). The only thing that prevents us from having the self-operating cars of '50s sci-fi is the fact that strong artificial intelligence is more difficult than we used to think. We're routinely turning plants into meat, and the price of such is coming down rapidly as economies of scale begin to apply. We've already managed to increase our production of food to the point that our planet is supporting more human life than had been dreamed possible in past eras (I keep having to mentally update one line from Tom Lehrer's classic "We Will All Go Together When We Go", when he refers to the species as "nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak"). The only reason we haven't genetically engineered unicorns and dragons is because that requires coming up with ways to anchor certain body parts that currently don't exist. That doesn't mean it's never going to happen.
Of course the nihilistic is currently dominating the landscape. Too many of us don't seem to comprehend the reality of what happens when you keep pouring crap into the sky, or that we need to find a way to either desalinate the seas at scale (without poisoning the remaining ocean with its own toxins) or import water from offplanet. Diseases are being permitted to run rampant, because preventing them "is agin mah freedums!" War, both conventional and non-, still looms as a potential ending to all. There are just so many points of failure clearly visible, it's hard for a lot of people to imagine how we might avoid them all. Even Star Trek, with its clearly utopian future, has to get there by way of the Bell Riots and nuclear war.
One of the purposes of SF, however, as our good host likes to point out, is to present us with cautionary tales and self-preventing prophecies. Read the dystopias, figure out how they happened, and try our best to avoid them - it's been done already, several times (Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" comes to mind).
Dr. Brin: try Iain M. Banks. Rob Sawyer does lots of fun stuff. Nancy Kress. ...
Lack of navel-gazing is the #1 reason why the Enlightenment wins in the long run.
We are a civilization, not a stultifying web of zero-sum transactions.
Tacitus is correct.
Science Fiction has lost its audacity, having become 'more introspective' to the point of penitence, as if self-mortification, simpering & favour currying was the price of admission to some sort of exclusive Galactic Country Club.
It's a social pathology, this disgusting western compulsion to apologize for all things incessantly, from caste & gender distinctions to climate change, and I am so sick of this Shame & Guilt Fest that I am left with ZFG.
The sad truth is that I am PROUD TO BE HUMAN, despite & perhaps because of all our flaws, and I miss Science Fiction as a literary genre that once reflected that pride, so much so that I hate humanity all the more for its timorous groveling.
K summed up this sentiment quite nicely:
Human thought is so primitive it's looked upon as an infectious disease by the rest of the universe. That kind of makes you proud, doesn't it?
Best
Jon S:
Read the dystopias, figure out how they happened, and try our best to avoid them - it's been done already, several times (Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" comes to mind).
As our host points out, the same with 1984 and maybe even Soylent Green.
However, the opposite also occurs. Many of today's authoritarians seem to have read 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale as how-to manuals, just as they have done with Mein Kampf and The Protcols of the Elders of Zion.
locunranch:
Tacitus is correct.
Help him, Jesus.
The sad truth is that I am PROUD TO BE HUMAN, despite & perhaps because of all our flaws, and I miss Science Fiction as a literary genre that once reflected that pride, so much so that I hate humanity all the more for its timorous groveling.
So are you fer humanity or again' it?
Larry Hart:
Pride and shame are not opposites but complementaries, in silent alliance.
Doubt and faith have a similar complementarity. For instance, I myself am skeptical that there is intelligent life on planet Earth. But I have complete faith that 1+1=2.
I've also noted a change in SciFi over the last twenty years or so. Less outward looking, more introspective. Less optimism, more post apoc nihilism.
1970s SF was pretty pessimistic and introspective, at least if you read any New Wave authors.
Robert.
Yes regards 70's with of course exceptions. I should have pushed my timeline for a change in mood further back.
Now as to why.
We stopped going to the moon, at least in person, in 1972. We hit a major obstacle to continued expansion of industry and commerce with the oil embargo crisis of 73 and 79. We had no Star Trek from 69 to 87 but that would be effect not cause. Star Wars started the cinematic conquest of Special Effects over thoughtful storyline.
You could have separate discussions on whether the change in SciFi is driven by change in society or secondarily by writers with differing life experiences.
Pulp magazines were killed off by TV which was slain by cyberspace. There are simply fewer venues to make money with imaginative fiction and more constraints always ensue from a smaller market.
Its harder to say why the current crop of writers in general is less expansive, less positive, less cheerful than the Grand Old Men were. Asimov and company lived through some bad times. I'd say the hangover from WW I was a much worse time to be alive than today. But they had something now lacking.
A well balanced education for one thing but that's yet another discussion.
Tacitus
You, for example, likely have in your possession (and may even be reading this on!) a handheld pocket computer that operates without a separate keyboard, and links easily to a worldwide computing network that can present to you any information that has ever been digitized
I.e. the pocket computers from The Mote in God's Eye, published in 1974.
Tacitus:
Star Wars started the cinematic conquest of Special Effects over thoughtful storyline.
I never thought of it this way before, but the most sci-fi (as opposed to Space Opera) aspect of Star Wars was not in the movie itself, but it was the movie. The ability to make a movie that looked like Star Wars in 1977 was in itself a triumph of science-fictionish technology.
Its harder to say why the current crop of writers in general is less expansive, less positive, less cheerful than the Grand Old Men were. Asimov and company lived through some bad times. I'd say the hangover from WW I was a much worse time to be alive than today. But they had something now lacking.
The World Wars and the Depression were indeed hard times, but I get the sense that people who lived through them sensed improvement on the way. The hard times themselves were challenges met, and that which didn't kill them made them stronger. Slogans like "Prosperity is just around the corner," reflected optimism.
Today, it's like everyone is waiting for the next shoe to drop. Modern slogans are more like, "The long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over."
A well balanced education for one thing but that's yet another discussion.
Yes, that too.
Some time in the 90s, a Chicago Tribune columnist wrote a snarky column about how simple game shows had become in the age of "Wheel of Fortune." He described some typical questions that housewives had been expected to answer on 1950s-era daytime game shows. They reflected a familiarity with such diverse subjects as classical music, political history, and medicine. We as a civilization have lost a lot in that regard.
