Ambrose & Elsewhere

A new “Babel Clash” post now up, this one titled (with classical restraint) “Monster Cowboys in Space!” It’s about genre mixing, as far as I can tell.

My Blog Gate post of the week is now up, this one a reread of a golden moldy, “The Elder Gods” by “Don A. Stuart” (really John W. Campbell jr).

It’s not a strain of swine flu, and it’s not the dance craze that all the kids are doing. It’s my latest “Babel Clash” post, and it’s here.

1. Charles Stross discovers that the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation didn’t even pretend to themselves that the science of the show was good. I feel his pain, I guess. I just feel it somewhat remotely, as it was obvious from the YAGLA plot of the initial episode that ST:TNG wasn’t going to be Star Trek: The Show That Puts the Science into Space Opera.

My problem with ST:TNG is that many of the plots are boring because the utopian background diminishes the opportunity for conflict. The Borg episodes tend to be pretty good, but then all those damn holodeck episodes (“It was all just a dream!”) brought the average way down again.

2. Science proves that Edward III was not written by Shakespeare, at least not by Shakespeare alone. I sort of determined this myself by reading the play last winter and muttering, “This can’t be Shakespeare.” In fact, I can’t see why anyone ever thought that it was by Shakespeare: there seems to be no internal or external evidence to support the assertion.

But the funny thing to me, in the article linked above, was the line: “the possibility that Shakespeare didn’t spend his entire career as a lonely, independent author should rock traditional academics.” The person who wrote this isn’t really hip to the last century or so of Shakespeare scholarship, but she thinks she is. Academia is a little like sf/f, in that the people who know least about it are the most sure that have its number. This is the sound of me saying “arrrgh.”

I just posted my first “Babel Clash” entry, this one modestly titled “Enge v. Elves”.

1. I was scrolling through a newsfeed and found this article. “Pus!” I muttered. “I was going to write something like that for Tor.com!” Then I realized: Hey, I did.

2. Matt Sturges (of Midwinter and Jack of Fables fame) and I (of Morlockian infame) are going to be guestblogging this week at the Borders “Babel Clash” blog.

“There is nothing so unbelievable that it may not become probable by putting it into words.”–Cicero, Paradoxes. (Sed nihil est tam incredibile, quod non dicendo fiat probabile.)

Fantasists and spin-doctors live by this saying, even if they’ve never heard it.

Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

After well over a month of slacking, I’ve finally posted a new Blog Gate entry, this one a dignified whine about whiners, specifically the type of person who says (and people have been saying this for as long as I remember), “SF doesn’t get any respect!” Appropriate answers run a narrow gamut from “Yes,” to “No” to “So?” but I managed to expand those three words into roughly 500 because I am a professional. So my SFWA card keeps on telling me.

My return to the lists of bloggerdom was partly inspired by a fortunate accident: Lou Anders kindly quoted a wisecrack of mine about “those who thirst for the foamy gray poison of respectability” in a post which sparked an interesting discussion, and the quote was picked up by Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist and io9, not exactly in the Oh-my-God-what-a-genius acclaimy way one would always prefer to be quoted. But it suddenly occurred to me that those that are begging for genre-respect always achieve the opposite. They’re like Rodney Dangerfield, only they can’t smell their own flop sweat. So I thought I would kindly point it out, that being the kind of guy I am.

After not posting through most of September, I seem to be posting a lot lately, but I should mention that I was recently interviewed by Randolph Carter of “Grinding to Valhalla” (here). And the guys from “Sci Fi Guys Book Review” talked to me last week for a podcast that should be appearing soon.

While I’ve been mostly incommunicado, Dave Freer has been running a project to finance taking his family’s pets along when the family emigrates to Australia. It’s a “Storyteller’s Bowl” concept: he publishes a new installment of his upcoming book, Save the Dragons, online every time donations reach a certain threshold. It’s a great cause–and a great story, as a matter of fact.