Crazed eco-freak takes hostages at Discovery Channel HQ.

Brit Mandelo asks about polyamory in F&SF. Most of the replies are on topic but of course there's also the people who would prefer not to see that sort of thing at all at all.

One brave soul points out the real menace inherent in SF&Fnal polyamory:


It just sounds so silly what we're talking about. If someone asked me "what are some good SFF books with monogamous relationships?" I'd be bewildered, because it's such a weird thing to me to care about in SFF. If you want a relationship book, read Romance novels. :)

I first saw a copy of The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction at Readercon and, on a quick look at the table of contents, was impressed, because here was as solid a collection of basic SF as I'd seen in a while -- indeed, for one volume covering the years it does in a general way, I don't know of a better one (The Road to Science Fiction is great, but it's 6 volumes!  Others I can think of are either more focused on a particular era or are more thesis-driven).

One thing that's important to keep in mind about the book is that it is intended as a teaching anthology -- its primary audience is any sort of "intro to SF" class (it even has a companion website with sample syllabi).  As such, it seems to me really strong.

Jeff VanderMeer raised a good point about the anthology's odd inclusion of very few stories from the last 20 years.  It's bizarre, and one of those things that tends to happen with books edited by a bunch of people.  It would be nice if the introduction addressed this weakness, because there are always compromises that have to be made in an anthology, and I imagine the editors probably thought that more recent work is more readily accessible to readers through various other anthologies and websites, so their focus should be on the older stuff.  Indeed, in a class, it would be easy to supplement this anthology by also using something like Dozois's Best of the Best and maybe some online stories.  Problem solved.

A more efficient solution would have been to end the anthology with Jim Kelly's "Think Like a Dinosaur" from 1995, and use the extra space and money on enriching some of the other decades, but I expect Wesleyan would have frowned on a book in which the most recent story is fifteen years old.

So the lack of representation for the last 20 years is weird, but I can understand it, and I would happily have such stories as "The Liberation of Earth" and "Desertion" and "When It Changed" and so many others easily accessible.  The only giant and inexplicable omission I've noticed in the book so far is its failure to reprint Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations", which is the story "Think Like a Dinosaur" is in direct response to.  (Eric Schaller notes this in the comments to Jeff's entry.  I emailed one of the editors to see if anyone's willing to talk about this omission, but haven't heard back yet. See update in next paragraph.)  One of the nice things about the book is that it is explicitly concerned with the idea of an SF megatext, and for that purpose, including "The Cold Equations" would have made a lot of sense.  There could be a problem with rights or something that prevents the story being reprinted in the book, but, again, it would have been nice to see it addressed in the introduction.  Godwin's story is mentioned in the headnote to "Think Like a Dinosaur", which only compounds the oddness.

Update: Just heard back from the editors of the book -- "Cold Equations" was on the original long list, but length considerations came into play, as well as a desire from at least a few of the editors to allow "Think Like a Dinosaur" to be something other than just a response to "Cold Equations".

(Eric also mentions that it would have been better perhaps to reprint "Mr. Boy", which is, I agree, among Jim's most impressive works.  But it's much longer than "Think Like a Dinosaur", and for an anthology like this, long stories take up so much space that they need to be absolutely essential to be included.  "TLD" fits the book's purposes well and is short enough that it doesn't hog precious space. Also, any of us would choose different stories by some of the authors, but that's the nature of anthologies.  Some of the selections that on a first glance I thought were odd -- especially Clarke's "The Sentinel" and Aldiss's "Supertoys..." -- make sense within the context of the book; in this case, it encourages connections to familiar media: both stories partly inspired films [indeed, films either directed by Stanley Kubrick (2001) or intitiated by him (A.I.)].  So while they're not by any means the best or most representative works by those authors, that's not the purpose of their inclusion in the anthology.)

