I will second "Contact." It's barely science fiction as we know it, but it's an excellent book for communicating to a non-SF reader the awe that draws most of us to SF.
My grandfather asked me what science fiction book he should read to get acquainted with the genre, and I gave him "Contact." If I'd given him "Dune," he'd have put it down in frustration twenty pages in.
C J Cherryh spans both Sci Fi and Fantasy. It's character driven fiction at its best, and no one does political intrigue better than Cherryh. She understands exactly what drives humanity, both on a personal and group basis. Most of her stories also have great plots with lots of twists and turns. Some people may find her long introspective passages boring, and few of her books are quick reads. Most of her Sci Fi titles contain limited tech descriptions carefully woven into the story and not a lot of the gee whiz factor. Slight more hard sci fi would be Downbelow Station and Cyteen, both of which won Hugos. Her latest, Regenesis, just came out and is a continuation of that story line. (I just started reading it).
Other personal favorites are Hammerfall, the first in the gene war series, the Faded Sun trilogy, and her first series, the Morgaine novels, starting with Gate of Ivrel ( All of these latter novels are soft sci fi, with some fantasy elements.) A theme she frequently explores is the adaptability of man, both on a personal and species basis, and how that may be our greatest survival trait. The effects of extended lifespans on the psyche come up a lot, too. With something like 60 novels to her credit, there's a lot to choose from, and most of them are still readily available via the net or libraries.
I've seen parts of two movies in the last year in which orbital energy beam platforms were used to alter weather/climate. In one, there was some kind of superhurricane and, just as Bova's heroes would have wanted, the heroes use an orbital maser or laser to alter the behavior of the storm. In another, Earth is plummeted into an ice age from a cometary/asteroid impact and an orbital weapons platform is used to literally heat things up a bit.
It makes me think of an old Ben Bova "juvenile", called The Weather-Makers, wherein noble studly scientist-heroes casually discussed using military satellites to "squirt a few lasers" at hurricans to make them go away.
Their biggest problems weren't with the weather, but rather with Big Bad Government Bureaucrats who wouldn't get out of their way and let them squirt lasers at cloud formations, damnit!
Recent Stories is really the only way into the blogs in the current information architecture, so I wanted to be sure we got it back post-haste. I've cleaned up the presentation a little, too.
We may have to live with the centered text in the editor for a while, though -- it's an easy but time-consuming fix.
Either you already fixed it, or it's behaving differently for others, because I have the recent stories/posts block in my view of the page. It looks good and is working properly. Thanks, again, Eric!
It's a whole-number version upgrade, so some things will be different. Including having a working WYSIWYG editor, a little later today. (TinyMCE just never worked right on this site; we'll now be using FCKEditor, which I've had good luck with on sites I build for work.)
I'll have a summary document in a few days. First I need to try to get the Amazon integration stuff working.
Thank you for your work in updating the site, Eric. I'm sure it will have a beneficial effect, and the recent stories block was being a bit dodgy the last few days, anyway.
The admin section for my login is different, too, if that makes a difference.
Thank you to member Steve Carper for posting a link to the New York Times article about this. It seems that Amazon has responded to the concerns of those decrying the read-aloud feature of the Kindle 2 as eating into audio edition sales. However, they aren't just turning it off outright or deleting the code. Instead, they are allowing rights holders to decide whether they want to permit Kindle 2 to read their works aloud. What Amazon proposes is a tag that indicates whether a work can be read aloud. This compromise, a form of DRM that actually came up during a lively discussion on our Google Groups listserv, hopefully will satisfy all parties involved. Of course, the party who brought it up was dead set against the idea of restricting the reading aloud of books by Kindle 2, but at least the feature isn't being eliminated.
--
eDave
Patent Lawyer, Aerospace Engineer, Mac Geek
"French is the language that turns dirt into romance."
Yes, the time listed for the Second Life event is SLT - the same as Pacific Time. For those of us on the East coast, that means the event will be taking place at 6:30 p.m.
Also, the month of March is Science Fiction Month at the library archipelago in Second Life. The LeGuin talk marks the beginning of a month of events and programs taking place at various libraries.
Anyone interested in holding an R-Spec event at the Monroe County Library System's Second Life Amphitheater should contact me to get on the calendar. This is a good time to get some recognition while SL libraries are promoting SF!
