Last week, it went like this. This week, it goes like this:
“Challengers” by the New Pornographers
I live with somebody too
“Endless Dream” by Conjure One feat. Poe
And I am just a trip that you are on
“I Need to Know” by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, guessed by Clayton
Well the talk on the street says you might go solo
“Mary Jane’s Last Dance” by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, guessed by Clayton
Take me as I come ’cause I can’t stay long
“Be the One for Me” by Dick Brave & the Backbeats
Girl, hands up please and set me free
“The Wind” by Cat Stevens, guessed by Eric B.
I let my music take me where my heart wants to go
“Veronica” by Elvis Costello, guessed by Eric B.
Did he roam down the town all the while?
“Anticipate” by Ani DiFranco
We lose sight of everything when we have to keep checking our backs
“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” by Bob Dylan, guessed by Clayton
That long black cloud is comin’ down
“What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” by Jimmy Ruffin, guessed by Generik
Always moving and going nowhere
Am I the only one sensing a vague wanderlust theme in these lyrics? Maybe that’s just because I was listening to To the Best of Our Knowledge‘s Travel podcast this morning. Maybe I just need a vacation. Anyway, good luck!
Indeed, Apple is best understood as the Singapore of technological ecosystems—smart, forward-looking, and every so often you get caned for chewing gum.
Good science fiction isn’t really about prognostication. Good science fiction, despite its futuristic settings and sometimes predictive imaginings, is just like any other fiction: about describing the present. It’s like Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness:
Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
Yet reporters keep playing the game of “what science fiction got right and what science fiction got wrong.” Twenty-five years after Neuromancer was first published, PC World gets into the act, suggesting that “Neuromancer is important because of its astounding predictive power.”
This seems like an interesting exercise — I’ll admit, it’s amusing to see how we do, or do not, live in Gibson’s imagined future world — but it sort of misses the point. Whatever its considerable strengths or continued relevance, Neuromancer is much more a book about 1984, about its present, than about the future we now live in. What it gets “right” or “wrong” is sort of beside the point. For one, Mark Sullivan’s article acknowledges right up front, in quoting Jack Womack’s intro to the book’s 2000 re-release, that Neuromancer was as much a direct influence on the future (particularly the development of the internet) as a prediction of it. “what if the act of writing it down, in fact,” asked Womack, “brought it about?”
And for another, Sullivan might want to read another Gibson story, “The Gernsback Continuum“. Science fiction has been getting things wrong since day one, and that’s very often a good thing.
“…it occurred to me the other day that we are finally getting to the future promised by bad ’50s science fiction. No rocket packs or flying cars, but consider the following. One distinctive (and oft-ridiculed) thing about old sci-fi was the dorkiness of its attempts to suggest the vocabulary of the future. “The Maidbot was vacu-cleaning as I Flashfried my Soysage and read my digipape, so I didn’t hear you trying to Vidphone me!”
A lot of the clumsy made-up words seemed to be brand names, despite the fact that trademarks almost never became verbs–at least not in 20th-century American English. (In the U.K., vacuuming is still called “Hoovering,†but I can’t think of a colloquial American example.)
But in the last decade, for the first time in history, trade names have started to become verbs. I can Google, I can Twitter. As awkward as it sounds, I can even Facebook. Will I someday be able to Twitter and Google as the maidbot flashfries me up some Soysage? Fingers crossed.
Yes, it seems the only way I can get in through the door, … to get into the party, is by way of the dumbwaiter. Not even the back door. I’m thinking the dumbwaiter.
I’m actually of two minds about the nomination. While it’s wonderful to see quality work like Dr. Horrible recognized with a nomination, the whole “Outstanding Special Class” category that it’s in seems a little confused about just what it’s supposed to be. Of the five nominees, only the Bruce Springsteen Super Bowl Halftime Show actually appeared on television — which is technically what the Emmys exist to honor — while the other three (webisodes or added content from 30 Rock, Battlestar Galactica and The Daily Show) are extensions of existing television shows. The category is more like “Stuff We Couldn’t Fit Elsewhere…Plus Hey! We’re Cool and Like Stuff on the Web!”
Still, as Whedon says, there’s room for hope:
You know, it absolutely is a step. And it absolutely means a great deal that the Academy went … and recognized that some of the … entertainment that they’re focused on is happening outside of conventional television. And it’s my hope that more people, … that the next time these nominations come up, there will be more than one company listed that is independent.