Larry Nolen speaks truthfully when he calls it a "safe" anthology.  I expect the editors would agree, because that's part of the point -- this is an intro anthology.  To fill it with lots of esoteric authors or less-familiar stories would be counter-productive to the stated purpose.  I'm not the audience for it (except that I might assign it to classes one day), because I already have copies of 95% of those stories.  This is not a book you give to somebody who has a shelf full of SF anthologies covering a bunch of different eras.  This is a book you give to somebody who's seen a few sci-fi movies and maybe read a couple books or a short story here or there, or  to somebody who has only read current work and wants a one-volume crash course in some of the classics of the field.  For such a person, this is a marvelous book.  Just stick a note in the end with a list of some of your favorite recent anthologies, so they can see the wonderful diversity of what's been published since 1995...

Oh and also:

Here's a Greasemonkey script that will disable those ()*&)(*&)*(& Facebook/Twitter crosspost boxes on livejournal.

Also, I will not be crossposting, if anybody wondered.

(Edited to clarify: it just takes the option out of your browser: it does not prevent other people from crossposting comments. Though why anybody would want to read a crossposted comment out of context is a mystery to me. Oh livejournal, try not to suck so much, please?)

Whew. A thousand words on Range of Ghosts today, and I am calling it at that rather than pushing on to a second thousand, because I can imagine few things I care less to do than write right now. At least I'm in the middle of the thrilling dawn assassination attempt and chase.

I did make jelly (wild grape/apple) and start a loaf of bread this morning, and I have to go to the post office on the way to climbing. Tomorrow may wind up being an unscheduled day off, just because my brain is tired.

In other news, I got ARCs for The Sea Thy Mistress yesterday. It comes out, at last check, in February. (Yes, it's got a drifting publication date. I apologize; this is the publisher's decision, for various reasons of their own.) I will probably find a way to give away a copy or two before too much longer.

For those of you who have been wondering what it's about, it turns out there's some sales matter and a blurb for it in the back of the MMPB of By the Mountain Bound.

It's more spoilery for the other two books than itself, but it's quite spoilery for the first two, so I place it behind a cut. Because I care.







So now you know.

QotD:

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you've got a serious problem.
--Toni Morrison

View Poll: #1613633

Please eschew the use of the new cross-posting option on LJ when replying to my entries.

Hurricane Earl is going to move up the east coast of the USA this week, reaching Canadian waters, still a... Jim Macdonald http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/

America's Worst Driver.


I would not myself sent candidates for AWD out into San Francisco to be tested on Lombard Street and whatever that one with the 30 degree incline was. Interesting how avoiding punishment isn't enough: they added prizes, too.

Still, I think the worst Andrew Younghusband ever did was snap someone's key off. Crushing the entire car sends a message.

I was impressed by the guy who ran an obstacle course the other two contestants took 4 and 5 minutes to run in just under 22 seconds. Without hitting anything. In reverse.

Pawn Stars

People don't really understand the whole "need to make a profit selling the thing you want me to buy" thing, do they?

When every non-mainstream person has been warmly gathered into the community of humanity, it will be ok to laugh at the Segway users, won't it?

Hypothetically speaking, how long would you expect it to take to go from "I'd like more diversity in my WarHammer, please" to "How dare you try to introduce artificial diversity into a made-up world"?

The answer.

Nicked from lederhosen

Bjorn Lomborg has apparently changed his mind, and now thinks that global warming is the number one planetary crisis priority.  “He's back and generating as many headlines as ever. After years as the world's leading climate change critic, Bjorn Lomberg  is now saying that we need to put it at the top of our priority list. What's that, he has a new book out? Indeed, and in , Lomborg, an adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, goes so far as to say we should spend $100 billion a year to sort it out. The Guardian calls it a Major U-Turn, one "that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby".

Richard Loosemore comments: ”The last quote from that article pretty much sums it up: >  'Grant him this: Dude knows how to play the media. Who else could get such attention for adopting a position already held by millions of sensible people?'”

