The Fall and Decline of Science Fiction
David Johnston
day science fiction. But I am going to address the question of why
if you tried to separate fantasy and science fiction in a current
bookstore, the fantasy section is almost bound to be bigger.
Variable 1: Success. Science fiction has been around for a
long time and it's garnered a lot of readership. To some
extent it has "escaped the ghetto". For example suppose
you wrote a story about how the American infantry is
revolutionised by the introduction of powered battle
armour. Science fiction right? Except that Dale Brown
writes it and it ends up in the thriller section. Nora Roberts
writes stories about a cop 50 years in the future chasing
crimes like the introduction of a lethal drug that gets you
high and reverses the physical signs of aging but then
kills you a few years later, and it ends up the mystery
section. Crichton writes stories about cloned dinosaurs
running amok or time travellers lost in the 14th century
and it ends up in general fiction. Hell I read a
_lawyer book_ which centered around how invasive
a technology that recorded the full sensory experience
of having sex could be.
People just don't find science fiction to be
weird enough these days that having a supertechnological
premise or environment is necessarily enough to end up
in the ghetto shelves. It seems in order to end up in science
fiction, it almost has to have bizarre
technological elements. The merely futuristic is insufficient.
You need something like magic nanotechnology, or
even more magic faster than light drives. That brings
us to:
Variable 2: Knowledge. Once upon a time, lots of
people seriously accepted ideas like psi powers,
faster than light travel or even practical slower
than light travel, galaxies full of life waiting
to be discovered, the whole star trek/star wars
package. Sadly now we know a bit too much
for that to seem more than a fantasy. These
days it's starting to look like writing a story
where Venus is covered in jungle and
canals push water down from the icecaps
of a dying Mars. Quaint. If you are going
to write stories about "science" that you
know damn well is fantasy, why not just
write fantasy? If Vulcans are no more
likely than elves, why not just write about
elves? The exception, of course is
military science fiction, just because
there's a flavour to tanks and guns
that just can't be duplicated in straight
fantasy.
And worse, there isn't all that much that
has replaced it. Nanotechnology.
Biological engineering. Mind-machine
interface. New flavours
of the month, that act as fertile story
seeds because we still don't understand
the limitations of these technologies as
much as we are starting to understand
the hard and fast limitations of space
travel and mental abilities. But still
the horizon of the future is getting
narrower and narrower, and so science
fiction falls behind and more and more
fantasy is written with rigorous rationalistic
rules, just because the people writing
it are people who would be writing
science fiction in an earlier time frame.
JoatSimeon
>faster than light travel
-- actually, this has become (somewhat) more credible in physics circles over
the past generation. So has time travel.
We don't have a Theory of Everything yet; we're probably not even close.
>or even practical slower than light travel,
-- perfectly practical; just not practical _yet_; rather like reaching escape
velocity in 1880.
They knew it was possible, just not the details of how; engineering hadn't
gotten that far yet.
It's a scale problem.
>galaxies full of life waiting to be discovered
-- and your evidence to the contrary is?
The past 15 years have proven that planets are common. We don't yet have the
technical means to find earth-sized planets, but such instruments are being
constructed even as we speak.
>Sadly now we know a bit too much for that to seem more than a fantasy.
-- total bat-puckey and hubris.
David Johnston
>>From: rgo...@telusplanet.net (David Johnston)
>
>>faster than light travel
>
>-- actually, this has become (somewhat) more credible in physics circles over
>the past generation. So has time travel.
I don't believe that.
>>or even practical slower than light travel,
>
>-- perfectly practical; just not practical _yet_; rather like reaching escape
>velocity in 1880.
I don't mean "practical" in the sense of "you can do it".
I mean "practical" in the sense of "you can make a profit doing it".
One day we probably will be able to do interstellar travel in a
reasonable time frame. But is anything likely to be out there
that we can't make more cheaply at home? Living space included?
>It's a scale problem.
>
>>galaxies full of life waiting to be discovered
>
>-- and your evidence to the contrary is?
>
>The past 15 years have proven that planets are common. We don't yet have the
>technical means to find earth-sized planets, but such instruments are being
>constructed even as we speak.
Of course planets are common. Nobody expected planets not to be
common. Hell, we've got a few dozen lumps of reasonable sized rock
right here in our solar system. Planets are the easy part.
Mark
Hugo Gernsback's day, but not for a long time. People get stuck on
this, though. A lot. Look at Margaret Atwood--she thinks you need
spaceships for it to be science fiction.
Your argument also assumes that there--and here I'm guessing, so
forgive me if I get this wrong--that there *ought* to be a chasm
between the various sections of the bookstore. That because something
ends up shevled as Thriller, et al, it somehow isn't SF anymore.
That's buying into the marketing categories at a level I, as a writer,
don't accept, and I'd be surprised if many readers would, either.
The fact is, there is a difference--in tone, in intent, in aesthetic,
in premise--between a Vulcan and an Elf. Just naming them makes the
implications of the ensuing story different.
Personally, I think the reason SF fares badly (if it does--your list
of writers who write it under other labels undercuts this a bit) is
not so much that much of what we used to call SF has now become
fantasy as the fact that we have a pretty healthy anti-intellectualism
in this day and age, and reading that smacks of reason and logic and
all the stuff SF is supposed to be about suffers as a result--as does
any genre that requires a modicum of appreciation for the intellect
and its responsible uses.
But that's just me.
Mark
author of:
COMPASS REACH
METAL OF NIGHT
PEACE & MEMORY
REMAINS (forthcoming)
www.marktiedemann.com
Mike Williams
> People just don't find science fiction to be
> weird enough these days that having a supertechnological
> premise or environment is necessarily enough to end up
> in the ghetto shelves. It seems in order to end up in science
> fiction, it almost has to have bizarre
> technological elements. The merely futuristic is insufficient.
It's the author, rather than the material that is ghettoized. If you start
with non-SF material then chances are your SF work(s) will stay on the
general/popular shelves (e.g. Lessing, Brown, etc). If your initial work is
SF thriller or goes out of its way to demystify the tech content then it may
still stay out of the ghetto (e.g. Crichton).
If you start with SF then it's almost certain that any subsequent writings
will stay in the SF shelves (e.g. Eddings, Lethem, Donaldson, Lem).
Exceptions are those that write under different names for non-genre works
(Banks, MM Smith, ...).
If the genre content is old enough then it may go to the children's section
(Verne, Wells, ...).
David Johnston
>Your argument assumes that the "point" of SF is the gizmos.
No, not at all. The point of science fiction is beside the point.
I was just considering the question of why science fiction
sections in stores that still have them as a separate category
are shrinking. That has nothing to do with the point of SF.
Maybe in
>Hugo Gernsback's day, but not for a long time. People get stuck on
>this, though. A lot. Look at Margaret Atwood--she thinks you need
>spaceships for it to be science fiction.
>
>Your argument also assumes that there--and here I'm guessing, so
>forgive me if I get this wrong--that there *ought* to be a chasm
>between the various sections of the bookstore.
No, not at all.
>The fact is, there is a difference--in tone, in intent, in aesthetic,
>in premise--between a Vulcan and an Elf.
Of course there is. But then again there's also a difference
between a Vulcan and a Klingon, in tone, in intent, and in
aesthetic.
Alan Poulter
@news.telusplanet.net:
> OK, don't panic. I'm not really going to denounce the state of modern
> day science fiction. But I am going to address the question of why
> if you tried to separate fantasy and science fiction in a current
> bookstore, the fantasy section is almost bound to be bigger.
The fantasy section is bigger as bookstores sell books that fit
formulae and current fantasy (trilogy set in mythical world) is
way more formulaic than current SF. Formulaic SF (TV tie-ins,
golden-age type SF) does make it into bookstores.
I think the reverse. Cutting edge current SF is pretty much
impenetrable to people who have not read a lot of SF and are
clued up on technologies.
See point above. Current SF reflects the complexity
of current society and science. People looking for
easy anwsers (head west at warp factor 5) in SF are
going to be disappointed. SF has written itself into
a ghetto and I for one am glad.
Alan Poulter
al...@poulter.demon.co.uk
SilverFox
"Mark" <mtied...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:78b1aacb.04010...@posting.google.com...
> Personally, I think the reason SF fares badly (if it does--your list
> of writers who write it under other labels undercuts this a bit) is
> not so much that much of what we used to call SF has now become
> fantasy as the fact that we have a pretty healthy anti-intellectualism
> in this day and age, and reading that smacks of reason and logic and
> all the stuff SF is supposed to be about suffers as a result--as does
> any genre that requires a modicum of appreciation for the intellect
> and its responsible uses.
Let's face it; the mundanes are getting dumber by the year. Look at the
time when Model As came out; each one came with a toolkit and most of the
people who owned one did their own maintenance. Now we have a whole
generation that can't even change their own oil or tires. They go to a job
and that's all they know as far as skills and interests. I hear of so many
who retire, and then die after only a couple of years, because they have no
interests outside of their chosen field.