This is "David Pascal's" essay. I've seen it on his website under the name Rudy Matic, his birth name. It's some very good writing, nonetheless.
Now he's Melvin? The man has more pseudonyms than Imelda Marcos has shoes.
I started a new blog on the R-SPEC site geared toward analysis of technology. The introductory post should be above. Let me know what you think. --
eDave Patent Lawyer, Aerospace Engineer, Mac Geek
"French is the language that turns dirt into romance." - Stephen King
Maybe its not about traditional tropes being crutches, but what is says about us that we like them. What do we need that we find there? Do we need to escape from an enjoyable escape? Comfortable is good sometimes, especially the kinds of comforts that make you think. ALL good SF does that, whether it uses traditional tropes or stretches in entirely new directions.
I'm with you on the fact that subgenrism is applicable to Fantasy. Mundane Fantasy may already have a tag as "Magical Realism". I suppose unless the two things could really show us something different about ourselves, they'd be the same.
Scalzi's math is atrocious, even outside of the point about the Publisher's Clearinghouse numbers drop.
The numbers of sets of eyes that see a blog are not comparable to the number of people that buy a magazine. There's a huge difference in the level of interest and investment by the reader. And not just investment in dollars, but in time and thought, so a large fudge factor would have to be applied to one side of that equation. Not apples and oranges. Apples and pumpkins.
Also, if he wants to look at awards, to be fair, he should include Hugos and Nebulas, which find most of their short fiction winners in the big three magazines. Those two awards could hardly be considered uninfluential in the careers of their winners. So if he was fair, he'd be dead wrong.
... and, btw, I think there is a parallel to be drawn to fantasy. Consider the plethora of vampire stories out there right now. You can find hip-hop vampires, reluctant vampires, vampire assassins, vampire detectives, and there seems to even be a surprisingly strong sub-genre for lesbian vampires. Werewolves are up and coming. And they're all pretty fangless creatures, as far as I can see, if you will forgive the completely intentional pun: They've had the horror leeched out of them to make them palatable, or they've been so highly sexualized (as with Anne Rice's monstrosities) that the stories are essentially blood-porn.
Is that really any worse than the flood of high-fantasy knockoffs that began to consume the fantasy shelves in the 70s? Maybe not, but then maybe they reflected the same phenomenon. Lord of the Rings wasn't the problem; it was the people who copied its tropes without understanding the importance of them being arranged in a particular way.
What would a "mundane fantasy" be like? Well, I don't think the problem's the same, to start with. You don't have "impossibles" that you can just bar, you've merely got tropes that have been trivialized, and since it's always possible to take them seriously again, it's silly to bar them. That said, I think you can see a lot of contemporary fantasy that either reshuffles the old tropes with new ideas (I think Garth Nix's "Mister Monday" and Abhorsen stories are good examples of this) or completely transposes the fantasy into a new modern context (China Mieville's King Rat or just about anything by Neil Gaiman).
But maybe you could do a mundane fantasy. Maybe you just restrict yourself to the events of everyday life, and try to make something fantastic out of that. It would be really hard. That's kind of what Lucius Shepard was doing in "Stars Seen Through Stone" (F&SF in March or April, I think); it's also what Fritz Leiber used to do so well with so many of his stories (like "Smoke Ghost" or "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes"), or Avram Davidson did in "And All the Seas With Oysters" (which had me looking askance at wire coat hangers for years).
It would be a really valuable exercise, in other words. Much like the writing exercises people do where they're not allowed to say what they're trying to show, or where they must write only in dialog. I see Mundane in much the same way: You use it to get you someplace, and then move on from there.
I think a lot of the heat over predicting technology (or science) is a red herring. The greatest passion in Ryman's talk seems to me to be around the concept of wish-fulfillment, and what kind of attitudes the bulk of SF creates, and especially this idea that the genre selects for stuff that is essentially geared to help us forget about the mess we might very well be in around here.
Dangerous escapism, if you will: Stuff that gives us license to be complacent, because hell, we'll just all go to Mars. Or Tau Ceti. Or upload ourselves into chunks of orbiting computronium.
