Day: August 4, 2007

Via Scott Westerfield, comes this really interesting New York Times article about New York City underworld explorers:

Alone and with cohorts, Mr. Anastasio has crawled, climbed and sometimes simply brazenly walked into countless train tunnels, abandoned subway stations, rotting factories, storm drains, towers, decaying hospitals and other shadowy remnants of the city’s infrastructure the authorities would rather he did not enter. Although he records his adventures on his Web site, ltvsquad.com, anonymity is, for him, a necessary tool.

Although, it’s a little tough to be anonymous when you post on your website and are interviewed at length in The New York Times…

While I think a lot of the photos are incredible (particularly Miru Kim‘s NSFW images), and it is a shame that some of these structures are completely closed to an interested public, I can’t say I really disagree with the M.T.A.’s position on this. These are very dangerous places to be crawling around in without training — and much less naked, as in Ms. Kim’s case.

A few from the Sci Fi Wire:

  • Dark Is Now The Seeker:

    The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising is the new name of the movie from Fox Walden based on the second of Susan Cooper’s five fantasy books. The studio made the change on July 27.

    Yeah, because that name rolls right off the tongue. Maybe this will appease the angry fans of the books who say the movie has taken way too many liberties.

  • Extinction is the Last Evil:

    Paul W.S. Anderson, the producer and screenwriter of Resident Evil: Extinction, told SCI FI Wire that his original intention was to create a trilogy based on the popular Capcom video games and that the upcoming sequel may be the last.

    You know, lately, it seems like every time somebody manages to squeeze out a couple of cash-driven sequels it’s because that’s what they always intended to do. Like it’s some grand artistic vision finally reaching its natural culmination. Like Weekend at Bernies was always intended as a trilogy, but sadly, the third film was never made*…

  • Cavemen Veers From TV Ads:

    The creators of the upcoming ABC sitcom Cavemen said that the idea may have started with the popular Geico TV commercials, but that the show will take things in a different direction.

    Well it would pretty much have to, wouldn’t it?

  • Beowulf Enhanced With Nudity:

    “We had our theory,” Gaiman (Sandman, Stardust) said in an interview at Comic-Con International in San Diego on July 27. “Our theory was that, at any point when the poem tells you what happened, it’s telling you the truth. But at any point when anybody in the poem goes offstage and then comes back on and says, ‘While I was in the other room, this is what happened,’ they could be lying.”

    I’ve got nothing to add to that. I just like it.


* I had to double check. Thankfully, no, it looks like it never was.

Just in case there was any doubt, CSI: NY is not a history program

“CSI: NY” may be popular viewing with Canadians, but it’s not fit for Canada’s History Television cable channel.

That’s the verdict of Canada’s TV watchdog, which has rejected broadcaster Alliance Atlantis Communications’ argument that “CSI: NY” offered History Television viewers “a critically acclaimed look at forensic policing in post-9/11 New York City.”

Via TV Squad.

Seriously, by Alliance Atlantis’ definition, pretty much anything would qualify as a history program.

Okay, so most everything that’s wrong with Bookswim as a concept has already been pointed out in the comments at Hacking Netflix (which is where I found out about it), but still:

  • The Netflix model is popular because it eliminates exorbitant late fees and allows the customer to decide how long to keep a movie out.
  • Books, on the other hand, are freely available at public libraries. And while there are late fees associated with this system, and limits on how long a book can be checked out or how often renewed, the late fees are often not very high, nor are the limits often very short.

Their selection, too, is fairly limited. I tried plugging in a handful of the titles that I can’t find at my local library1, but none of them came up in my search. Their catalog is a little weird and incomplete2 and feels not at all like Netflix, but more like the selection you’d see at very small used bookstore, or at a very large garage sale. I suspect that a lot of the books come from their own shelves and donations.

I think Bookswim will appeal primarily, if not exclusively, to people without access to a public library (or even a decent used bookstore). But beyond that?

I give them credit for trying something new, and maybe some people will think it’s a terrific idea and a valuable service. I just know that I won’t be signing up anytime soon.

1 Oh, to have access to a university library again…

2 They have the second, third, and fourth books of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, but not Dune itself. Oh, and they have Steve Martin’s Shopgirl listed as science fiction.

Via Gerry Canavan, I learn of the impending death of science fiction:

The main points of the argument are: (a) in the coming century innovation in science and technology will come to a near standstill and will cease driving cultural change; (b) the mainspring of science fiction is the perception of innovation in science and technology; and (c) as innovation in science and technology ceases being a major determinant of cultural change science fiction will dry up and fade away.

There are a lot of problems with this argument, but I’m not even going to discuss the whole technological singularity aspect of it. I’m not remotely convinced by the idea that technological advancement will reach some kind of standstill or plateau anytime soon, much less within the century. But I can’t argue against the validity of it as an idea. It’s not unintriguing, nor entirely implausible.

What I do think is exceptionally flawed, however, is Harter’s definition of science fiction — namely that “the mainspring of science fiction is the perception of innovation in science and technology.” What this suggests, more than anything, is a profound ignorance of the genre, which is filled with stories not at all interested in the innovation in science and technology. Harter acknowledges that “science fiction…fans are not particularly interested in futurology, i.e., in the serious attempt to understand and predict the future, as they are in the use of various futures as settings for stories.” But a) he seems to view that as a failing, and b) he for some reason seems to think those self-same stories are nonetheless concerned with futurology.

But I think Harter could have done well to read Ursula K. Le Guin’s introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness:

Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made….Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn’t the name of the game by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer’s or the reader’s. Variables are the spice of life….Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

Le Guin acknowledges that “what sets [science fiction] apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life — science, all the sciences, and technology…” But that’s a far cry from suggesting that the genre needs a continually replenished and updated supply of science in order to survive.

Yes, some stories are interested — profoundly interested — in science and its evolution, but there are plenty whose depictions of technology are no more advanced or elaborate than the science fiction of twenty, thirty, or even a hundred years ago. Science fiction, like all fiction, is primarily concerned with the human condition — less in how we will live than in how we do live. One might be forgiven for thinking of it solely as a predictive genre, but only if one hadn’t actually read very much of it. Science fiction is not futurology.

Even in the face of a technological singularity, I think there would be “what if” stories worth telling. I don’t think the genre is going anywhere just yet.