At sf cons, I meet people who can converse on a variety of topics and
levels. These are people who purposely try to broaden their horizons. I
think a lot of this is formed in childhood, when someone; parents, a good
teacher, friends, whomever, showed them new things and got them interested
in a variety of subjects. For the most part, television doesn't do this.
The public school system is failing us by not requiring good language
skills. (And the evidence is painfully obvious on many newsgroups.) When
Johnny can't read, he won't...... It becomes a circle that feeds itself,
while slowly moving in on itself. Someone needs to spark the inquisitive
nature of today's kids and wake their brains up!
SilverFox ^..^
David Johnston
<al...@poulter.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> People just don't find science fiction to be
>> weird enough these days that having a supertechnological
>> premise or environment is necessarily enough to end up
>> in the ghetto shelves. It seems in order to end up in science
>> fiction, it almost has to have bizarre
>> technological elements. The merely futuristic is insufficient.
>> You need something like magic nanotechnology, or
>> even more magic faster than light drives. That brings
>> us to:
>
>I think the reverse. Cutting edge current SF is pretty much
>impenetrable to people who have not read a lot of SF and are
>clued up on technologies.
How is that the reverse?
Mark
> >The fact is, there is a difference--in tone, in intent, in aesthetic,
> >in premise--between a Vulcan and an Elf.
>
> Of course there is. But then again there's also a difference
> between a Vulcan and a Klingon, in tone, in intent, and in
> aesthetic.
No,not at al. A Klingon and a Vulcan still fit the same
aesthetic--aliens with a connection to each other via the background
premise. Add an elf and the background won't support it.
But this is nitpicking of the least productive sort.
Justin Bacon
>No,not at al. A Klingon and a Vulcan still fit the same
>aesthetic--aliens with a connection to each other via the background
>premise. Add an elf and the background won't support it.
Oh, c'mon. This is Star Trek, the TV show which tried to convince us that there
are planets of Nazis, Romans, and 20th century gangsters just waiting to be
discovered. Whether or not Kirk, Spock, and McCoy would run into elves would
probably depend wholly on whether or not Desilu was doing a fantasy show on the
next lot.
Justin Bacon
tria...@aol.com
Peter Bruells
Apart from the Romans, both the Nazis and the Caponists were created
by Federation meddling.
lal_truckee
>>From: rgo...@telusplanet.net (David Johnston)
>
>
>>faster than light travel
>
>
> -- actually, this has become (somewhat) more credible in physics circles over
> the past generation. So has time travel.
>
> We don't have a Theory of Everything yet; we're probably not even close.
>
>
>>or even practical slower than light travel,
>
>
> -- perfectly practical; just not practical _yet_; rather like reaching escape
> velocity in 1880.
Well, Verne used cannon in "From the Earth to the Moon" in 1865 to reach
escape velocity. Bull demonstrated that such was actually a practical
solution somewhat later.
> They knew it was possible, just not the details of how; engineering hadn't
> gotten that far yet.
>
> It's a scale problem.
Yep. I suspect if a major euro power in the 19th century had thrown
Apollo size money at the enterprise, escape velocity could have been
achieved in 1880; Bull used nothing but 19th century tech, IIRC.
>>galaxies full of life waiting to be discovered
>
>
> -- and your evidence to the contrary is?
>
> The past 15 years have proven that planets are common. We don't yet have the
> technical means to find earth-sized planets, but such instruments are being
> constructed even as we speak.
>
>
>>Sadly now we know a bit too much for that to seem more than a fantasy.
>
>
> -- total bat-puckey and hubris.
Exactly.
And just because Mike Cretin clones his dinosaurs over in the mainstrean
section doesn't make it less SF; (it does make it poor SF, but that's
another issue.)
lal_truckee
Actually, didn't they essentually run into "elves" in that visit to the
rest stop/paradise planet (I forget the episode name; sorry.)
Oops: Me bad. "Star Trek" and "SF" shouldn't be mentioned in the same
post. I withdraw my sentiment.
lal_truckee
> I hear of so many
> who retire, and then die after only a couple of years, because they have no
> interests outside of their chosen field.
Won't happen to me - I have SF to fall back on. <silly grin>
Jano
> See point above. Current SF reflects the complexity
> of current society and science. People looking for
> easy anwsers (head west at warp factor 5) in SF are
> going to be disappointed. SF has written itself into
> a ghetto and I for one am glad.
I think you're right. After having read lately more and more hard SF I
find difficult to go back to simpler books (inside SF genre, that is).
Mark
Don't confuse the idea of Klingons and Vulcans in that milieu with its
execution. Besides, that wasn't my choice for example. As a general
observation, aliens within a science fictional context are different
as I noted from elves--which, in order to be elves, would have to be
identified as such and would therefore clash with the background
(unless a magnificently intricate justification within a SFnal context
were made for their presence, which would still render it Not
Fantasy).
David Johnston
>
>
>Don't confuse the idea of Klingons and Vulcans in that milieu with its
>execution. Besides, that wasn't my choice for example. As a general
>observation, aliens within a science fictional context are different
>as I noted from elves--which, in order to be elves, would have to be
>identified as such and would therefore clash with the background
I do not find the Liaden to clash with the background of their
science fiction series even though they have been identified
as elves.
Wayne Throop
:: aesthetic--aliens with a connection to each other via the background
:: premise. Add an elf and the background won't support it.
: tria...@aol.com (Justin Bacon)
: Oh, c'mon. This is Star Trek, the TV show which tried to convince us
: that there are planets of Nazis, Romans, and 20th century gangsters
: just waiting to be discovered. Whether or not Kirk, Spock, and McCoy
: would run into elves would probably depend wholly on whether or not
: Desilu was doing a fantasy show on the next lot.
Not only that, but c'mon; Vulcans *are* elves (at least, they fit
a lot of the archetypical characteristics).
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
J.B. Moreno
> On 05 Jan 2004 23:40:44 GMT, joats...@aol.com (JoatSimeon) wrote:
>
> >>From: rgo...@telusplanet.net (David Johnston)
-snip-
> >>galaxies full of life waiting to be discovered
> >
> >-- and your evidence to the contrary is?
> >
> >The past 15 years have proven that planets are common. We don't yet have the
> >technical means to find earth-sized planets, but such instruments are being
> >constructed even as we speak.
>
> Of course planets are common. Nobody expected planets not to be
> common. Hell, we've got a few dozen lumps of reasonable sized rock
> right here in our solar system. Planets are the easy part.
Actually that's not the easy part -- I can remember people arguing that
there were no planets outside of our solar system: of course most of
them were religious wackos in my opinion, but really, it wasn't always
assumed to be non-fiction.
--
JBM
"Everything is futile." -- Marvin of Borg
Alan Poulter
@news.telusplanet.net:
Apologies, I snipped too much of the orginal post.
The point was that SF is now humdrum and incorporated
into other fictional genres. The sort of SF that does
make it into, say crime fiction, is nothing like the
sort of SF being turned out by cutting-edge SF writers.
The SF cliches one finds outside SF are not central
any more to contemporary SF, which has moved on into
areas that cannot be cut and pasted out of SF elsewhere.
Alan Poulter
al...@poulter.demon.co.uk
Michael S. Schiffer
news:1g74a9q.916lcmiiopjtN%pl...@newsreaders.com:
> David Johnston <rgo...@telusplanet.net> wrote:
>...
>> Of course planets are common. Nobody expected planets not to
>> be common. Hell, we've got a few dozen lumps of reasonable
>> sized rock right here in our solar system. Planets are the
>> easy part.
> Actually that's not the easy part -- I can remember people
> arguing that there were no planets outside of our solar system:
> of course most of them were religious wackos in my opinion, but
> really, it wasn't always assumed to be non-fiction.
There was also a time when planetary formation was deemed to be the
result of an unusual event, like two stars passing close enough to
one another to draw material out of them. (This shows up in the
Lensman books, where the many planets of the two galaxies where the
action takes place are the result of an unlikely cataclysm
involving both.)
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
msch...@condor.depaul.edu
Del Cotter
Wayne Throop <thr...@sheol.org> said:
>: tria...@aol.com (Justin Bacon)
>: Oh, c'mon. This is Star Trek, the TV show which tried to convince us
>: that there are planets of Nazis, Romans, and 20th century gangsters
>: just waiting to be discovered. Whether or not Kirk, Spock, and McCoy
>: would run into elves would probably depend wholly on whether or not
>: Desilu was doing a fantasy show on the next lot.
>
>Not only that, but c'mon; Vulcans *are* elves (at least, they fit
>a lot of the archetypical characteristics).
Go not to the Vulcans for advice, for they will say both yes and no and
"your question is illogical".