I think it misses the point a little to cite counter-examples, because they're mostly either old or not mainstream or both, and anyway are not really part of what Ryman's objecting to, which is the vague beast of "mainstream SF". And when Ryman says "mainstream", I think it's pretty clear that he means the main stream of the genre, not the main mass market, especially when he says stuff like this:
Mass market SF doesn’t imagine how different interstellar flight will make us. And I don’t mean the usual posthuman stuff. I mean different culturally. I mean getting back home to find 200 years have passed and that everything we loved and believed in is gone. Yes, some SF has done just that, notably The Forever War. So why isn’t the space pilot coming back from the distant past an SF stereotype? Answer: because that’s not what the SF wants.
This idea that "SF" might "want" something is particularly interesting to me, and I think it might be behind what's really pissing some people off, because it insinuates that we're not aware of why we make some things successful and not others.
Too, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that Ryman is talking about "literature". He wants more of it. He thinks the proper function of "literature" is to unbalance people. Rudy Rucker, who's also critical of the Mundane Manifesto, wants the same thing:
I don’t think SF is necessarily about predicting possible futures. I’ve always felt that SF is more like surrealism. The idea is to shock people into awareness. Show them how odd the world is. Whether or not you draw on realistic tropes is irrelevant. But my personal practice is to allow really strange kinds of things to happen. This said, I do always to try and make the science internally consistent. Part of the fun of SF is making up explanations for your effects.
[A crystal-magic BS filter.]
Much of the discussion seems to be around, as you put it, where we cut the pie. Or rather, I would say, where we imagine cutting the pie. Because, for example, Geoff Ryman and Rudy Rucker are really after more or less the same thing, and they both know it and aren't afraid to admit the fact. Rudy seems to think Geoff's methods are misguided. Maybe they are. Or maybe the methods aren't as serious as we make them out to be. Maybe they really are about forcing yourself to think differently -- to think about stories without the traditional tropes, to seriously ask yourself whether they're crutches or not.
I've seen parts of two movies in the last year in which orbital energy beam platforms were used to alter weather/climate. In one, there was some kind of superhurricane and, just as Bova's heroes would have wanted, the heroes use an orbital maser or laser to alter the behavior of the storm. In another, Earth is plummeted into an ice age from a cometary/asteroid impact and an orbital weapons platform is used to literally heat things up a bit.
It makes me think of an old Ben Bova "juvenile", called The Weather-Makers, wherein noble studly scientist-heroes casually discussed using military satellites to "squirt a few lasers" at hurricans to make them go away.
Their biggest problems weren't with the weather, but rather with Big Bad Government Bureaucrats who wouldn't get out of their way and let them squirt lasers at cloud formations, damnit!
Recent Stories is really the only way into the blogs in the current information architecture, so I wanted to be sure we got it back post-haste. I've cleaned up the presentation a little, too.
We may have to live with the centered text in the editor for a while, though -- it's an easy but time-consuming fix.
Either you already fixed it, or it's behaving differently for others, because I have the recent stories/posts block in my view of the page. It looks good and is working properly. Thanks, again, Eric!
It's a whole-number version upgrade, so some things will be different. Including having a working WYSIWYG editor, a little later today. (TinyMCE just never worked right on this site; we'll now be using FCKEditor, which I've had good luck with on sites I build for work.)
I'll have a summary document in a few days. First I need to try to get the Amazon integration stuff working.
Thank you to member Steve Carper for posting a link to the New York Times article about this. It seems that Amazon has responded to the concerns of those decrying the read-aloud feature of the Kindle 2 as eating into audio edition sales. However, they aren't just turning it off outright or deleting the code. Instead, they are allowing rights holders to decide whether they want to permit Kindle 2 to read their works aloud. What Amazon proposes is a tag that indicates whether a work can be read aloud. This compromise, a form of DRM that actually came up during a lively discussion on our Google Groups listserv, hopefully will satisfy all parties involved. Of course, the party who brought it up was dead set against the idea of restricting the reading aloud of books by Kindle 2, but at least the feature isn't being eliminated.
--
eDave
Patent Lawyer, Aerospace Engineer, Mac Geek
"French is the language that turns dirt into romance."
- Stephen King
Just to clarify, the times listed in the post are SL time (equivalent to Pacific Time).
