- J.R. Blackwell on high school:
If my life now was like high school, if my “real life” as they say, was at all like the lack of freedom and harassment I experienced while in high school, then things wouldn’t be going well for me at all. Perhaps then, that is how high school prepares you for real life – but showing you what you have to work hard to stay away from – how your earning power gives you freedoms that if you lost, you would lose your freedoms as well. Perhaps high school is a warning for the young mind – fail, and you will go someplace very much like here, except in that place, there isn’t a prom.
- Frederik Pohl, who at 89 was just awarded his high school diploma would seem to agree:
Pohl speculates that perhaps, if he had finished high school, he might have gone on to spend the rest of his career at American Car and
Foundry, instead of writing multiple science fiction classics.”Just quit school, kids!
- A contest to pick the funniest joke and, surprisingly, none of them are terrible? What are the odds? Obviously your mileage may vary, and some — like the winner, I think — are maybe more drolly amusing that laugh-aloud funny, but in any “ten best” list, you expect at least some real clunkers. [via]
- Just how ridiculous are the “birthers”? Well… [via]
- And finally, while I debate buying this
G.I. Joe Complete Collector’s Set (no, seriously. I am honestly tempted), here’s…
Month: August 2009
Monday various
- Need a little extra bees and honey in your sky rocket? Cockney rhyming slang to be added as an option to some East London ATMs. Silly merchant bankers!
- An interesting article on the new graphic novel version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, although I’m not so sure about the whole “comic books are the anti-book” sentiment that seems to be running through it. [via] It may be time for me to revisit Bradbury’s original novel, especially in light of the man’s own sometimes puzzling pronouncements about it in recent years. I love Ray Bradbury maybe more than any other writer, and it’s possible he’s earned his curmudgeonly ways, but it can be a lot easier to love the words than the man.
- Still, the man’s an absolute darling compared to, say, Lord of the Flies author William Golding [via]
- Dear Tom Ridge: too damn little, too damn late. I didn’t even like you all that much when you were my governor.
- And finally, John Scalzi has been getting some flack in certain circles for his write-up of design flaws in the Star Wars universe, but the man isn’t wrong. (Even the six-year-old me, who can’t help but pester, “Well, maybe the Sarlaac isn’t native to Tatooine,” has to accept that.)
Maybe there’s more than one final frontier
James Wallace Harris asks the intriguing question, Has the Universe Gotten Too Big for Science Fiction? But I think his reasoning is built upon a deeply flawed and limited definition of science fiction that can’t help but exclude things that fit squarely within the genre, like the recent films District 9 and Moon:
District 9 uses outer space aliens as a metaphor for a story about immigration xenophobia and racism. And even though District 9 opens with a magnificent flying saucer orbiting perfectly over Johannesburg, South Africa, with max-gnarly alien aliens, I still don’t consider it science fiction. Why? Real science fiction is about exploring the cutting edge of reality, and District 9 uses its aliens like other movies use angels or dragons to tell a fable. More than that, District 9 models its action after video games rather than modern science fiction magazine stories – but does District 9 model the emerging post-modern SF magazine stories?
District 9, he says, “uses science fiction as a metaphor for human xenophobia, rather than being speculative fiction about first contact with a non-human intelligence.” But I’d suggest that most if not all science fiction uses its subjects as metaphor. The genre is not, strictly speaking, a predictive tool; despite its name, it need not be defined solely by an ability to scientifically (much less accurately) speculate on the future, on technology, or on alien physiology and human contact with same. Because of its futuristic trappings of spaceships and aliens and intelligent machines, I think we sometimes forget that good science fiction is like any good fiction: ultimately it’s about us, as people, here and now.
I’m willing to go as far as Ursula K. Le Guin, who suggests a distinction between the more scientifically minded SF and the more anything-goes sci-fi, but I think that’s a fine line, and that they’re more like twin aspects of science fiction than two independent, mutually exclusive genres unto themselves. And even Le Guin admits of SF that “some of it is literarily self-aware enough to treat its metaphors as metaphors.”