--
Del Cotter
Thanks to the overwhelming volume of UBE, I am now rejecting *all* email
sent to d...@branta.demon.co.uk. Please send your email to del2 instead.
Sean O'Hara
> Mark wrote:
> >No,not at al. A Klingon and a Vulcan still fit the same
> >aesthetic--aliens with a connection to each other via the background
> >premise. Add an elf and the background won't support it.
>
> Oh, c'mon. This is Star Trek, the TV show which tried to convince us that there
> are planets of Nazis, Romans, and 20th century gangsters just waiting to be
> discovered.
Well, to be fair, the Nazis and gangsters were the result of cultural
contamination.
Now the Romans, there's no excuse for them, nor for Miri's planet, which
was an exact duplicate of the Earth circa 1960.
--
Sean O'Hara
Gibberish in Neutral: http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com/
Steve Coltrin
> Go not to the Vulcans for advice, for they will
pretend not to hear anything you don't say in first order predicate calculus.
--
Steve Coltrin spco...@omcl.org WWVBF?
"Even special children need to be beaten sometimes." - Brian Bruns
Christopher Adams
> Justin Bacon wrote:
>> Mark wrote:
>
>>> No,not at al. A Klingon and a Vulcan still fit the same
>>> aesthetic--aliens with a connection to each other via the background
>>> premise. Add an elf and the background won't support it.
>>
>> Oh, c'mon. This is Star Trek, the TV show which tried to convince us
>> that there are planets of Nazis, Romans, and 20th century gangsters
>> just waiting to be discovered.
>
> Well, to be fair, the Nazis and gangsters were the result of cultural
> contamination.
>
> Now the Romans, there's no excuse for them, nor for Miri's planet, which
> was an exact duplicate of the Earth circa 1960.
This is why it would be best for the franchise if most of the original series
information not directly needed to establish the "modern" series' background
were explicitly ignored, I think. This includes small details attached to
otherwise-utilised phenomena. The one exception? The difference between TOS and
Motion Picture Klingons, just because that DS9 episode is cool.
--
Christopher Adams - SUTEKH Functions Officer 2003
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrante.
Martin Lewis
> > People just don't find science fiction to be
> > weird enough these days that having a supertechnological
> > premise or environment is necessarily enough to end up
> > in the ghetto shelves. It seems in order to end up in science
> > fiction, it almost has to have bizarre
> > technological elements. The merely futuristic is insufficient.
>
> It's the author, rather than the material that is ghettoized. If you start
> with non-SF material then chances are your SF work(s) will stay on the
> general/popular shelves (e.g. Lessing, Brown, etc). If your initial work is
> SF thriller or goes out of its way to demystify the tech content then it may
> still stay out of the ghetto (e.g. Crichton).
>
> If you start with SF then it's almost certain that any subsequent writings
> will stay in the SF shelves (e.g. Eddings, Lethem, Donaldson, Lem).
The opposite is true of Lethem, at least in the UK. The publication
of his first mainstream novel, Motherless Brooklyn, lead to his entire
back catalogue being reprinted and shelved as mainstream. I don't know
what the situation is in Australia but I doubt that Motherless
Brooklyn was shelved in SF.
Martin
Sean O'Hara
declared...
series or movies contradicts the original series -- it's not like TOS
had any continuity. I mean, in some episodes the Enterprise was a United
Earth starship instead of a Federation one; and there are references to
at least three separate World War IIIs over the course of the series.
Michael S. Schiffer
in news:MPG.1a676358d...@news.cis.dfn.de:
>...
> See, I don't understand the people who complain when one of the
> modern series or movies contradicts the original series -- it's
> not like TOS had any continuity. I mean, in some episodes the
> Enterprise was a United Earth starship instead of a Federation
> one; and there are references to at least three separate World
> War IIIs over the course of the series.
What were the three?
Craig Richardson
wrote:
>begin Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
>> Go not to the Vulcans for advice, for they will
>
>pretend not to hear anything you don't say in first order predicate calculus.
"Hmm. I wonder if he meant 'exclusive or' in that question. No, I am
certain that if that was what he meant, he would have specified. Oh,
well. Humans."
--Craig
--
I start to wish Bob Melvin would walk out to the mound, ask Freddy if he
was injured, and then kick him in the balls so he can call in an
emergency replacement from the bullpen --Derek Zumsteg in BP, 5/13/2003
Sean O'Hara
declared...
> Sean O'Hara <darkerthenightth...@myrealbox.com> wrote
> in news:MPG.1a676358d...@news.cis.dfn.de:
> >...
> > See, I don't understand the people who complain when one of the
> > modern series or movies contradicts the original series -- it's
> > not like TOS had any continuity. I mean, in some episodes the
> > Enterprise was a United Earth starship instead of a Federation
> > one; and there are references to at least three separate World
> > War IIIs over the course of the series.
>
> What were the three?
>
remember the other episodes (I think the ones with Abraham Lincoln and
Zephram Cochrane, but I'm not sure), but there are references to WWIII
in the 21st Century at disparate points in the 21st Century.
Mike Williams
> The opposite is true of Lethem, at least in the UK. The publication
> of his first mainstream novel, Motherless Brooklyn, lead to his entire
> back catalogue being reprinted and shelved as mainstream. I don't know
> what the situation is in Australia but I doubt that Motherless
> Brooklyn was shelved in SF.
I've noticed it all being filed as crime or SF. When I was in London in
2002, I found Motherless Brooklyn in SF shelves.
JoatSimeon
>areas that cannot be cut and pasted out of SF elsewhere.
-- you're confusing SF as a literary genre with SF as a marketing category. It
isn't placement within the bookstore which determines whether it's SF.
K. Laisathit
> Variable 2: Knowledge. Once upon a time, lots of
> people seriously accepted ideas like psi powers,
> faster than light travel or even practical slower
> than light travel, galaxies full of life waiting
> to be discovered, the whole star trek/star wars
> package. Sadly now we know a bit too much
This would have been a better theory had the former shelf
spaces not been dedicated to movie tie-ins. I don't about
the good old US, but right here where I live, I've seen
an alarming development. The largest bookstore in Bangkok
used to have 4 shelves dedicated to SF and another 2 for
Fantasy. The two for the fantasy books stay after. Out of
the original 4 SF shelfs I saw 3 years ago, now we have two.
The other two are taken over by movie tie-in. *sigh*
Later...
Shawn H
:>The past 15 years have proven that planets are common. We don't yet have the
:>technical means to find earth-sized planets, but such instruments are being
:>constructed even as we speak.
: Of course planets are common. Nobody expected planets not to be
: common. Hell, we've got a few dozen lumps of reasonable sized rock
: right here in our solar system. Planets are the easy part.
Not true. While it was theorized that they were out there, there was definitely
still excitement when .... just last year? ..... when one of our telescopes
could actually see some orbiting another star. Planets are a HUGE mystery, and
an almost untapped field of study.
Shawn
Shawn H
: Your argument assumes that the "point" of SF is the gizmos. Maybe in
: Hugo Gernsback's day, but not for a long time. People get stuck on
: this, though. A lot. Look at Margaret Atwood--she thinks you need
: spaceships for it to be science fiction.
Does she? I don't recall any in Handmaid's Tale.
: in this day and age, and reading that smacks of reason and logic and
: all the stuff SF is supposed to be about suffers as a result--as does
: any genre that requires a modicum of appreciation for the intellect
: and its responsible uses.
Is SF about reason and logic? The stuff I read is about awe and immortality,
usually.
Shawn
Shawn H
:> It's the author, rather than the material that is ghettoized. If you start
:> with non-SF material then chances are your SF work(s) will stay on the
:> general/popular shelves (e.g. Lessing, Brown, etc). If your initial work is
:> SF thriller or goes out of its way to demystify the tech content then it may
:> still stay out of the ghetto (e.g. Crichton).
:>
:> If you start with SF then it's almost certain that any subsequent writings
:> will stay in the SF shelves (e.g. Eddings, Lethem, Donaldson, Lem).
: The opposite is true of Lethem, at least in the UK. The publication
: of his first mainstream novel, Motherless Brooklyn, lead to his entire
: back catalogue being reprinted and shelved as mainstream. I don't know
: what the situation is in Australia but I doubt that Motherless
: Brooklyn was shelved in SF.
That's happening to Philip K. Dick, too. Starting to be seen as just a great
writer, outside of his genre.
Shawn
Shawn H
:>faster than light travel
: -- actually, this has become (somewhat) more credible in physics circles over
: the past generation. So has time travel.
: We don't have a Theory of Everything yet; we're probably not even close.
We are not close. While knowledge has exponentially advanced in the past
century (and so has sci-fi), there's worlds left to discover. And while we can
speculate, we can fictionalize.
:>galaxies full of life waiting to be discovered
: -- and your evidence to the contrary is?
: The past 15 years have proven that planets are common. We don't yet have the
: technical means to find earth-sized planets, but such instruments are being
: constructed even as we speak.