Its harder to say why the current crop of writers in general is less expansive, less positive, less cheerful than the Grand Old Men were.
Hopeful fiction is still written. Cory Doctorow, for example, seems to have devoted himself to writing it. (At least his young adult stuff.)
And your Grand Old Men weren't all cheerful. Poul Anderson's series got darker the longer they lasted. H. Beam Piper have civilizations falling, and corruption at the heart of Paratime society. John Brunner was often gloomy. Randall Garret wrote thinly-disguised plantation tales of poor slaves suffering when they were freed from their caring masters…
Given that SF is no longer the almost-exclusive playground of white men, I'll hypothesize that one thing you're seeing is newer writers interrogating the unexamined assumptions of earlier writers, and discovering that grand empires are invariably supported by an underclass. Or are more interested in the small details glossed over in grand tales, because people like them were glossed over in stories when they were growing up. Or are distrustful of epic tales of hope and glory, because they have discovered how many of those that they were taught in school are one-sided and paper over atrocities.
Also, I'm pretty well the last generation that could assume that we would have it better than our parents. (We were wrong, but that's what we were told growing up.) Everyone younger than me knew that they likely wouldn't have it so good, would be working longer for less, were facing an environmental catastrophe…
SF has always reflected society and public concerns. WWII, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the environmental crisis… all have shaped popular SF. Both because of writers' experiences, but also because of audience demands.
I think it possible that your positive SF was written (or inspired) in the wave of optimism after winning WWII. Certainly a lot of 60s SF was Cold War-dark and gloomy.
But they had something now lacking.
And depending on the Old Man in question, lacked something we now have. Asimov boasted in print about sexually assaulting female SF fans, for example.
Pfeh. Poor L keeps leaping Aha! to claim folks ‘agree’ with him, knowing those folks will thus feel nauseated. Again, fellah… put up WAGER STAKES we can’t name a hundred SF works across the last decade that weren’t the Good old Stuff that you lament being extinct.
We had no Star Trek from 69 to 87
Really?
Anderson was tracing the fall of the Roman Empire, so of course his Technic tales grew darker, while continuing to explore some interesting facets of 'otherness'. Perhaps check out his Maurai stories, instead?
What qualifies as 'good old sf' anyway?
Tony
Good point. The 80's were a golden age for movies generally and the best of the ST films were made then. The first one ironically was a failed TV series. That helps explain the multiple new characters - and that was refreshing - that appeared and then vanished. ST I was not well regarded at the time but has held up nicely. TV level special effects and a thoughtful plot.
Wrath of Khan will always be my favorite. No explainin' some stuff.
Tacitus
Tacitus
Wrath of Khan will always be my favorite.
Totally agree. For all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that Carol Marcus is my favorite paramour for Kirk.
At first, I thought the Spock sacrifice was too contrived, but it's grown on me with multiple viewings. And it did get me to finally read A Tale of Two Cities.
Plus, it's funny now to see young Kirstie Alley as Saavik. Almost as funny as seeing young Susan Sarandon in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Todays "great" sci fi writers
Louis Bujold
L E Dahners
come to mind first but there were far more great stories from the 80's and 90's than from the 70's
Wrath of Khan was a heck of a lot of fun, but it was not the idealistic, serious ST that I really loved - the version shown in the first two seasons of TOS and which Roddenberry tried to being to the big screen in ST: TMP.
Sadly, TMP was a bit of a failure. In some respects, it had some check-the-box plot elements. Spock on Vulcan...check. Earth in the 23rd Century...check. Fatal transporter accident...check. I would love to do a fan edit of the film that deletes most of those elements. Start with the Klingon attack with only a minimal amount of Epsilon 9 (maybe just a shot or two of them monitoring the Klingon communications. Delete the scenes of Spock on Vulcan. Cut most of the fly-by of the Enterprise in space dock. Delete the transporter accident.
I liked the serious tone of ST: TMP; I just wish it had been a better movie.
K. B. Spangler is currently writing an ongoing webcomic with cyborg goverment agents that have gone rogue and refused to ruin the world (they can also talk to ghosts, but most of them don't know that), called A Girl and Her Fed (agirlandherfed.com). She's also published two novel series set in that world, one revolving around Hope Blackwell, the eponymous Girl, and the other around Rachel Peng, one of the cyborg agents who went blind when her chip was fully activated (she stared at the sun for 9 consecutive hours in shock) but gets around by using her artificial senses to read electromagnetic fields (and, apparently, empathic fields emitted by people, which she perceives as colors and is still working out). She also wrote the novella Stoneskin and its sequel, the novel The Blackwing War, in which a society of "witches" have managed to befriend something powerful enough to twist aspects of reality to its whim, but with the personality of a black lab puppy. It's used mostly to enable FTL travel.
Seanan McGuire, under the name "Mira Grant", writes medical horror/SF which can mostly be considered hopeful because humans survive, and even thrive. The novel Feed, the first book of the Newsflesh series, begins twenty years or so after the Zombie Apocalypse. There are certain places where sane people just don't go, but for most folks zombies are just one of those facts of life - you're born, you live, you die, your body rises from the ground driven by its Kellis-Amberlee infection to try to infect others, it's killed again and incinerated, the cycle continues. (Also, in the end we find out that humans are developing an immune-system response to K-A, and one day it may become commensal, continuing to destroy cold viruses and cancers without causing that zombification side effect.)
Carol Marcus's "Can I cook, or can't I?" line was one of the best ever.
Faustian pride in picking up the tools of Creation...
...betrayed in STIII's return to the lame/stupid Frankenstein mythos. 1980s 90s third SF flicks almost always betrayed the magnificent 2nd film.