I have not yet seen District 9, but I hesitate to exclude it from science fiction simply because first contact with a non-human intelligence might actually play out differently, or because it looks at how we might treat an alien species more as a metaphor for how we have treated our own. Maybe it’s a different type of science fiction than some; maybe it’s more sci-fi than SF; or maybe it just (to borrow a phrase from Harlan Ellison) uses some of the furniture of the genre. But does that mean it isn’t science fiction, that it should be cast out from the umbrella of that name?
I think we’ve moved past the point where it’s the “science” half that wholly and completely defines the genre.
Moving on, I’m not at all sure I understand Harris’ reason for excluding Moon from science fiction — even if, unfortunately, I’ve not yet seen that film either. Harris writes:
Science fiction has always been about the future, it always embraced modernism, showing absolute faith in science with the relentless belief that we will eventually comprehend reality. Ivy League intellectuals have always considered the SF genre to be a literature for dreamy adolescents, so maybe it’s just taken science fiction a bit longer than the rest of the literary world to grow up and face the post-modern world of uncertainty.
I don’t agree with that definition of the genre — be it sci-fi or SF — at all. How is science fiction that looks inward, or that speculates on a less than gleaming and perfect future, or that acknowledges the uncertainty we all understandably have about the future — which by its (or at least our) very nature is unknowable — how is any of that suddenly not science fiction? I think the genre can absolutely shake off the embrace of modernism, doubt the infallibility of science, and throw into question our ability to understand reality. Moreover, I think it has an obligation to do so, above and beyond any “sensawunda” its stories might sometimes provide. Science fiction can celebrate science, positivity, and a gung-ho spirit of adventure and exploration. But that’s not all it can do, and I think we’d severely handicap the genre by imposing on it such a narrow definition.
That’s why, for instance, I think David J. Williams is wrong when he suggests that Mundane SF is dead simply because he personally finds it boring. Or that the confusingly named SFFE was wrong when they suggested that positivity and enthusiasm should be championed above all else. (To the point where it was implied that the alternative wasn’t just bad science fiction, but genuinely unethical.) I think the genre is a lot more accommodating and expansive than some people, or their definitions, would allow. I think there are lots of different types of science fiction, and stories within the genre that slip in and out of those different types, that adopt certain elements (or pieces of furniture) to tell interesting and important tales. Rather than narrow our focus and say things like, “This isn’t science fiction, because it doesn’t do…”, maybe we should embrace the wide variety of things the genre does do. Maybe we should expand our definitions.
I think the genre, and certainly we its readers and viewers, would be richer for it.
That’s one way of putting it
Noel Murray on Torchwood: Children of Earth:
Mostly, this run of Torchwood is concerned with how evil both large and small plays out in a series of selfish acts and procedural moves. In that way, Children Of Earth is like The Wire of science fiction.
Sunday various
- Well here’s a shocker: a zombie apocalypse really would wipe out mankind. So say Canadian researchers, anyhow, and I’ve learned to trust Canadians on matters zombie-related. [via]
- From the “Are You Sure That Isn’t from The Onion Department”: “College Grad Sues College Because She Can’t Find a Job.” [via]
- I had real problems with Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica near the end — not as much as some people, maybe, but still enough that I have yet to finish watching the final season. (It’s telling how much I wasn’t enjoying it that I was able to stop, months ago, midway through the cliffhanger mutiny episodes, and not really feel compelled to continue.) But how can it not be too early for yet another remake? The elements that Moore didn’t adapt were the cheesy Star Wars-ripoffs of the original show. Who, besides maybe Glen Larson and Dirk Benedict, is crying out for that? And so soon?
- Fox News gets okay to misinform public:
In its six-page written decision, the Court of Appeals held that the Federal Communications Commission position against news distortion is only a “policy,” not a promulgated law, rule, or regulation.
Well that’s reassuring.[via]
- And finally, uniting all robots under a single operating system? Yeah, that couldn’t possibly go wrong… [via]