And we know next to nothing about them, still. We don't even understand Mars.
:>Sadly now we know a bit too much for that to seem more than a fantasy.
: -- total bat-puckey and hubris.
Agreed. There's no way we're smart enough to have dispensed with all wonder.
The reason sci-fi (present in every bookstore, btw) might have been eclipsed by
fantasy: movies. Most of the biggest blockbuster films ever can be classified
as sci-fi. It's as popular as ever, just in a more accessible form.
Shawn
Shawn H
: : just waiting to be discovered. Whether or not Kirk, Spock, and McCoy
: : would run into elves would probably depend wholly on whether or not
: : Desilu was doing a fantasy show on the next lot.
: Not only that, but c'mon; Vulcans *are* elves (at least, they fit
: a lot of the archetypical characteristics).
True.
Shawn
Shawn H
:> It's a scale problem.
: Yep. I suspect if a major euro power in the 19th century had thrown
: Apollo size money at the enterprise, escape velocity could have been
: achieved in 1880; Bull used nothing but 19th century tech, IIRC.
The lastest issue of the comic Planetary explores some gun-loving Texans
achieving that goal in that time period.
:> -- total bat-puckey and hubris.
: Exactly.
: And just because Mike Cretin clones his dinosaurs over in the mainstrean
: section doesn't make it less SF; (it does make it poor SF, but that's
: another issue.)
Totally other issue. Especially since many of those books that swelled the
apocryphal sci-fi shelves of old were space opera anyway.
Shawn
David Johnston
>David Johnston <rgo...@telusplanet.net> wrote:
>
>:>The past 15 years have proven that planets are common. We don't yet have the
>:>technical means to find earth-sized planets, but such instruments are being
>:>constructed even as we speak.
>
>: Of course planets are common. Nobody expected planets not to be
>: common. Hell, we've got a few dozen lumps of reasonable sized rock
>: right here in our solar system. Planets are the easy part.
>
>Not true. While it was theorized that they were out there, there was definitely
>still excitement when .... just last year? ..... when one of our telescopes
>could actually see some orbiting another star.
It was a milestone in astronomy to actually detect extrasolar
planets, but one the "stellar collision" theory of planet formation
was discarded, nobody seriously doubted that they would be out
there.
Mark
> Mark <mtied...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> : Your argument assumes that the "point" of SF is the gizmos. Maybe in
> : Hugo Gernsback's day, but not for a long time. People get stuck on
> : this, though. A lot. Look at Margaret Atwood--she thinks you need
> : spaceships for it to be science fiction.
>
> Does she? I don't recall any in Handmaid's Tale.
She claims The Handmaid's Tale is NOT science fiction. The spaceships
quote is from a recent interview.
>
> : in this day and age, and reading that smacks of reason and logic and
> : all the stuff SF is supposed to be about suffers as a result--as does
> : any genre that requires a modicum of appreciation for the intellect
> : and its responsible uses.
>
> Is SF about reason and logic? The stuff I read is about awe and immortality,
> usually.
I said "supposed to be about". In point of fact, even the awe and
immortality are based in causal chains that should follow the logic of
cultural/technological progressions. The best SF usually displays a
strong prejudcie in favor of reason and the application of the
intellect. Logic occasionally enters into this.
Mark
> "Mark" <mtied...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
> news:78b1aacb.04010...@posting.google.com...
> > Personally, I think the reason SF fares badly (if it does--your list
> > of writers who write it under other labels undercuts this a bit) is
> > not so much that much of what we used to call SF has now become
> > fantasy as the fact that we have a pretty healthy anti-intellectualism
> > in this day and age, and reading that smacks of reason and logic and
> > all the stuff SF is supposed to be about suffers as a result--as does
> > any genre that requires a modicum of appreciation for the intellect
> > and its responsible uses.
>
>
>
>
> time when Model As came out; each one came with a toolkit and most of the
> people who owned one did their own maintenance. Now we have a whole
> generation that can't even change their own oil or tires. They go to a job
> and that's all they know as far as skills and interests. I hear of so many
> who retire, and then die after only a couple of years, because they have no
> interests outside of their chosen field.
I took a while to think about this before responding. No, mundanes
are not getting dumber by the year. The gap between what interests SF
fans and those disparagingly referred to as Mundanes does grow a bit
more.
Most people in the age of Model As did not have a Model A. Nor did
they have a job which gave them personal fulfillment. Nor did they
have much beyond a grade school education. The people we hear about
are those we would today consider upper middle class. They bought the
books and the stories were more often than not written for them.
What the average person needs to know today to get through a year of
life would blow the cranial capacity of someone a hundred years ago.
I point this out because this sort of denigration "outside fandom" is
exactly why there's a disjunction between so-called Mundanes and
hardcore SF fans. It's a generalization and a stereotype and no more
true than when Mundanes say of SF fans that all they know is Star Trek
and computer games.
The thread of anti-intellectualism today is not simplistic. It's
sophisticated. It's not a lack of knowledge, but a claim that certain
kinds of knowledge are detrimental or erroneous. The language of
present day anti-intellectually is not that of the uneducated.
There's a difference. A century ago, anti-intellectualism was a class
stance taken by people who had little or no chance of ever becoming
intellectually sophisticated. Today it's a choice taken by people who
are intentionally turning their backs on Western science and
philosophy and related forms of understanding. SF is very much a
progeny of those things. It makes the implicit claim that there are
reasons for the way things are and how they will be--and that those
reasons can be understood and can give us a certain amount of control.
The anti-intellectualism that I refer to self-consciously rejects
that. And does so from very erudite positions.
Generally it's called post-modernism.
Shawn H
: Shawn H <s#no#hi...@fas.harvard.edu> wrote in message news:<btn3ot$pc$4...@news.fas.harvard.edu>...
:> Mark <mtied...@earthlink.net> wrote:
:> : Your argument assumes that the "point" of SF is the gizmos. Maybe in
:> : Hugo Gernsback's day, but not for a long time. People get stuck on
:> : this, though. A lot. Look at Margaret Atwood--she thinks you need
:> : spaceships for it to be science fiction.
:>
:> Does she? I don't recall any in Handmaid's Tale.
: She claims The Handmaid's Tale is NOT science fiction. The spaceships
: quote is from a recent interview.
Artists so seldom know what they're actually doing. Leave that to their
critics I guess.
:> : in this day and age, and reading that smacks of reason and logic and
:> : all the stuff SF is supposed to be about suffers as a result--as does
:> : any genre that requires a modicum of appreciation for the intellect
:> : and its responsible uses.
:>
:> Is SF about reason and logic? The stuff I read is about awe and immortality,
:> usually.
: I said "supposed to be about". In point of fact, even the awe and
: immortality are based in causal chains that should follow the logic of
: cultural/technological progressions. The best SF usually displays a
: strong prejudcie in favor of reason and the application of the
: intellect. Logic occasionally enters into this.
I don't think so (except for the "occasionally" about logic); I think the
best SF displays a strong tendency towards worrying about certain
pressing issues, and hypothesizing (through a variety of means) their
possible outcomes, both transcendent and dire.
Technology is the means, in other words, not the goal or destination.
Shawn
Ian Montgomerie
>The thread of anti-intellectualism today is not simplistic. It's
>sophisticated. It's not a lack of knowledge, but a claim that certain
>kinds of knowledge are detrimental or erroneous. The language of
>present day anti-intellectually is not that of the uneducated.
>There's a difference. A century ago, anti-intellectualism was a class
>stance taken by people who had little or no chance of ever becoming
>intellectually sophisticated. Today it's a choice taken by people who
>are intentionally turning their backs on Western science and
>philosophy and related forms of understanding. SF is very much a
>progeny of those things. It makes the implicit claim that there are
>reasons for the way things are and how they will be--and that those
>reasons can be understood and can give us a certain amount of control.
> The anti-intellectualism that I refer to self-consciously rejects
>that. And does so from very erudite positions.
>
>Generally it's called post-modernism.
For every one "anti-intellectual" post-modernist (this is a huge
misnomer - they're not anti-intellectual at all, they're intellectuals
opposed to the idea that we can approach objectivity), there are a
hundred garden variety, truly "anti-intellectual" people in the old
fashioned "if it's not in the Bible or the US constitution and I can't
make huge money in it, it's ivory-tower egghead crap" crowd. There is
indeed a strong current of anti-intellectualism in the US, but it's
not new and it's not post-modernism, it's old and it's strongest in
the religious right.
But there is still a great deal of sympathy for anti-intellectualism
in popular culture too - for example, appearing more intellectual than
populist is still a much greater liability for a US presidential
candidate than for leadership candidates in most western countries,
and it's a small culture shock for someone moving to this country to
see the extents to which US politicians go to be "folksy".