--
eDave Patent Lawyer, Aerospace Engineer, Mac & Ubuntu Geek
"French is the language that turns dirt into romance." - Stephen King
Click this text to add Nancy's reading to your Google calendar.
--
eDave Patent Lawyer, Aerospace Engineer, Mac Geek "French is the language that turns dirt into romance." - Stephen King
I started a new blog on the R-SPEC site geared toward analysis of technology. The introductory post should be above. Let me know what you think.
-- eDave
Patent Lawyer, Aerospace Engineer, Mac Geek
"French is the language that turns dirt into romance." - Stephen King
... and, btw, I think there is a parallel to be drawn to fantasy. Consider the plethora of vampire stories out there right now. You can find hip-hop vampires, reluctant vampires, vampire assassins, vampire detectives, and there seems to even be a surprisingly strong sub-genre for lesbian vampires. Werewolves are up and coming. And they're all pretty fangless creatures, as far as I can see, if you will forgive the completely intentional pun: They've had the horror leeched out of them to make them palatable, or they've been so highly sexualized (as with Anne Rice's monstrosities) that the stories are essentially blood-porn.
Is that really any worse than the flood of high-fantasy knockoffs that began to consume the fantasy shelves in the 70s? Maybe not, but then maybe they reflected the same phenomenon. Lord of the Rings wasn't the problem; it was the people who copied its tropes without understanding the importance of them being arranged in a particular way.
What would a "mundane fantasy" be like? Well, I don't think the problem's the same, to start with. You don't have "impossibles" that you can just bar, you've merely got tropes that have been trivialized, and since it's always possible to take them seriously again, it's silly to bar them. That said, I think you can see a lot of contemporary fantasy that either reshuffles the old tropes with new ideas (I think Garth Nix's "Mister Monday" and Abhorsen stories are good examples of this) or completely transposes the fantasy into a new modern context (China Mieville's King Rat or just about anything by Neil Gaiman).
But maybe you could do a mundane fantasy. Maybe you just restrict yourself to the events of everyday life, and try to make something fantastic out of that. It would be really hard. That's kind of what Lucius Shepard was doing in "Stars Seen Through Stone" (F&SF in March or April, I think); it's also what Fritz Leiber used to do so well with so many of his stories (like "Smoke Ghost" or "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes"), or Avram Davidson did in "And All the Seas With Oysters" (which had me looking askance at wire coat hangers for years).
It would be a really valuable exercise, in other words. Much like the writing exercises people do where they're not allowed to say what they're trying to show, or where they must write only in dialog. I see Mundane in much the same way: You use it to get you someplace, and then move on from there.
I think a lot of the heat over predicting technology (or science) is a red herring. The greatest passion in Ryman's talk seems to me to be around the concept of wish-fulfillment, and what kind of attitudes the bulk of SF creates, and especially this idea that the genre selects for stuff that is essentially geared to help us forget about the mess we might very well be in around here.
Dangerous escapism, if you will: Stuff that gives us license to be complacent, because hell, we'll just all go to Mars. Or Tau Ceti. Or upload ourselves into chunks of orbiting computronium.
I think it misses the point a little to cite counter-examples, because they're mostly either old or not mainstream or both, and anyway are not really part of what Ryman's objecting to, which is the vague beast of "mainstream SF". And when Ryman says "mainstream", I think it's pretty clear that he means the main stream of the genre, not the main mass market, especially when he says stuff like this:
This idea that "SF" might "want" something is particularly interesting to me, and I think it might be behind what's really pissing some people off, because it insinuates that we're not aware of why we make some things successful and not others.Too, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that Ryman is talking about "literature". He wants more of it. He thinks the proper function of "literature" is to unbalance people. Rudy Rucker, who's also critical of the Mundane Manifesto, wants the same thing:
Much of the discussion seems to be around, as you put it, where we cut the pie. Or rather, I would say, where we imagine cutting the pie. Because, for example, Geoff Ryman and Rudy Rucker are really after more or less the same thing, and they both know it and aren't afraid to admit the fact. Rudy seems to think Geoff's methods are misguided. Maybe they are. Or maybe the methods aren't as serious as we make them out to be. Maybe they really are about forcing yourself to think differently -- to think about stories without the traditional tropes, to seriously ask yourself whether they're crutches or not.