My university has just cancelled day classes. I can’t remember the last time this happened.
On the one hand, I have a school-kid’s delight in an unexpected day off. On the other hand, I’m embarrassed to live in a town that would shut down for a few inches of snow. We didn’t do things like that in the Old Country.
I think I’ll go sit, with an expression of disapproval, in front of the fireplace and read Leigh Brackett and the Iliad. That will send the right message, I think.
When I realized that last night’s episode would feature Telecop, Doublement and Mohinder Snoresh, I was prepared to be bored (these being hands down the most tedious characters in the group). But Mohinder crossing paths with Sylar lent a certain interest to the proceedings, and I was hoping that the Eeevil part of Doublement would either kill Telecop or compel him to behave with a reasonable degree of intelligence in order to survive. Amazingly, I almost got my wish; Telecop used his ability as if it were an asset for once. He reverted to type by doing something unbright at the end of his plot-segment, but even that made a certain amount of sense in context.
I wonder, too, if some of the writers aren’t “of the devil’s party” (as Blake said of Milton). Masi Oka as Hiro lights up the screen whenever he appears, but he’s been sidetracked for a number of episodes. The Amazing Indestructible Cheerleader is under the thumb of the Sinister Man with Horn-Rimmed Glasses, Peter Petrelli’s superpower will probably end up to be gale-force whining, etc. etc. It’s only the Eeevil characters who are allowed to act decisively, intelligently, effectively.
This is a potential problem but (talk about gale-force whining!) I thought last night’s episode was above average.
I… I don’t know anything about this sort of thing. Not personally. An ill-tempered reaction to a rejection slip, I mean. (It’s not as if anyone can prove anything, anyway: those records were purged.) But I’ve heard… I’ve heard it’s like this… thing.
[Snerged from Sean Stiennon.]
Steve Wilson has a typically hilarious take on the question of comic books and Homer, an issue that arose on John C. Wright’s LiveJournal.
I don’t think readers will go too far wrong by following John Wright’s prescriptions (Take Homer more seriously than comic books or genre fiction!), but I’m not sure that I can go along with his argument. For instance, I’m quite certain that a couple of genre books by Le Guin (Left Hand of Darkness and A Wizard of Earthsea) are permanent additions to American literature, worthy to take their place on a shelf next to Melville and Twain.
One of the reasons why I don’t think comic book series could attain the level of great art is because of their lack of seriousness about death. More blathering behind the cut.
M. John Harrison asserts that “Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.”
Which is a bit like saying that every use of the hand represents the triumph of the body over the thumb. Rhymes conveniently with “dumb.”
He may mean that telling a story is an activity distinct from worldbuilding, and often at odds with the exposition of information about the invented world, a truism I expect is understood by everyone who’s had a stab at writing sf/f. Or he may be expressing hostility to the kind of fiction that requires significant world-building, as opposed to stories which occur in already furnished worlds: that’s what the rest of his entry suggests. (“Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent.” etc.)
He ends by associating world-building with the Bush administration, a rather timid and dishonest rhetorical move. This suggests a new corollary of Godwin’s Law: The more desperate someone becomes in their criticism of a target the more likely they are to associate the target with the Bush administration. In any case, even if the association were valid, it wouldn’t necessarily be relevant. Officials in the Bush administration also breathe. (I naturally exclude Cheney from this observation.) But MJH is not going to stop breathing just to differentiate himself from them, nor am I.
[The link to MJH’s blog glommed from James Nicoll.]
[Addendum ( 2/8/07): There is some further discussion of this at the Lotus Lyceum.]
From the AP Science section: “An astronaut drove 900 miles and donned a disguise to confront a woman she believed was her rival for the affections of a space shuttle pilot, police said.”
Add a trip through a wormhole, perhaps a talking squid or two… This could be an sf story before it’s a Law & Order episode. And it tends to confirm my belief that science journalism is where the action is, these days.
I was rereading Euripides’ Crazy Hercules today to prepare for a class when I was poleaxed by a stray line.
ἄλλως δ’ ἀδυνάτων ἔοικ’ ἐρᾶν.
–Euripides, Heracles 318
“But I seem to be pointlessly in love with impossible things.”
It strikes me as a good epitaph for a fantasy-writer. Because every fantasy I write is (in part) a letter of protest against the way things are. I want to put on a coat of feathers and fly around the world. I want to see what’s on the other side of the flat earth. I want to break the door of hell and smash the bolts, and the hosts of the dead will outnumber the living. I want to bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion. I want to send lightnings, that they may go and say unto me, “Here we are.” I want to do any number of things whose realization seems to be, to put it mildly, unlikely.
Fantasy (in the literary sense) probably serves a lot of different functions. But it is, at least, a coping device for minds afflicted by the many pleasing impossibilities that can never be executed.
Because you get to write phrases like “Shadow of a Martian Robot”, which sounds like a lost collaboration of Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury.
Another glimpse into the breakup of Pitch-Black.
It strikes me that there might be a good mainstream novel (or at least a Law and Order episode) in the ups and downs of running a small press.
Robert J. Sawyer, the sf writer, has a rather tiresome post insisting that science fiction is rational, whereas fantasy is not. He actually argues that the only reason for any market overlap is due to Ace Books pirating publishing Lord of the Rings in their sf line. That sf and fantasy were mingling in fiction magazines (and elsewhere) for a generation or more before this epochal event is a fact that passes under Sawyer’s radar: not a powerful instrument, it seems.
Preferring sf to f is a point of view (though not mine: I like both) and there are certain distinctive features to each genre: robots in sf, golems in fantasy, etc. But rationality is not exclusively or particularly a feature of sf; it is essential to fantasy, as Tolkien pointed out a decade or so before he set out on his mission to destroy Americo-Canadian science fiction.
Sawyer’s point rests on his assertion that fantasy deals in things which cannot happen, whereas sf deals with things which can happen; that’s why sf is rational and fantasy is not. Putting aside all the impossible things that sf routinely proffers us with a straight face (like the dimension-hopping highly intelligent Neanderthals RJS writes about), let’s consider the premise that it is rational to consider only those things which one knows to be possible.
This might be a reasonable proposition if we knew absolutely everything which is possible and everything which is impossible. But we don’t. Arguably, we can’t, but in practical terms we never will. To be rational in the real world is to acknowledge the limits of one’s knowledge, to entertain the possibility that everything you know is wrong, or at least some of what you know is wrong. The inability to confront this existential reality is not a sign of rationality; it is a symptom of dogmatism.
“Counterfactual thinking” is another way of describing the feature of fantasy which RJS erroneously calls irrational. Counterfactuals are essential to human psychology. They have an important place in philosophy and science and history. Someone who could not engage in them would be utterly shut off from the unknown possibilities that life offers.
[Edit: fixed a bad link. Bad Link! No ocarina for you!]
[I copped the link to RJS’s blog from Paul Jessup.]
[Another theft from Paul Jessup: There’s a fell-off-my-chair-funny web-comic about the Sawyer kerflufflet at Steve Wilson’s My Elves Are Different. I mention this somewhere in the comments, but after sagely considering the question for roughly 5 milliseconds I decided that My Elves Are Different needs to be exalted to the skies. And lifting the link up from the comments was as close as I could get.]