Dave Goldman
mtied...@earthlink.net (Mark) wrote:
> The thread of anti-intellectualism today is not simplistic. It's
> sophisticated. It's not a lack of knowledge, but a claim that certain
> kinds of knowledge are detrimental or erroneous. The language of
> present day anti-intellectually is not that of the uneducated.
> There's a difference. A century ago, anti-intellectualism was a class
> stance taken by people who had little or no chance of ever becoming
> intellectually sophisticated. Today it's a choice taken by people who
> are intentionally turning their backs on Western science and
> philosophy and related forms of understanding. SF is very much a
> progeny of those things. It makes the implicit claim that there are
> reasons for the way things are and how they will be--and that those
> reasons can be understood and can give us a certain amount of control.
> The anti-intellectualism that I refer to self-consciously rejects
> that. And does so from very erudite positions.
>
> Generally it's called post-modernism.
As you say, there is certainly a post-modernist highly-educated version of
anti-rationality, anti-science, and anti-technology.
But if you took a poll of non-readers of SF, I suspect that very few of
the respondents would be able to define "post-modernism."
However, when politicians disparage intellectuals as, e.g., "the elites,"
they do not do so to appeal to post-modernist philosopher voters.
When communities vote to provide major amounts of money to high-school
football but little or none to support academically high-achieving
students, that's not the Ph.D.s outvoting the non-college-grads.
21st century American anti-intellectualism continues to come primarily
from those who have not themselves partaken of intellectualism. Whether
due to the attitudes of their parents or their communities, or to the lack
of financial opportunity, or to the lack of academically-oriented schools
in their neighborhood, or whatever. (Or to the politicians who would
rather encourage a general disdain for "intellectuals" than have to face
an electorate that is accustomed to questioning authority.)
- Dave Goldman
Portland, OR
Mark
> For every one "anti-intellectual" post-modernist (this is a huge
> misnomer - they're not anti-intellectual at all, they're intellectuals
> opposed to the idea that we can approach objectivity), there are a
> hundred garden variety, truly "anti-intellectual" people in the old
> fashioned "if it's not in the Bible or the US constitution and I can't
> make huge money in it, it's ivory-tower egghead crap" crowd. There is
> indeed a strong current of anti-intellectualism in the US, but it's
> not new and it's not post-modernism, it's old and it's strongest in
> the religious right.
>
This is certainly true, but those "grass roots" anti-intellectuals do
not buy books--at least, not popular fiction (except maybe, possibly,
the Left Behind)--, therefore do not determine what gets more
shelf-space--fantasy or SF. My remarks referenced those who do form a
demographic in purchases that publishers will follow. Those
anti-intellectuals are of a somewhat different stripe. They are the
sort you see at cocktail parties who brag about being innumerate or
ignorant of technology or science--and think it's something to be
proud of.
Mark
author of:
COMPASS REACH
METAL OF NIGHT
PEACE MEMORY
REMAINS (forthcoming)
www.marktiedemann.com
p.s. Before posting, it occurred to me that the group to which you
referred does affect book-buying in one important sence--text books,
via school boards, which leads to a skewed educational environment--so
that kids who are NOT part of the so-called religious right suffer
from the prejudices of the religious right. When these kids then
start buying books for pleasure--IF they do--their choices probably
reflect the holes in their education resulting from this
anti-intellectual influence.
Mark
> : I said "supposed to be about". In point of fact, even the awe and
> : immortality are based in causal chains that should follow the logic of
> : cultural/technological progressions. The best SF usually displays a
> : strong prejudcie in favor of reason and the application of the
> : intellect. Logic occasionally enters into this.
>
> I don't think so (except for the "occasionally" about logic); I think the
> best SF displays a strong tendency towards worrying about certain
> pressing issues, and hypothesizing (through a variety of means) their
> possible outcomes, both transcendent and dire.
>
> Technology is the means, in other words, not the goal or destination.
>
I think that's what I said. Read "worry about" for "causal chains"
and "hypothesizing their possible outcomes" for "reason and the
application of intellect."
Maybe not. But I agree, SF is not *about* the technology.
Ian Montgomerie
>>
>> For every one "anti-intellectual" post-modernist (this is a huge
>> misnomer - they're not anti-intellectual at all, they're intellectuals
>> opposed to the idea that we can approach objectivity), there are a
>> hundred garden variety, truly "anti-intellectual" people in the old
>> fashioned "if it's not in the Bible or the US constitution and I can't
>> make huge money in it, it's ivory-tower egghead crap" crowd. There is
>> indeed a strong current of anti-intellectualism in the US, but it's
>> not new and it's not post-modernism, it's old and it's strongest in
>> the religious right.
>>
>
>This is certainly true, but those "grass roots" anti-intellectuals do
>not buy books--at least, not popular fiction (except maybe, possibly,
>the Left Behind)--, therefore do not determine what gets more
>shelf-space--fantasy or SF. My remarks referenced those who do form a
>demographic in purchases that publishers will follow.
Are you _seriously_ asserting that the fantasy/SF market is heavily
influenced by the buying power of _postmodernists_?
David Johnston
>>
>> For every one "anti-intellectual" post-modernist (this is a huge
>> misnomer - they're not anti-intellectual at all, they're intellectuals
>> opposed to the idea that we can approach objectivity), there are a
>> hundred garden variety, truly "anti-intellectual" people in the old
>> fashioned "if it's not in the Bible or the US constitution and I can't
>> make huge money in it, it's ivory-tower egghead crap" crowd. There is
>> indeed a strong current of anti-intellectualism in the US, but it's
>> not new and it's not post-modernism, it's old and it's strongest in
>> the religious right.
>>
>
>This is certainly true, but those "grass roots" anti-intellectuals do
>not buy books--at least, not popular fiction (except maybe, possibly,
>the Left Behind)--, therefore do not determine what gets more
>shelf-space--fantasy or SF. My remarks referenced those who do form a
>demographic in purchases that publishers will follow.
That's silly. Post-modernists are not the primary or even a tertiary
market of fantasy novels.
Justin Bacon
>: Look at Margaret Atwood--she thinks you need
>: spaceships for it to be science fiction.
>
>Does she? I don't recall any in Handmaid's Tale.
Which is why Atwood thinks that it isn't science fiction.
My one attempt to read Atwood convinced me that she was like most non-genre
authors who try to write science fiction: Their ignorance of the genre leads
them to treat ideas which are thirty or fifty years old as if they were
refreshing and clever. This may cause the mainstream reader to coo at their
cleverness, but generally just annoys me. It also leads to sloppy
world-building.
The fact that she doesn't even want to acknowledge that she is, in fact,
writing science fiction suggests she will never improve in this regard. As a
result, she's easily ignored.
Justin Bacon
tria...@aol.com
Mark
Partly I was being tongue-in-cheek. On the other hand, the
low-level--and sometimes overt--pervasiveness of post modernist
thining in colleges, of which one consequence is a disdain for genre
(of any sort, but most especially of the kind of writing which
presumes that it can actually Say Something) and a rejection of the
scientific and technical fields by art and literature instructors--a
reinforcement of Snow's Two Culture problem. Teacher to taught to
group to community...
Granted, anti-intellectualism has many more sources than post
modernism. Still, post modernism perversely gives an academic gloss
to the mindset that rejects the possibility of useful knowledge.
Reduction of texts to symbols and signs which can ultimately mean
anything and therefore mean nothing, while a useful tool in the hands
of those who understand the limits of deconstruction, simply undercuts
the hope of learning for those who, in many ways, perfectly content to
have the responsibility of understanding anything.
It is one among several influences on the general public to which I
referred and the effects are fairly wide-ranging, not in the least
limited to the buying decisions of the average reader.
Mark
author of:
COMPASS REACH
METAL OF NIGHT
Louann Miller
>My one attempt to read Atwood convinced me that she was like most non-genre
>authors who try to write science fiction: Their ignorance of the genre leads
>them to treat ideas which are thirty or fifty years old as if they were
>refreshing and clever. This may cause the mainstream reader to coo at their
>cleverness, but generally just annoys me. It also leads to sloppy
>world-building.
I haven't read Atwood, but that was much my opinion of PD James'
thingie about sudden universal male infertility.
(forget title, glance at Amazon, decide it's too much trouble)
You know, whatsisname.
Louann
Stewart Robert Hinsley
<loua...@yahoo.net> writes
>
>I haven't read Atwood, but that was much my opinion of PD James'
>thingie about sudden universal male infertility.
>
>(forget title, glance at Amazon, decide it's too much trouble)
>
>You know, whatsisname.
>
--
Stewart Robert Hinsley
John Elliott
: In article <j5p2005vbcibqpa0q...@4ax.com>, Louann Miller
: <loua...@yahoo.net> writes
:>I haven't read Atwood, but that was much my opinion of PD James'
:>thingie about sudden universal male infertility.
: "The Children of Men".
The book never makes it clear whether the problem is male infertility,
female infertility, or just authorial fiat.
