thoughts and opinions by author s. andrew swann
S Andrew Swann | February 17, 2010
I09 led me to a post by Ian Sales about the dreaded Info Dump:
Unless the writer has chosen to use an outsider as a protagonist – a common trick in fantasy, but much less so in science fiction – the only way the reader is going to learn anything about the world of the story [...]
S Andrew Swann | February 10, 2010
Remember Rollerball? The original 1975 version with James Caan? One of the interesting premises of the movie was the collapse of the nation-state in favor of the corporation. That premise was somewhat prescient, anticipating one of the main tropes of cyberpunk by almost a decade. The idea is commonplace now, a shorthand for some deep [...]
S Andrew Swann | February 3, 2010
Today I’ve a guest blog post up @ SciFiGuy.ca wherein I go and mull over my current obsessions on religion and space opera in the Apotheosis Trilogy.
Can you write SF about religion? It’s an interesting question because when people tend to think of Religion and SF, it almost always in terms of opposition. It is [...]
S Andrew Swann | February 1, 2010
I recently read a rather interesting sfnal riff on Obama’s state of the union speech, based on an administration reference to a “New Foundation”:
But I recall reading here or somewhere that Paul Krugman and several other leading economic and legal academic-policymakers had come to their professions wanting to be … Hari Seldon. Deeply attracted to [...]
S Andrew Swann | December 30, 2009
Someone has again scratched a pet peeve of mine, that old pseudo-literary bugbear “relevance.” As in, SF is losing it, and it better get some quick or else be declared “irrelevant.” This is a bit of an oversimplification of the essay by Jetse de Vries, Should SF Die? But it pretty much encapsulates my problem [...]
S Andrew Swann | October 27, 2009
I think the general audience for fiction, judging by current pop culture, is developing a more resilient suspension of disbelief. This occurred to me as I watched the last episode of Flashforward. Now several years ago, a series like that would place the universe changing event at some (probably indeterminate) point in the future. [...]
S Andrew Swann | October 8, 2009
Via the wonder of the internet, I’ve caught up with both episodes of Flashforward so far. I can say that I’m enjoying it, and I hope it avoids the fate of another similarly time-twisting series ABC tried during Lost’s absence, the show Daybreak . Like the prior effort, it has a contemporary setting using the [...]
S Andrew Swann | August 20, 2009
(Inspired by some blog posts elsewhere)
The aliens are really metaphors for a) blacks b) Jews c) pick a minority group. It’s one thing to use another species to write about racism, quite another to just lift some particular human experience and graft it on to a non-human. It rarely makes sense. It’s even worse when [...]
S Andrew Swann | August 6, 2009
Prepare yourself for the great Libertarian/Transhumanist cage match. And here you can read about the resulting internet kerfuffle. Sort of the philosophical equivalent of a flame-war between furries and trekkies.
S Andrew Swann | July 21, 2009
I bet you thought I was kidding.
I bet you thought such things would never see any practical use.
I bet you believe them when they say that their mission is not to build “futuristic robots” to “feed on the human population”
Will you feel that way when they start building themselves?
(Props to Elizabeth Bear and Patrick Nielsen [...]
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