"Sadly, TMP was a bit of a failure. In some respects, it had some check-the-box plot elements. Spock on Vulcan...check. Earth in the 23rd Century...check. Fatal transporter accident...check. I would love to do a fan edit of the film that deletes most of those elements. Start with the Klingon attack with only a minimal amount of Epsilon 9 (maybe just a shot or two of them monitoring the Klingon communications. Delete the scenes of Spock on Vulcan. Cut most of the fly-by of the Enterprise in space dock. Delete the transporter accident."
You can't really delete the Spock-on-Vulcan scenes, as they help explain why he's acting the way he's acting. A lot of the space porn can go, though - it was mostly there to help pad out the runtime into an entire movie, rather than its original intent to be the pilot of a TV show. And I'm sure there are better ways to indicate how unready the Enterprise is, and how unhealthy Kirk's obsession with taking command of her and taking her out is, than by killing two random NPCs in the transporter. Heck, wasn't that the whole point of that "wormhole" scene?
GMT -5 8032:
Wrath of Khan was a heck of a lot of fun, but it was not the idealistic, serious ST that I really loved - the version shown in the first two seasons of TOS and which Roddenberry tried to being to the big screen in ST: TMP.
Hmmmm, I beg to differ. The Genesis project was all that (I'm discounting how it was portrayed in the next movie). And that combined with the action and excitement of the Khan part of the plot gives the film a bit of everything a Trek fan could want.
Delete the scenes of Spock on Vulcan. Cut most of the fly-by of the Enterprise in space dock. Delete the transporter accident.
I liked the serious tone of ST: TMP; I just wish it had been a better movie.
It also suffered from the plot being a re-hash of the episode with Jason Roykirk.
But some of what you cite as failures makes more sense now that there you can't swing a dead cat without hitting more movie and tv Star Trek. In context, TMP was literally the big-screen depiction of Star Trek at long last. They had to have that fly-by of the ship and stuff like that, just to say, "We've arrived at the big screen!".
The scenes on Vulcan and the transporter accident, if perhaps overdone, were important to the plot. They needed Spock to replace the Vulcan who was lost to the accident, and Spock therefore changed course at a pivotal moment in his life, which would otherwise have gone in a completely different direction. Maybe all that should have been made clearer in the film rather than leaving it to the viewer to notice on his own.
The part I would have excised is Captain Decker being all hot to trot with the thing that killed his beloved just because it made itself look like her. Eeeww.
Dr Brin:
..betrayed in STIII's return to the lame/stupid Frankenstein mythos. 1980s 90s third SF flicks almost always betrayed the magnificent 2nd film.
In my old age, I am able to do with comics and movies what I never could in my youth--enjoy the versions that I like, including the implied-but-never-realized potential they set up, while totally disregarding the bad parts that came later.
Reread Fritz Leiber's 'A Pail of Air' and tell me again how you've read its recent & modern equal (link below).
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51461
Or, better yet, go full Robert (even though Robert Downey Jr argues that people should never go Full Robert) and immediately disparage, disqualify & cancel all authors who appear old, white, white adjacent, male, established, educated, heterosexual or potentially flawed because of undefined 'privilege'.
Now we have a wager, assuming you're still capable of naming at least 100 young unknown authors who've published awe-inspiring science fiction over the last decade.
Forget for the moment that Science Fiction (as well as Electrification, the Novel & the European Enlightenment) were all created & perpetuated by old, educated & mostly white males who were predominantly heterosexual.
We can't let a simple thing like FACT interfere with our stunningly brave & imaginary pro-diversity narrative, can we?
Best
_____
Bonus wager: Describe (in 20 words or less) how the topics of perfection, peace, love, inclusion, equity & equality drive a story forward, engage the reader and make for great enduring literature.
Fun rumination on the plausibility of the post-scarcity, utopian society portrayed in Star Trek.
https://dreamertalin.medium.com/united-federation-of-planets-b7203b217054
-- Cheater demands I name 100 AUTHORS of the GOS, which I could but would require lots of work and trigger quibbles.
I said 100 WORKS of GOS across the last decade and I will happily do that for a $1000 bet.
But the crux is that he is not asking any of us for gret GOS recent examples to enjoy. In fact, he is terrified of losing the grouch masturbatory riff.
I said 100 WORKS of GOS across the last decade
I can get you over half of the way there with just one author - L E Dahners!!
Extremely interesting stories - the way that science fiction used to be - take an idea and run with it
I remember James Caan in an old Get Smart episode. He played some treasonous aide to a king, played by Don Adams (doing his best Roger Coleman accent). He did it incognito, taking the character's name in the credits.
He will be missed.
Larry
I suspect our mutual fondness for Wrath of Khan reflects our, ahem, maturity. Some movies are enjoyable on their surface level but are really about more. W.of K. is about growing old with grace. So is another of my favorite movies Bull Durham but that's not SciFi.
Tacitus
A.F. Rey:
I remember James Caan in an old Get Smart episode. He played some treasonous aide to a king, played by Don Adams (doing his best Roger Coleman accent).
At first, I thought you were making a "Wrath of Khan" reference.
I do remember that Don Adams played the part of a Maxwell Smart double who was a king.
He [Caan] did it incognito, taking the character's name in the credits.
I remember he did a cameo in Mel Brooks's Silent Movie. I don't think the scene was even scripted in advance--they just used him because he happened to be on set the day they were filming there.
I seem to recall that he reprised the role of Sonny in the final (flashback) scene of Godfather II without demanding pay. It does seem like he was just that kind of guy.
Extremely interesting stories - the way that science fiction used to be - take an idea and run with it
Peter Watts is good at that.
https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
And not fiction, but I think you'll like the essay "En Route to Dystopia with the Angry Optimist":
https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Are-We-There-Yet.pdf
Larry,
...Captain Decker being all hot to trot with the thing... Eeeww.
Supposedly she smelled like her too.
I don't think it worked in the movie because it's a non-trivial task to portray (visually) and human responding to subtle aromas (olfactory). Emotional effects can be shown, but the audience can easily miss the causes.