--
John Elliott
Louann Miller
IIRC all the characters including governments believed it to be male
infertility. Women considered good baby-hatching material were
required to register and go through periodic medical testing so they'd
be ready to go with mass AI if they ever found a fertile male.
But really the answer is "authorial fiat," as no explanation is ever
given or even attempted for this universal infertility and it also
affects sperm banked some time before all the men turned out to be
shooting blanks.
Louann
David Cowie
>
> IIRC all the characters including governments believed it to be male
> infertility. Women considered good baby-hatching material were
> required to register and go through periodic medical testing so they'd
> be ready to go with mass AI if they ever found a fertile male.
>
This resembles my faint memories of _The Twilight of Briareus_ by Richard
Cowper.
--
David Cowie david_cowie at lineone dot net
Containment Failure + 1394:39
Mark
--Reduction of texts to symbols and signs which can ultimately mean
anything and therefore mean nothing, while a useful tool in the hands
of those who understand the limits of deconstruction, simply undercuts
the hope of learning for those who, in many ways, perfectly content to
have the responsibility of understanding anything.--
I meant to say, "simply undercuts the hope of learning for those who,
in many ways, are perfectly content to have the responsibility of
understanding anything lifted.
Duh.
Joe "Nuke Me Xemu" Foster
> Sorry, I garbled the following line:
>
> --Reduction of texts to symbols and signs which can ultimately mean
> anything and therefore mean nothing, while a useful tool in the hands
> of those who understand the limits of deconstruction, simply undercuts
> the hope of learning for those who, in many ways, perfectly content to
> have the responsibility of understanding anything.--
> I meant to say, "simply undercuts the hope of learning for those who,
> in many ways, are perfectly content to have the responsibility of
> understanding anything lifted.
>
> Duh.
They *like* the idea of becoming, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, a nation
of suckers, a world of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan
who saunters along?
Mmmmm... Snake oil...
--
Joe Foster <mailto:jlfoster%40znet.com> Sign the Check! <http://www.xenu.net/>
WARNING: I cannot be held responsible for the above They're coming to
because my cats have apparently learned to type. take me away, ha ha!
Ian Montgomerie
>> That's silly. Post-modernists are not the primary or even a tertiary
>> market of fantasy novels.
>
>Partly I was being tongue-in-cheek. On the other hand, the
>low-level--and sometimes overt--pervasiveness of post modernist
>thining in colleges, of which one consequence is a disdain for genre
>(of any sort, but most especially of the kind of writing which
>presumes that it can actually Say Something) and a rejection of the
>scientific and technical fields by art and literature instructors--a
>reinforcement of Snow's Two Culture problem. Teacher to taught to
>group to community...
Okay time out here. WHAT colleges? I recently graduated university,
and I know a fair number of recent graduates from a lot of fields.
And the fact is that in person, I have NEVER encountered the sort of
"pomo" that people bitch and moan about. I have read stuff by
post-modernists, but as far as I can tell that's pretty much all
virtually anyone has done - read some stuff by nutty pomos and heard
of something nutty they did over there somewhere, but never actually
encountered any. The reality seems to be that, like "political
correctness", this is one of those things that provides such a good
target for contempt that it's bashed out of all proportion to its tiny
real influence.
>It is one among several influences on the general public to which I
>referred and the effects are fairly wide-ranging, not in the least
>limited to the buying decisions of the average reader.
Time out again. Post-modernism has no noticable influence on the
"general public". Most people have never heard of it, not firsthand
and not secondhand through someone who's putting forward pomo ideas in
a popular medium. The great majority of _recent university students_
couldn't tell you what it is, haven't read anything advocating it or
anything like it, and would scoff at the idea that objectivity is
impossible.
There are a lot of people in US popular culture who disbelieve in
major conclusions of science, but that's got nothing to do with
"postmodernism" and everything to do with various forms of
supernaturalism (from creationism to astrology to faith healing to new
age mysticism to etc. etc. etc.).
Jeffrey C. Dege
>
>Okay time out here. WHAT colleges? I recently graduated university,
>and I know a fair number of recent graduates from a lot of fields.
>And the fact is that in person, I have NEVER encountered the sort of
>"pomo" that people bitch and moan about.
Did you study languages and literature, or did you actually learn
something?
--
Nearly every electrical engineer believes deep in his heart that he
is better at writing computer software than any computer programmer,
and can show as proof the fact that he has written a number of small
applications, each of which was done quickly, easily, and exactly met
his needs.
Shawn H
:> I don't think so (except for the "occasionally" about logic); I think the
:> best SF displays a strong tendency towards worrying about certain
:> pressing issues, and hypothesizing (through a variety of means) their
:> possible outcomes, both transcendent and dire.
:>
:> Technology is the means, in other words, not the goal or destination.
: I think that's what I said. Read "worry about" for "causal chains"
: and "hypothesizing their possible outcomes" for "reason and the
: application of intellect."
Does that hypothesizing come out of reason, or out of feeling and fears
(or hopes)?
Shawn
Crowfoot
tria...@aol.com (Justin Bacon) wrote:
She may also be making sure that she has an out when knowledgeable
readers like yourself point out that her ideas are way out of date and
her SF thinking poor, ie that she has not done her homework by reading
in the genre she so blithely disregards. You say it's crappy SF, and
*she* blows off your criticism with the airy retort that she wasn't
trying to write SF, so your criticism is moot.
But it's still SF, and as such it's neither original nor high quality,
IMO.
SMC
--
Crowfoot
Mike Williams
> She may also be making sure that she has an out when knowledgeable
> readers like yourself point out that her ideas are way out of date and
> her SF thinking poor, ie that she has not done her homework by reading
> in the genre she so blithely disregards. You say it's crappy SF, and
> *she* blows off your criticism with the airy retort that she wasn't
> trying to write SF, so your criticism is moot.
Leading to the immediate retorts :
1.that she doesn't know what she's talking about; or
2. to clarify: you are NOT writing speculative fiction of ideas, and it's
really just a sloppily written pot-boiler; or
3. ASk her if she has heard of Shakepeare: "a rose by any other name..."
Crowfoot
loua...@yahoo.net wrote:
> On 10 Jan 2004 23:35:28 GMT, tria...@aol.com (Justin Bacon) wrote:
>
> >My one attempt to read Atwood convinced me that she was like most
> >non-genre
> >authors who try to write science fiction: Their ignorance of the genre
> >leads
> >them to treat ideas which are thirty or fifty years old as if they were
> >refreshing and clever. This may cause the mainstream reader to coo at
> >their
> >cleverness, but generally just annoys me. It also leads to sloppy
> >world-building.
>
> I haven't read Atwood, but that was much my opinion of PD James'
> thingie about sudden universal male infertility.
Yes, another excellent example of the same pathetic conviction of
mainstream authors that all you have to do to write good SF is to have
one Idea (which you never bother to check to see how many SF authors
have already written about it much better than you ever could) and throw
it into a "world" made out of right now plus a lot of junk you absorbed
from old movie and TV SF when you were still young enough to indulge in
such fripperies.
I notice also that mainstream writers seem to get into this stance
largely when they have a political position to push, which may be
another reason their work is so poor -- it's really polemic dressed up
in the trappings of outdated SF and casually at that, since the real
point is the polemic, not the SF. P.D. James' book was her on her usual
crazy hobbyhorse about uppity women (aided by foolish men) interfering
in God's Own Plans for Reproductive History, and ends with the
infertility plague being broken by the birth of -- YOU GUESSED IT! --
A Boy; what else would be significant enough?
Atwood's TALE was a feminist parable. MOCKINGBIRD, written many years
ago by a mainstream author whose name I have mercifully forgotten, was
about the Perils Of Letting The Vast Evil Of Birth Control Take Over The
World (like THAT'S ever been a threat or likely to be any time soon).
Who else has done this stuff? Walder Percy, the one about the end of
the world down south somewhere -- damn it, what was it? I don't really
remember now, although W.P. was a sweet writer. The major problem is
that they just don't bother to *read* SF first (judging by their
product, anyway), probably because they basically despise it too much to
waste their time reading it when they can obviously (being so much more
able than any mere SF author) just toss of something superior without
first finding out anything about it besides what they've seen on the
screen and read in other literary sources about it.
Hmm. I think I have strong feelings about this.
SMC
--
Crowfoot
JoatSimeon
(like THAT'S ever been a threat or likely to be any time soon).
-- actually, the world TFR (Total Fertility Rate) is currently projected to
drop below the replacement rate of 2.1 sometime in the next 10 or 15 years.
World TFR is currently about 2.6, btw, mainly because 3rd-world birthrates have
been plunging like rocks for the past generatoin.
That means that the world population will peak out and start to decline a bit
later -- reaching about 7.2 billion between 2040 and 2050, and then dropping at
a steadily increasing rate.
There's some really odd demographic stuff happening out there.
