Ambrose & Elsewhere

New Babel Clash: Respectobiggles of the Mainstream. (Actually, respectobiggles don’t come up, but now I wish I’d thought of them. Maybe the next time this perennial topic comes up.)

New Babel Clash: Using reality, or vice versa.

Courtesy of Black Gate and Pyr, win a free copy of This Crooked Way, the book that many are calling, “A book about Morlock and some other characters.”

…into your blog I will creep. (At least, if you’re the Borders Babel Clash blog. Not otherwise, on advice of counsel.) A new entry here, this one with a video subtext, a political surtext, and a pro-fabulistic agenda.

“What do we want?”

“STORIES!”

“When do we want them?”

“AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE, IF IT’S NOT TOO MUCH TROUBLE!”

“‘Now!’ The line is ‘Now!'”

“‘THE LINE IS NOW!’ THAT IS SO ZEN!”

“Some rabbles just aren’t worth rousing.”

“GO TO SLEEP! YOU CAN ALWAYS DELETE THIS IN THE MORNING!”

They’re right, I think.

More genre-mixing in today’s “Babel Clash” post.

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”.