This is a screenwriting trap. Novels describe leaving plenty of opportunity to explain pheromones. Movie and TV episodes show putting the explanation at risk of sounding like narration or fourth wall breakage.
locumranch,
Wagers are supposed to be accompanied by suggested stakes and odds.
Your tasks require work. A reward for winning is a reasonable expectation.
YMMV, but to me, Star Trek, The Motion Picture felt more like a science fiction story than any of the sequels. Not that the sequels were unenjoyable, just that those stews had too much schmaltz, too little vegetables.
As usual, Dr. Brin & I talk past each other, as he wagers that he can name 'a hundred SF works across the last decade', while I wager that all comers cannot name '100 young authors who've published awe-inspiring science fiction over the last decade' comparable to Fritz Leiber's 'A Pail of Air'.
Woke Sideshow Rob provides more than comic relief with his attempt to smear, cancel & nullify the great Isaac Asimov for the 'thought crime' of being 'too heterosexual' (???). He also makes my point that these accusations in no way invalidate Asimov's Mastery of Science Fact & Fiction.
Modern Science Fiction mostly sucks donkey dongs for this very reason:
In the field of Woke Science Fiction, Identity Politics are now believed to be more important than good storytelling, plotting, pacing & character development.
Once was. my children, we judged Science Fiction GOOD when it was well-written, thought provoking & entertaining, regardless of the identity of the author, not because it was authored by some celebrated transgender anti-patriarchal smurf.
I have therefore modified my two wagers:
(1) Just show me ONE modern Science Fiction story by a new author on par with 'A Pail of Air'; and
(2) Explain (in 20 words or less) how a LACK OF CONFLICT makes for great story-telling.
Alfred suggests that wagers "require work (and) a reward for winning is a reasonable expectation". This makes sense to me, assuming that the wagerer doesn't stack the bet in his favour like Nathan Detroit, Dr. Brin or my deplorable self.
Could this be why this wagering technique is somewhat less effective than our host suggests? Because it only works on SUCKERS who never question if the terms of the wager are fair or in good faith ?
I shall consult Sky Masterson to resolve this conundrum.
Best
Tim H:
to me, Star Trek, The Motion Picture felt more like a science fiction story than any of the sequels.
It seems to me that in the 1960s, the presence of starships, alien planets, and time travel was sufficient to make something a science-fiction story. Nowadays, maybe thanks to Star Wars, all that just is so much puffery.
Having said that, I still think you're discounting the sci-fi aspects of the Genesis Project in Wrath of Khan.
(1) Just show me ONE modern Science Fiction story by a new author on par with 'A Pail of Air'; and
(2) Explain (in 20 words or less) how a LACK OF CONFLICT makes for great story-telling.
I will bite
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082PC132B
BETTER than "'A Pail of Air'"
Conflict is ALWAYS needed for great story telling - but it does not have to be "military conflict"
Larry, I did note that YMMV, given that, the genesis torpedo was a fine bit of handwavium.
Tim H:
the genesis torpedo was a fine bit of handwavium.
I don't just mean the torpedo. I meant the entire project, including the cave that Carol showed to Kirk.
Admittedly, what I'm about to mention is fantasy, not sci-fi, but has anyone else seen any of the Netflix series based on Neil Gaiman's Sandman?
I mean, despite the inevitable plot alterations that tv always demands, including the necessary distancing from references to the DC universe, it's doing a remarkable job of staying true to the original source. So far, there is only one 10-episode season which takes us through the first two trade paperbacks (there are 10 in all),and they've already laid the groundwork for what is to come in later episodes. Martin Tenbones and Hob Gadling*, to name two.
For the first time in a long time, I'm looking forward to more from a tv series.
* Looking at the episode list, I was disappointed that "Men of Good Fortune" was not to be included, but that storyline was actually subsumed into the "Sound of Her Wings" episode. Oh, me of little faith.
Demanding comparison to his totally subjective ranking ot a particular favorite story is irrelevant.
But I will bet $500 a truly neutral lover of GOS hard SF will rank EITHER of my YA SF adventure series to fall into that category, either my own COLONY HIGH or the two most recent Out of Time novels by bright new authors.
The Colony High series: aliens kidnap a California high school! http://www.davidbrin.com/colonyhigh.html
The "Out of Time" (or "Yanked!") series: Only teens can teleport through time and space! Dollops of fun, adventure & optimism for young adults. http://www.davidbrin.com/outoftime.html
Adventure! High concepts! Danger! Overcome by courage and ingenuity!
@ Locum How about Cory Doctorow's "Unauthorized Bread"? The perils of letting corporations and algorithms run too many basic human functions, like the ability to bake bread.
Actually, if you look at the scrolling banner at the top of the tor.com website, you will find a rotating selection of new short stories, at least a couple of which are likely to fill your criteria.
EITHER of my YA SF adventure series to fall into that category
I'd rate them with the Heinlein juveniles in terms of 'feel'.
“anti-patriarchal smurf”?
LoCum, what does that mean?
With respect, I disagree with your comment "You can't really delete the Spock-on-Vulcan scenes, as they help explain why he's acting the way he's acting." Spock describes what happened when he met with Kirk and McCoy in the officer's lounge scene (right after the Enterprise successfully reaches warp 7). Maybe we could decide this by making edits with and without that scene to see how it feels.
Speaking of the wormhole scene, I think it was handled better in the NATO trailer:
https://youtu.be/ybVsMBnhJOI
One aside. at 11:40 into that video, we hear the very first public playing of Jerry Goldsmith's new Star Trek theme.
I saw this in November 1979 when Roddenberry came to Columbus, Ohio to promote the film. The afternoon before his show, I was asked to take a message to Roddenberry in his hotel room. I got invited in and sat at the table while Roddenberry and some of his friends drank some whisky, smoked some pot, and listened to the Great Bird of the Galaxy talk about philosophy. Ahhhh....good times. The next morning at a press conference, the reporters asked softball questions. I raised my hand and asked: "Sir, you have only produced TV series. What do you know about producing a $30 million plus movie?" He answered that he really did not know, he was just making it up as he was going along."