Richard Horton
>Atwood's TALE was a feminist parable. MOCKINGBIRD, written many years
>ago by a mainstream author whose name I have mercifully forgotten
Wasn't this by Walter Tevis, who did at least tolerable SF in _The Man
Who Fell to Earth_?
>, was
>about the Perils Of Letting The Vast Evil Of Birth Control Take Over The
>World (like THAT'S ever been a threat or likely to be any time soon).
>
>Who else has done this stuff? Walder Percy, the one about the end of
>the world down south somewhere -- damn it, what was it?
_Love in the Ruins_? (or "Among") The Thanatos Syndrome?
> I don't really
>remember now, although W.P. was a sweet writer. The major problem is
>that they just don't bother to *read* SF first (judging by their
>product, anyway), probably because they basically despise it too much to
>waste their time reading it when they can obviously (being so much more
>able than any mere SF author) just toss of something superior without
>first finding out anything about it besides what they've seen on the
>screen and read in other literary sources about it.
>
>Hmm. I think I have strong feelings about this.
John Updike wrote an SF novel, not highly praised as far as I can
tell, a few years ago. (I admit I haven't read it and can't remember
the title.) Only thing is, you can't say Updike doesn't =read= SF --
he clearly read a lot of Golden Age stuff back in his own golden age
(i.e. 13 or so), and he still keeps up with the likes of Le Guin, at
least. (On the evidence of some reviews he has written.)
--
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard...@sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.tangentonline.com)
wth...@godzilla5.acpub.duke.edu
"The Children of Men". It must be embarrassing, as a mature
writer in her prime, to realize (if she does) that a twenty
five year old writer did the same book better. And thirty
years earlier. Why she wrote it is a mystery (1) to me.
As the comic book guy would say, "Worst P. D. James ever."
(1) One I'd like her to write.
William Hyde
EOS Department
Duke University
Charles Cunningham
> JoatSimeon wrote:
> Well, Verne used cannon in "From the Earth to the Moon" in 1865 to reach
> escape velocity. Bull demonstrated that such was actually a practical
> solution somewhat later.
>
I don't know who "Bull" is, but it is certainly NOT practical to blow
someone out of a cannon--the acceleration needed to reach escape
velocity delivered in that short a time would reduce any humans to
pulp.
charles cunningham
Joe Pfeiffer
After which you are faced with the problem of making the shell from
something that'll make it out of the atmosphere before vaporizing.
--
Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D. Phone -- (505) 646-1605
Department of Computer Science FAX -- (505) 646-1002
New Mexico State University http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer
Southwestern NM Regional Science and Engr Fair: http://www.nmsu.edu/~scifair
David Tate
> On 11 Jan 2004 05:47:08 -0800, mtied...@earthlink.net (Mark) wrote:
>
> >> That's silly. Post-modernists are not the primary or even a tertiary
> >> market of fantasy novels.
> >
> >Partly I was being tongue-in-cheek. On the other hand, the
> >low-level--and sometimes overt--pervasiveness of post modernist
> >thining in colleges, of which one consequence is a disdain for genre
> >(of any sort, but most especially of the kind of writing which
> >presumes that it can actually Say Something) and a rejection of the
> >scientific and technical fields by art and literature instructors--a
> >reinforcement of Snow's Two Culture problem. Teacher to taught to
> >group to community...
>
> Okay time out here. WHAT colleges? I recently graduated university,
> and I know a fair number of recent graduates from a lot of fields.
> And the fact is that in person, I have NEVER encountered the sort of
> "pomo" that people bitch and moan about. I have read stuff by
> post-modernists, but as far as I can tell that's pretty much all
> virtually anyone has done - read some stuff by nutty pomos and heard
> of something nutty they did over there somewhere, but never actually
> encountered any. The reality seems to be that, like "political
> correctness", this is one of those things that provides such a good
> target for contempt that it's bashed out of all proportion to its tiny
> real influence.
I think this is mostly true, *but*...
I recently had a very interesting long chat with a professor of
philosophy from a not-so-prestigious state university in the midwest.
I studied philosophy a couple of decades ago, and try to keep up with
some of the "hot topic", so I was interested to hear what he and his
department were up to these days.
What I learned was that they don't actually teach much of what I would
call 'philosophy' any more. The traditional curriculum, and the
questions behind it, have essentially been scrapped over the last
decade or so, in favor of -- you guessed it, postmodernist studies.
Similarly, what one can get published in the philosophical journals
has skewed strongly in the same direction.
Now, this is only one data point, and most people don't consider the
content of philosophy curricula to be relevant to culture at large,
but it does suggest that the pomo influence has been a lot more
sweeping that you suggest, and in ways that will have permanent
consequences for what our grandchildren do and don't study.
David Tate
SilverFox
<wth...@godzilla5.acpub.duke.edu> wrote in message
news:yv7zk73x...@godzilla5.acpub.duke.edu...
>
> As the comic book guy would say, "Worst P. D. James ever."
No, no..... He'd say. "Worst. P.D. James. Ever."
SilverFox ^..^
=====
Sherman: Fillmore, why do you like to read so much?
Fillmore: It's entertaining.
Sherman: You don't look very entertained.
Fillmore: Huh?
Sherman: You don't ooh and ahh and laugh and all that kind of stuff. You
just sit there.
Fillmore: It's all happening in my head. It's like watching TV without the
TV. You just imagine it.
Sherman: Sounds like a lot of work. What's the book about?
Fillmore: It's a historical novel. Kings and queens...That kind of stuff.
Sherman: BORRRING.
Fillmore: The queen is played by Pamela Anderson.
Sherman: Wow. Really?
[From the comic, Sherman's Lagoon,
http://cgibin.rcn.com/fillmore.dnai/cgi-bin/sviewer.pl?selectdate=1/11/04]
John Schilling
Gerald K. Bull, 1928-1990.
Bull was the premier artillery expert of his time, and developed some of
the best artillery weapons of his time. But mundane and practical use
of artillery was never his thing; he had an outright obsession with
absurd Vernian extrapolations of the technology. And he came into the
field at just the wrong time, when it was generally recognized that
while howitzers were the economical workhorse of the "deliver a whole
shitload of explosives just over that hill" business, the extremes of
performance were now the domain of rockets and missiles.
He convinced the United States to fund some basic experiments in using
heavily modified battleship guns to launch projectiles on stratospheric
trajectories as a hedge against rockets maybe not being all that they
promised to be, and when the US said "enough" his native Canada still
funded him for a few more years.
After that, he started sinking into crankdom, coming up with paper designs
for superguns capable of putting satellites into orbit and trying to find
investors willing to build same. No luck, obviously, because even if the
designs worked as advertised the supergun needed no less than *four*
supplimentary solid rocket stages to reach orbit whereas the rocketry
people had long since figured out how to put a payload into orbit with
three rocket stages and no humongous cannon.
The quoting above is a bit munged, but whoever said that using a cannon
to reach escape velocity is a practical solution was reading too much
of Bull's hype and not enough of the fine print.
Needing to put food on the table and having burnt all his bridges in North
America, he took a job in South Africa. This was back when the Apartheid
regime was on the wrong side of an international arms embargo and its army
stuck with a bunch of rusting old WWII-surplus howitzers. When Bull was
finished, the South Africans had the finest medium artillery in the world,
which they exported to anyone who didn't mind doing business with them.
Only in the past decade have the US and Europe really caught up.
But those were just boring ordinary guns, and Bull wanted to build a
Supergun(tm). Guy named Saddam Hussein, who had just bought a bunch of
Bull-designed South African artillery, made him a deal he couldn't refuse.
So Bull spent the late 1980s in Iraq building A: a big-ass cannon that
could lob a ton of payload over three hundred miles and B: improved
guidance and propulsion systems for Iraq's SCUD missiles, which could
also lob a ton of payload over three hundred miles.
Anyone who thought the cannon was worth bothering with given that SCUD
missiles ar widely available on the international market was an idiot.
Possibly Hussein was an idiot. More likely, Hussein figured indulging
Bull on the supergun was a fair price to pay to get his expertise onto
the missile problem.
Either way, both the gun and the missiles were aimed squarely at Israel,
and this was back when there was no question about Iraq having a stockpile
of nerve and mustard gasses on account of he was actually using them at
the time.
By strange coincidence, some unknown assailant shot Bull in the back of
the head with a silenced pistol, outside his apartment in Brussels in
1990.
The supergun was never completed, and the SCUDs which fell on Tel Aviv
a year later were notoriously unreliable and inaccurate.
The End.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
SilverFox
news:910d6026.04011...@posting.google.com...
"Bull" would be Gerald Bull (the late). Google him and "supergun". Also,
related Googles: "Nazi V3", "HARP" (High Altitude Research Program).
Basically, though, the trick is to use a really long barrel.