By all means use this conversion on your well-educated but obstinate “ostrich-skeptic.” It’s big stuff. 

But don’t expect the spin machine to stop turning out bright fools to razzle us and dazzle us with incantations that have one aim... to keep us doing nothing.  Take Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, who offers yet another version of the right wing nostrum that lots of people, interacting freely, will bounce around so many ideas, that solutions to problems will naturally appear (or evolve, like species in nature), leading to better times for all. 

Now, mind you, I  absolutely agree with everything I just paraphrased! And much more! For example, Ridley correctly demolishes the opposing foolishness of the left - the insipid pessimism conveyed in liberal-influenced media like the film AVATAR - that modern society is somehow worse than cultures that came earlier, more violent, less kindly or thoughtful. 

Baloney. (In fact the very ubiquity and success of messages like AVATAR is partial disproof of its premise!  Think about that.)

Prof. Steven Pinker already has made it abundantly and decisively clear that humanity is now experiencing unprecedentedly-low levels of violence, per capita, compared to any time in (or before) history.  Likewise increasing levels of education,  freedom and (yes) ethical behavior.  The foolish leftist notion - that we can only continue this progress by chiding people, while frantically ignoring the fact that progress has been made - is certainly insane. It deserves rigorous criticism. 

Nevertheless, the right is far worse.  Take the way their fizzy “optimism” arm-wavings start off by reciting truths - (e.g that ideas do breed and evolve among free/educated people... and civilization has thereby moved forward). Only then, insidiously, they razzle that basic truth into rationalizations for indolence!

Problems will solve themselves, as if by magic!  Ignoring Adam Smith’s cautiously pro-government and anti-oligarchy reasoning, they mis-apply his teachings in order to praise the kind of laissez-faire faith in an “invisible hand” that plays right into the hands of entrenched and conniving oligarchy.

The crux: this fizzing, percolation of ideas and solutions does happen - it can lead to all the great synergies that the optimists proclaim... even the miracle of the runaway positive sum game... the suppsed justification of capitalism.  On the other hand this semi-random idea-churn works best when it then feeds into a process called the modern-western, mixed society, wherein smart men and women in business, the arts and government compare notes, deliberate, negotiate, plan and bring about solutions to problems!

The usual prescription that lies underneath what Bjorn Lomberg used to teach, and that other court rationalizers continue to foist on us, is that men like Marshall and Acheson and Vennevar Bush - who MADE this modern world - should be ignored in favor of a random boiling of freely-exchanged solutions. But the invisible hand is only a metaphor.  Groups of human beings do assess, make and implement plans. Civil servants and politicians and scientists and citizens can and should play at least as big a role as crony CEO golf buddies. 

But the message of the right wing optimism machine is to claim that foresight and deliberation can ONLY be engaged in by corporate masters. Never anybody else.  It ignores how much planning and genuine leadership went into making this present world of low violence and rising hope.

------ Other politically redolent matters -----

Kent Pitman offered this observation about “rights” in the US system of government in light of current events (mosques, immigration, etc “Rights are just promises we make to ourselves on our better days, binding us to the conduct we aspire to, hoping that on our worse days we will not be quick enough or powerful enough to undo them before we regain our sanity.”

As for the incredible gall of Glenn Beck arrogating the mantle of “Heir of Martin Luther King?”  I have one response that may seem unfair, regionalist, even a bit snippy.  On the other hand it says a lot, in a visually powerful way.

Find a map showing those states that were most opposed to Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Act. Now compare that map to one showing the regions where Glenn Beck is most popular today.  I mean, geez. Some things ain’t complicated.

More evidence of wasted money in Iraq. Of course the pathetic thing is the failure of anybody on the right to call for a Special Prosecutor, re all this.  If you include possible graft in military support contracts, we’re possibly talking about HUNDREDS of billions.  So where are the people who screeched over never-proved assertions that a few tens of  millions (yes, that is an “M”) might have been pilfered from the UN’s Oil-for-Food program, back in the Clinton years?  What do such people call misdeeds under Bushite direction - three or four orders of magnitude worse - “ancient history.”

Why, oh why, does not President Obama use the Gulf Oil Spill and the Minerals Management Agency scandal as an excuse to appoint a special prosecutor... and then simply let the SP run loose?

BCRion reminds us of this classic. (Note the date!) That is both funny and heartbreaking that it hurts, so bad.
If only, it wasn't true.

--- A little Science... and a boycott. ---

A new, magnetic-zap method for treating depression seems verified & approved.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.  Norton Security Software promised rebates when I bought packages at Fry’s. EVERY time, they have reneged. The “debit cards” they sent me never worked. The call-in numbers never answered.  I’ll never do business with them or with Kaspersky, ever again.

...a collaborative contrarian product of http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ (site feed URL: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/atom.xml)

Oh, there's #5:

Lynne Thomas & Co. announce another mad fandom enterprise... and I helped!

And here's number six:

U.S. State Department page on Pakistan disaster relief. 

Seriously. Every little bit helps.

(Also, shucking lima beans is really, really hard. But that was the best succotash ever.)

Yesterday the four of us went to an oriental rug store in Petone, then to the outlet stores in Otaki. Shopping ensued, though none of the magnificent carpets caught calendula_witch's eye. This also involved driving about through even more beautiful countryside and townscape. Plus some pretty decent lunch. Then home for a long nap (me) followed by a fascinating party in a rooftop apartment in downtown Wellington.

Some last minute-shopping in train for today, then we're packing and off to Melbourne.

Your Tuesday/Wednesday moment of zen.



Old ute (Holden?) with golden Buddhas in the back, Otaki, NZ. © 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

arcaedia reminds us that today is the release date of my collection The Sky That Wraps — For some value of "today", as I write this post on the other side of the International Date Line.

Steampunk Wallpaper — (jimvanpelt via lt260.)

Lady Clankington's Cabinet of Carnal Curiosities — And via danjite, further steampunk curiosities. NSFW.

Is that my son wearing a dress? — I'm a progressive, supportive dad. Why was I so troubled by the sight of my little boy dressed as Snow White? (Thanks to willyumtx.)

How to Remake Life — Venter Institute researchers have made the first viable cell with a synthetic genome. Cool stuff. I'm waiting for someone to do this ab initio.

Metrocontextual science map — This is seriously cool as well.

It's Witch-Hunt Season — 'Tis autumn and a conservative's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of impeachment and political harassment.

Beck, Christianity and Social Justice — Yeah, well...

?otD: Have you ever wrapped the sky?



9/1/2010
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (NZ tourism)
Body movement: airport walking to come
Hours slept: 9.0 (fitful, plus 90 minute nap as well)
This morning's weigh-in: n/a
Yesterday's chemo stress index: 3/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Deliverer by C.J. Cherryh

Carthago deleta est. (I couldn't find words for this. Carthage was easier.) link back to Open thread 145... Abi Sutherland http://www.sunpig.com/abi/

I am still in a Jack Williamson mood so it's Star Bridge, which was co-written with James E. Gunn.

I would have sworn I read this in the 1970s but that's the edition I have and it's from 1982. Actually, I bought it used so it's from some time after July 1982.

Sorry, small typo. That should read The 10 Most Depressing 'Funky Winkerbean' Strips for August (With Bonus Despair)

We went away for the weekend (hashtag funfunfun), and I'm now behind on everything. So many links, so little time. Did you know it's Clockwork Angel day? A new Cassie Clare book is always cause for celebration. Soon, as in next week when I have more time, I'll be singing the praises of Meljean Brook's AWESOME forthcoming steampunk romance The Iron Duke. I love this book so much. Want. Sequel. Nao. If you're interested in reading Mockingjay discussion, check out the post below this one; I've been greatly enjoying the comments. You might also want to take a peek at... Gwenda Bond