GMT -5 8032:
With respect, I disagree with your comment "You can't really delete the Spock-on-Vulcan scenes, as they help explain why he's acting the way he's acting." Spock describes what happened when he met with Kirk and McCoy in the officer's lounge scene (right after the Enterprise successfully reaches warp 7).
I think this is largely a matter of personal taste. Me, I'm not a big fan of important moments being told only through exposition. But I don't think there's an objective answer to this question,
I saw this in November 1979 when Roddenberry came to Columbus, Ohio to promote the film.
I don't think you currently live in Columbus, but I have no idea when you left. Did you ever attend the Small Press Alternative Comics Expo (SPACE)? I was there for several gatherings with "Cerebus" fans in the aught-aughts, and even had a hand in this fanzine:
https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?TID=651461
Cory Doctorow, age 50+, is hardly an up & coming young writer.
That said, his 'Unlicensed Bread' (if it's the one with the proprietary toasters & the hacked elevators) is a well-crafted tale, one that's derivative of (1) Damon Knight's Analogue series (collected as 'Hell's Pavement', 1967) and (2) William Gibson's 'write about the present as if it's the future' approach, circa 1980.
Likewise, even the most competent Youth Adventure Science Fiction, as written by long established authors like Brin, Heinlein & Asimov, is NOT representative of an up & coming cadre of young scifi writers, being more reflective of the old guard than the new.
It's a sad state of affairs when old guard authors are thrown under the metaphorical bus to make the new guard seem less tawdry & incompetent, and so the blacklisting continues, as evidenced by Robert's recent attempt to tar Asimov with an unsubstantiated sexual assault allegation.
Since 2010, the Woke have targeted the science fiction old guard for destruction & erasure, along with many political figures. First, Clarke & Bradley as alleged pedophiles. Second, Heinlein as a racist, sexist & fascist. This thread, Asimov. Lovecraft, Campbell, Resnick, Pournelle, Niven, Flint, Lackey, Rowling, and the list of proscribed authors grows by the day.
Either way, reading is a dying art form anyway, whereas the future is zero history, ticktock, word wooze and a boot stamping on the human face for ever & ever.
Best
______
For daring to question the use of the term 'smurf', Alan_B self-identifies as the worse sort of 'ism'. It's hate speech because 'smurf' means what it means but never what it does not mean. He is therefore CANCELLED. An unperson.
Jeepers, I really, really try hard - as you all will attest - to be patient. But...
Again, The authors writing great Heinleinian NEW sci fi in my Out of Time series are NEW authors. New. First timers, delivering the Good Old Stuff.
And there are tons of others. Jiminy man. Grouchy is one thing. (Get off my lawn!)
Dumb and obstinate are different.
Hi Loco
The novel I suggested was written by a young whippersnapper who has only just started writing (in the last decade)
Have you checked it out??
Lo C,
Appears a small apology might be owed you: didn’t know until now that a smurf is slang for a money launderer. Had thought your reference was to the animated smurfs, as some animated smurfs are alleged to be bolshie.
I do remember that a Muppet, Miss Piggy, did long ago make anti-patriarchal remarks—which is the reason for the slight confusion. Shall you forgive me?
It's a sad state of affairs when old guard authors are thrown under the metaphorical bus to make the new guard seem less tawdry & incompetent, and so the blacklisting continues, as evidenced by Robert's recent attempt to tar Asimov with an unsubstantiated sexual assault allegation.
He apparently had enough of a reputation for butt-pinching that he was asked to give a convention talk on it:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/62246028@N05/7874486032/in/set-72157631100154582/
Granted this was before I was born and 'the past is a different country', but it sounds like antics like that were endured by women, rather than being welcomed.
https://the-orbit.net/almostdiamonds/2012/09/09/we-dont-do-that-anymore/
Having never been to an SF convention, the example I was referring to come from the introduction to his book Lecherous Limericks, in which he describes grabbing a fan's breasts, keeping one still while moving the other in figure eights, while reciting one of his limericks that ended "keeping one breast in perfect arrest / while the other described figure eights".
I'll grant you, we only have Asimov's word that this happened. Maybe he exaggerated? Was he bragging? He didn't provide much information about the fan beyond 'attractive young woman', so finding witnesses to corroborate will be difficult.
Still, it does call to mind a certain prominent politician's statement that when you're famous you can get away with a lot.
locumranch,
Could this be why this wagering technique is somewhat less effective than our host suggests?
No. My suspicion is a lot of people don't know how to offer wagers. I spent some of my growing-up years in Vegas thinking about how the casinos made money on sporting events. I might be assuming too much knowledge is available to those who didn't have my experience.
They way we figure out if you are stacking the wager is to examine the odds you offer and then observe how many people take up the bet and on which side. For example...
Pick any regular season football game and try to predict the winner. Some are easy. Too easy. Bookies establish a point spread to make it less easy because what they want to do is offer fixed odds. The usual wager is "11 gets you 10" meaning when you beat the spread you get your 11 back and 10 more. If a bookie establishes a good spread, people bet each side roughly evenly and the bookie wins no matter the outcome.
The typical baseball game wager shifts the payback values instead of establishing a run spread. "17 gets you 10" suggests the bookie thinks one team is more likely to win. The wager for the other team would look like "10 gets you 16". Winners are decided strictly by the final score with no point spread.
Now... consider your 20 words or less suggested wager and ponder whether you'd offer a "spread with fix odds" or "no spread with outcome specific odds."
Also ponder who does the judging since it should probably be someone neutral. Bookies are successful when they are neutral because they get a slice of the middle. That's what makes Vegas work.
After you do that, you are finally close to how we would decide whether you (or anyone else) are stacking a wager. If the odds or spread are biased, the neutral handler of the wagers will get a lopsided book. If you offer even money for your 20 words suggestion and the rest of us think it's trivially easy (I don't), the bookie would get a load of people wanting to take up the wager and turn to you to ask if you intend to underwrite the unbalanced book. If you offer 5 gets you 1 instead, fewer people will jump on one side. A few might want to take the other side and help underwrite it.