SilverFox ^..^
=====
WARNING: This Product Attracts Every Other Piece of Matter in the Universe,
Including the Products of Other Manufacturers, with a Force Proportional to
the Product of the Masses and Inversely Proportional to the Distance Between
Them.
David Cowie
> I don't know who "Bull" is, but it is certainly NOT practical to blow
> someone out of a cannon--the acceleration needed to reach escape
> velocity delivered in that short a time would reduce any humans to pulp.
Gerald Vincent Bull (born 1928 Ontario, died March 22, 1990 Brussels) was
an engineer who many consider to have developed long range artillery
beyond what anyone else has accomplished. He was a driven man, who moved
from project to project always chasing his dream of launching a satellite
using a huge artillery piece. To this end he designed the Project Babylon
"supergun" for the Iraqi government, during which he was killed
(purportedly by Israeli Mossad agents) outside his home in Brussels.
Cut from http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull
--
David Cowie david_cowie at lineone dot net
Containment Failure + 1420:42
Shawn H
: The fact that she doesn't even want to acknowledge that she is, in fact,
: writing science fiction suggests she will never improve in this regard. As a
: result, she's easily ignored.
I don't think it's that simple. She may not wish to be pigeon-holed or labeled
(few artists do), but she's been including fantasy or speculative aspects in
her novels for some time. Handmaid's Tale had a power that spoke to a lot of
people.
Shawn
Mark Atwood
>
> I don't think it's that simple. She may not wish to be pigeon-holed or labeled
> (few artists do), but she's been including fantasy or speculative aspects in
> her novels for some time. Handmaid's Tale had a power that spoke to a lot of
> people.
So did _Clan of the Cave Bear_, and they are about equally stupid.
--
Mark Atwood | When you do things right,
m...@pobox.com | people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Mark
Why not both?
Mark
Ian Montgomerie
> > and I know a fair number of recent graduates from a lot of fields.
> > And the fact is that in person, I have NEVER encountered the sort of
> > "pomo" that people bitch and moan about. I have read stuff by
> > post-modernists, but as far as I can tell that's pretty much all
> > virtually anyone has done - read some stuff by nutty pomos and heard
> > of something nutty they did over there somewhere, but never actually
> > encountered any. The reality seems to be that, like "political
> > correctness", this is one of those things that provides such a good
> > target for contempt that it's bashed out of all proportion to its tiny
> > real influence.
>
> I think this is mostly true, *but*...
>
> I recently had a very interesting long chat with a professor of
> philosophy from a not-so-prestigious state university in the midwest.
> I studied philosophy a couple of decades ago, and try to keep up with
> some of the "hot topic", so I was interested to hear what he and his
> department were up to these days.
>
> What I learned was that they don't actually teach much of what I would
> call 'philosophy' any more. The traditional curriculum, and the
> questions behind it, have essentially been scrapped over the last
> decade or so, in favor of -- you guessed it, postmodernist studies.
> Similarly, what one can get published in the philosophical journals
> has skewed strongly in the same direction.
Interesting. And also completely different from the state of
philosophy at the University of Waterloo in the 1990s, as another
example. It seemed a pretty diverse department there, and certainly
not dominated by postmodernism. From what I know of philosophy, it's
a field which has its "hot topics" at any given time but is also one
where the hot topics come and go, since it's generally difficult to
actually disprove the opposition. Non-philosophy majors taking first
and second year philosophy courses will disproportionately not read
anything written in the past fifty years. Unless they take philosophy
of mind, which is not even vaguely pomo.
Mark
I witnessed personally--if a personal anecdote will do--the animosity
toward SF and technology and science generally at my Clarion class
when the head of the English Dept. of MSU went on a tirade about all
three. He considered SF a perversion of art because it comingled
things which ought not to be comingled. He also thought it was
impossible to teach people How To Write, that all we were engaging in
was Crit-Lit.
Delany recounts a pervasive aversion in the Academy to what he calls
"paraliterature"--and Delany has taught in some of those institutions
and witnessed it firsthand.
A few of my colleagues had less bombastic experiences when they
announced their chosen field--in college, in lit courses, etc--would
be SF.
I know a few teachers at Columbia University (Missouri) who have seen
first-hand the subtle and at times not so subtle intimidation art
students get when they peak into a science course or two--from their
peers as well as their teachers.
You're right, most people don't know post-modern from post-mortem.
But they read book reviews and when Sven Birkerts tells them that SF
is inferior because it can never be true literature they pay attention
(because it "elevates premise over character"). If any of them are
well-educated, they also know that Sven Birkerts has written many
essays and published collections of them that exude technopohobia.
The general public doesn't have to know what postmodernism IS in order
to have their tastes affected by it, since at a high level critical
discourse takes it cues--both pro and con--from Lacan, Derrida, and
Foucault. This then goes to the next level down where lit classes,
lit magazines that aspire to a standard of taste, and people who talk
on radio and tv about "fine art" on such venues as Charlie Rose or
Breakfast With The Arts, all draw their examples of what art must
aspire to from the critical work done by the likes of Birkerts and the
subsequent pronouncements of writers like Atwood. Coupled with the
obvious disdain for genre labels which result in absurdities like J.K.
Rowling being told by her publisher et al NOT to show up to accept the
Hugo Award because "dear, you don't want to be associated with SF" and
kindred flaps like Mary Doria Russell shunning SF for the same reason,
even though her first novel owes a debt to an SF classic.
It is the infighting within these various circles that sends out
shockwaves--or vibes, if you will--which people pick up on. It
reinforces an aversion to the scientific and technical which has been
with us since the end of the Sixties, which itself was one of the
first by-products of deconstruction applied to science--the idea that
science is only a "narrative" and can make no real claims about
anything. The one-time faith the general public held in scientists
(not in science, the general public never really knew what that was)
was shattered from the 50s to the 80s with the emergent
crises--nuclear proliferation, global warming, the breakdown of
health-care, environmental issues, etc--which produced endless debate
(mainly spurred out of politics, but it doesn't matter) over what or
who was correct.
I made the claim about post-modernism as something of a jest. But it
is part and parcel of a top-end anti-intellectualism that denigrates
the technical and scientific. Barring fundamentalism animosity toward
godless western culture (homegrown or otherwise), this denigration
comes from SOMEWHERE. Educated people tend to dismiss "folk wisdom",
so if they have this attitude, then quite likely they got it from
institutions and individuals they respect, i.e. the so-called Academy.
Christopher Adams
> Shawn H wrote:
>>
>> I don't think it's that simple. She may not wish to be pigeon-holed or
>> labeled (few artists do), but she's been including fantasy or
>> speculative aspects in her novels for some time. Handmaid's Tale had a
>> power that spoke to a lot of people.
>
> So did _Clan of the Cave Bear_, and they are about equally stupid.
Quit badmouthing your mother. At least she's trying. ;)
--
Christopher Adams - SUTEKH Functions Officer 2003
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrante.
Bishop
>I witnessed personally--if a personal anecdote will do--the animosity
>toward SF and technology and science generally at my Clarion class
>when the head of the English Dept. of MSU went on a tirade about all
>three. He considered SF a perversion of art because it comingled
>things which ought not to be comingled. He also thought it was
>impossible to teach people How To Write, that all we were engaging in
>was Crit-Lit.
I am not going to argue that there aren't some English Departments out there
that have a disdain for SF but I haven't seen it in the two schools that I
attended while getting my English Minor.
In my Freshman Composition class we watched Blade Runner and had to pick a
critical topic on the film to write about.
I have had been in two 400 level courses in which Tolkien was compared
favorably to more traditional authors such as Thoreau and Yeats. In fact we had
an extended discussion on Yeats' and Tolkien's views on mythology and folklore.
They even had a student in the graduate program who was an aspiring SF writer
and as far as I know he never had any problem with the faculty.
I also have a friend who went to Georgia Tech where they offered a course on SF
circa 1994. He read a ton of good stuff in there and got to bore everyone else
with his "literary" SF insights.
The only really bad experience I had with Post-modernist thinking was a
Shakespeare course that I took. It was supposed to be a survey course but it
was taught by this really strident feminist...so we ended up reading all the
Bard's gender conflict pieces.
On the final day of class, a young lady raised her hand and asked the
instructor, unironically, "So why is Shakespeare considered such an important
writer?." In her zeal to fill everyone's head with gender politics in Taming of
the Shrew and As You Like It, she hadn't managed to communicate the most
important thing that she had to teach. Nor did she even manage to synthesize
her teachings into any sort of coherent conclusion for the course because she
was supposed to be teaching mainstream stuff not gender studies.
Mark Atwood
> Mark Atwood wrote:
>> Shawn H wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't think it's that simple. She may not wish to be pigeon-holed or
>>> labeled (few artists do), but she's been including fantasy or
>>> speculative aspects in her novels for some time. Handmaid's Tale had a
>>> power that spoke to a lot of people.
>>
>> So did _Clan of the Cave Bear_, and they are about equally stupid.
>
> