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 Read more…
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, Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
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) Read more…
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 Read more…
(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 Read more…
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.
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 Read more…