So... a stacked wager is obvious when you examine the book kept by the neutral wager handler.
-----
Good wagers are challenging to establish*, but bookies are easy to find. That's why most Vegas Sports Books look to what each other does. The real books aren't kept in any one casino because players can adopt spread positions across multiple casinos. In aggregate, though, those folks are very good at predicting what the rest of us will think is a balanced bet. On average, they make tons of money doing this.
* Our host has a few that are decent and that's why people don't take them up. They'd have to study the details of a proposed wager and confront reality if the risked money wasn't a trivially small amount.
One of my grandfathers was a pincher of waitress' behinds. When I learned of it as a kid, my mother was clear about it not being acceptable behavior.
There is a huge difference between tolerated and acceptable. Some fights aren't worth fighting... especially when a mother can take steps ensuring her sons don't do it... essentially winning the fight in the next generation.
That kind of win might not satisfy some Progressives, but it is the primary way in which they make allies of Liberals. My mother leaned so far left in her final years she was inclined to make suggestions to Sen Sanders about trying for more, but she fought the long fight when raising me and my siblings.
Nnedi Okorafor springs to mind.
Otherwise, young authors have a variety of outlets, these days, so don't limit yourselves to short stories that fit between pages. They don't limit themselves to spaceships in spa-ace either.
Something like Gunnerkrigg Court would not have been possible in the 'golden age'.
Arcane's superb use of animation to present investable characters to tell a strong story had me hooked before the teleporting airships turned up.
The 'Horizon' game series offers a mind blowing tale of how the world got to be dominated by cybernetic dinosaurs, and even let's you take part in it.
Finally found a copy of the book. Looks like my memory is flawed. The anecdote is on page 123, not the introduction, and he only handles one breast not both. I must have mixed up a story I heard elsewhere with memories of reading the book.
Still, I don't think that puts him in a better light.
Alfred Differ:
There is a huge difference between tolerated and acceptable.
After Trump's famous comment about how "When you're famous, they let you do it [grab them by the p---y], someone on this list used that to argue that he never assaulted anyone. That is, the grabbing was voluntary because the women let him do it.
My counterargument was to imagine he said something like, "When you're rich and powerful, they let you punch them in the face." The punching in the face (or grabbing by the genetalia) is not so much welcomed as endured because one has (or feels one has) no choice but to let it happen.
One of my grandfathers was a pincher of waitress' behinds. When I learned of it as a kid, my mother was clear about it not being acceptable behavior.
An older male cousin of my mom's was also known throughout the extended family for pinching women's butts. As was Poppy Bush with his famous "David Cop-A-Feel" quip. It seems to have just been a thing among men of that generation. And though it was tolerated rather than welcomed, there's some leeway for the guys interpreting toleration as welcoming. I wouldn't cancel Isaac Asimov over it, even if he was one of those guys. At this point in history, "We've thankfully moved on from tolerating bullying," more accurately describes my sense of it.
Lo C,
I’m not opposed to you, otherwise wouldn’t read your comments. But your linkage isn’t clear; you write on Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ being pejorative & satirical—yet the link between a five centuries-old book and 21st century SF is tenuous.
You are quite ambitious; but the loftiness of your thoughts isn’t matched by enough detail.
Re: Asimov
I've spent years working on computational psychohistory largely because that's the most likely path he'd have pursued had he lived longer. However, I'm always careful to not be a starry-eyed Asimov fanboy, he had his warts is a common refrain of mine. Of course, bathwater, baby.
About sexual customs: I have seen respectable thought go from puritanism, to libertinism, and back to another kind of puritanism; all while assuring me that they were making progress, in both directions! The cycle is constant in its angular momentum, and the hypocrisy that holds the wheel together.
As for why the cycle happens, there are many theories. Is it inherent in sex itself? Is it the economy? The environment? My own crackpot theory is that sunspots control the stock market, the stock market controls hemlines, and hemlines control sunspots. The correlations are, respectively, positive, positive, and negative; this ensures that the system as a whole is unstable.
I admit that this theory has weak points. I mean, the stock market controlling hemlines? Absurd! But the phenomenon itself is absurd.
If you don't like that theory then here's another one: sex is going out of fashion because babies are going out of fashion, and that in turn is because Gaia hath decreed, "That's enough of you humans!"
About the sunspots-market-hemlines theory of sexual-custom cyclicity: if an odd number of correlations are negative, then the system as a whole is unstable. For instance, negative-positive-positive: so if the Sun breaks out in spots, then the stock market falls, so hemlines fall, so the Sun clears up, so the stock market rises, so hemlines rise, so the Sun breaks out in spots, and we are back to where we started, in a cycle of period six.
I still admit that my theory has weaknesses, such as the absurd market-hemline connection. Oh, and also that it has zero evidence in its favor. But it makes a good story.
About the Gaian baby-bust theory: the biosphere controls human fertility through the global marketplace, which has priced babies out of affordability for the masses. Various human political factions are resisting Gaia's baby bust by forcing pregnancies to term; but the invisible hand of the Market is quicker than the all-seeing eye of the State.
Paradoctor:
I mean, the stock market controlling hemlines? Absurd! But the phenomenon itself is absurd.
Not all that absurd if you consider intervening causality. In times of easy money, there's more of a tendency toward acting with wild abandon, and so more risqee clothing for women is in style. Hemlines are just one marker of that.
If you don't like that theory then here's another one: sex is going out of fashion because babies are going out of fashion, and that in turn is because Gaia hath decreed, "That's enough of you humans!"
Were he still alive, I think Kurt Vonnegut would agree with you. He made that explicitly clear in his novel Cat's Cradle in which the only remaining band of human beings, which included no women of childbearing age, totally lost interest in even thinking about sex. As the narrator put it (paraphrasing from memory), he never realized how much of that excitement in bed had been excitement over keeping the human race alive.
That doesn't exactly dovetail with my own sexual feelings, but I have known for a long time that I'm a bit of a freak in that area. Despite being a seemingly-normal hetero male, my sexual appetite has never been "with intent" to reproduce.
And now that pregnancy has been weaponized by the Republican supreme court, sex for women (even within marriage) is a bit like playing Russian roulette. That's gotta be bringing hemlines down a bit, along with female libido.
No truer words were ever spoken...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/opinion/trump-fbi-raid.html
To let this dictate the workings of justice is to accept an insurrectionists’ veto. The far right is constantly threatening violence if it doesn’t get its way. Does anyone truly believe that giving in to its blackmail will make it less aggressive?
Birth rate!!
The data shows that people are close to being "rational consumers" - once you get past absolute poverty the birth rate is determined by the "cost" of having children - thus the Scandinavians where the menfolk help have a higher birthrate than the Southern Europeans where the men do not help
The "solution" is to drop the "cost" - its NOT an urgent problem we have 100+ years before it becomes even slightly urgent
The cliffhanger at the end of the first season of Designated Survivor turns out to be prescient in light of today's headlines.
"Sir, we know what Lozano was accessing at the Pentagon. He hacked the Defense Department's most highly classified server."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that every single aspect of our country's defense superstructure is now vulnerable: troop movements, intel on our nuclear arsenal, identities of our covert assets.
Scidata: Of course, bathwater, baby.
Deserves a prize for destroying Robert's anti-Asimov argument in fewer than 5 words, since the tale is not the teller & the baby is not the bathwater.
Alan_B: You write on Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ being pejorative & satirical—yet the link between a five centuries-old book and 21st century SF is tenuous.
It's a simple matter of Utopia Misunderstood as what was once a joke is now being taken in deadly earnest by social reformers, futurists & the 21st century SF community when, in actuality, perfectionism is a fool's errand.
Alfred: My suspicion is a lot of people don't know how to offer wagers.
Nor do they know how to accept them. And so, like our fine host & Nathan Detroit, I am perfectly willing to take the risk (of a wager), providing I can figure out a bet on which there is no chance of losing.
Duncan_C: The novel I suggested... Have you checked it out?
I read Dahners first, 'Telekinesis', basic sword & sorcery, heroics & a smattering of medical knowledge, written at a 4th grade level, but he persists & may improve. I'll keep 1/2 an eye open for his later works.
Davd Brin: First timers, delivering the Good Old Stuff. And there are tons of others.
The numbers tell a different story as, even in the SF Golden Age, the hacks outnumbered the GOS by 10 to 1, but all that remains now from that bygone age is the GOS (presorted), while all the new stuff is still mostly hacks (unsorted).
I concede that there may be new GOS out there, but I have neither the time nor the patience to sort the good from the bad.
Best
____
@Mad-Lib: Cory Doctorow's 'Unauthorized Bread' (if it's the one with the proprietary toasters & the hacked elevators) was well-written but a bit derivative of Damon Knight's Analogue series (collected as 'Hell's Pavement', 1967) and William Gibson's "write about the present as if it's the future" style, circa 1980.
I'm always careful to not be a starry-eyed Asimov fanboy, he had his warts is a common refrain of mine. Of course, bathwater, baby.
In many ways he was an excellent writer — his clear and concise non-fiction books helped get me started in science. I can admire that skill without venerating the man.
His characters always felt a bit flat to me, compared to Poul Anderson's or Robert Heinlein's. I read his books for the ideas, not the characters or dialogue. I reread the Foundation trilogy before starting to watch the Apple TV+ series, and while I still liked the plot (and overarching idea) the characterization and dialogue felt a bit off. (Some of this could be distance in time — old movie dialogue often seems stilted and artificial to me as well.)
As to his personal predilections, well, if he tried groping one of my nieces he'd be typing one-handed for a while. Times have changed, and they know they don't have to tolerate that kind of thing any more*.
Speaking of nieces, my heroic and gorgeous niece** is getting married tomorrow so I'm off to bed early. There will be grandnieces and grandnephews to play with, and this is one celebration I don't want to be tired at!
*A thought on toleration from one of my gay friends: if groping is just guys being guys and no big deal, why do straight men get so upset when a gay guy gropes them?
**Worked as a doctor/surgeon in NYC during the height of the pandemic, with one surgical mask a week because the American president was using federal reserves as a reward for political supporters. I know what 80-hour weeks are like, and she was pulling worse than that.
“Perfectionism is a fool’s errand”
There are exceptions: if a student aims for 100% correctness in taking an exam, perfectionism is the way to go. Religionists tell me our goal is to seek perfection. ‘Course, they’re referring to moving into the Hereafter; yet seeking perfection is integral to such. Abrahamic faiths, btw, are remarkably similar to Marxism. But not surprisingly: politics whelped religion.
Christians have God and His Son; Marxists, Marx and Engels. Christians believe in Heaven; Marxists, in a classless world. Christianity predicts Apocalypse; Marxists, Revolution.
They all have their Scriptures—to guide them to eventual Perfection.
Thomas More sought perfection, and persecuted heretics who disagreed with his version of perfectionism.
If you want 100% on an exam, learn the teacher instead of the subject.
Tests sample what students know about a subject, but they are written by people who can be studied much like the subject they intend to test.
---
An unpleasant (statistical) fact is most students land pretty much in the same place on the class curve on every test in a class. Once you've seen your first mid-term score, odds are high you know where you'll land on the final exam. Quite high.
To beat that you must do something other students aren't doing. Think you can study more than the person who scored at the top? Not likely. Not impossible, but that's what all the other students are trying too.
Only a few students study the teacher.
Loco
You answer your own question!!
"The Greats" are the best of the hundreds of "Hacks" of their generation - and they became better with practice
its the same with todays writers there are great writers among the rest - and they get better with practice
You are closing your eyes to the many superb writers - or refusing to read through the others in order to find the greats
50 years from now todays "Greats" will stand out the same way that the greats of the 70's do today
At any rate, don’t know whether politics derived from religion, or vice versa. Originally, humans were animists, ascribing sentience to the inanimate. Then they organized themselves politically—politics being policies that organize collective life. Afterwards organized religion evolved.
But it’s ‘which came first: chicken or egg?’
I've got to kvetch about Bill Maher again.
His show last night started off so well, too. He had NY Times columnist Ross Douthat on the show, not to talk about politics, but about his recent experience with Lyme Disease which was almost identical to what my wife went through for several years beginning in 2014--doctors not having a clue how to diagnose or treat the disease and being incapable of trying treatments out to see if they helped. Maher, of course, used this as a platform to rag on Dr Fauci and the CDC for daring to censor conversations about COVID treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, because they haven't earned the monopoly on truth. I didn't have any problem with that.
But then, later in the show, he mentioned one of his recent bugaboos--that when he sees young people wearing masks outside, he wants to scream at them that they're idiots, that as young people, they won't be severly impacted if they get COVID, and that "you can't catch it outside if you try." So to paraphrase, he insists on his own freedom to be a super-spreader and to defy the most current guidelines on dealing with COVID (on the grounds that those guidelines might be mistaken), but by gosh, anyone else who takes precautions that he doesn't subscribe to should be ridiculed and shamed.
Then, he talked about his personal friend Salman Rushdie being stabbed while giving a talk, and (rightly) decried the anti-American tendency sadly gaining ground to respond to speech that one doesn't like with actual violence. Again, so far, so good. But then he and his two panelists turned it entirely into a discussion of leftists on college campuses wanting trigger warnings and reporting professors who say offensive things. Not even a hint or a mention of the elephant in the room on this subject--that the Americans who actually perpetrate violence against those they politically disagree with are right-wing Republicans. The guy who attacked a Cleveland FBI office didn't even get a mention in this discussion, nor did the fact that Republican congressmen now want to defund the FBI.
I know Maher is ostensibly an ally in the fight for Constitutional democracy, and I even get that his barbs against liberals are intended to make us better contenders rather than to help the traitors beat us. But it's getting increasingly difficult to watch him demean us on things that he really has no expertise on (like child-rearing). I really only tuned into the show last night to see what he'd say about the FBI search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, and even there I was disappointed. Most of what they discussed on that subject was about how the incident plays into Trump's narrative of persecution, and that it will help Trump rile up his base.
Frankly, the main reason I continue to be stuck tuning in is that he almost always has a hot young anti-woke chick a la Ann Coulter on the panel in skimpy clothing. Last night at least didn't disappoint in that regard.
(Did I say that or think it?)
"Maher, of course, used this as a platform to rag on Dr Fauci and the CDC for daring to censor conversations about COVID treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, because they haven't earned the monopoly on truth. I didn't have any problem with that."
I do. A rather severe problem, in fact. Because there have been multiple studies done. Ivermectin could potentially kill COVID viruses, but the dosage required is more than twice the lethal dose for a normal human being - basically, the virus is dead, but so is the host. And hydrochloroquine has been proved useless against COVID, but thanks to that misuse, my wife hasn't been able to get her lupus meds for six months now (HCQ is a specific for certain immune disorders, chief among them lupus and rheumatoid arthritis - it helps dull the pain, making motion easier. You can imagine the consequence of not having that for six months, with no word on when the prescription can be renewed and refilled).
Having someone with such reach that you respect them spewing anti-scientific rhetoric in the name of "a monopoly on truth" serves to undercut the concept that there exists an external reality that must be paid attention to. We've gone through four years of our nation being led by a political party that doesn't believe in external reality. It hasn't been good.
One of the silliest things about whining about people wearing masks outside is they have no idea even why they're doing that. For example, I wear a mask when I go grocery shopping, and I usually place a lunch order at a place across the parking lot before I go shop, then come back and pick it up. I usually don't bother to take my mask off when walking through the parking lot because it's only a few minutes and it's more effort to take it off and on than just leave it on.
Additionally, from what I understand there's a good deal of people for whom allergies have historically made them miserable at certain times of the year, and quite a few discovered that wearing masks outdoors actually greatly improved their symptoms. So a lot of people just wear masks outside now just to avoid aggravating allergies.
Also, it's unlikely you'll catch COVID outdoors, but I'm not sure how reliable that is with the newer more transmissible variants. In a crowded area outdoors I can see it still being a concern. I don't wear masks outside but I do generally try to space out a bit- I was at an outdoor festival last weekend and about 10% of people were wearing masks and I don't see why anyone should give them shit about it if it makes them feel comfortable.
He of course also has no idea about the state of health of these young people he's complaining about. Many people have invisible medical conditions that merit more careful approaches to Covid. Then again, even if they don't, if they would prefer not to get sick (because really who likes being sick?) why is that something he wants to scream about? I haven't been sick in years and I'd like to keep it that way- wearing a mask is such minimal effort for that I might just keep wearing them in grocery stores forever.
Alfred Differ:
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If you want 100% on an exam, learn the teacher instead of the subject.
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The Deception Theorem of Electron Psychology states:
At a high enough energy, the intelligence of the particle will exceed the intelligence of the experimental team: therefore all high-energy particle experiments will yield data that is precise but not accurate.
LH I do wish Maher could make his points with sufficient asides to make them clear. e.g. when he spoke on oestity, he should have said: " I am talking about FITNESS, and self-control over eating, both of which should be praised. I am NOT speaking against a broadening of body image acceptance. Bulemic fashion models were not good role models, either. And a person who is fit-n-chunky has nothing to apologizxe for and much to be proud of!"
Had he inserted just that, his rant would have been far better.
I am way too busy and bored to read locum's latest. Someone speak if he has said something vitamin-rich, even if still obsessive/insane.
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MY NEXT BLOG POSTING IS A BIT HYPER INTELLECTUAL, BUT IMPORTANT.
onward
onward
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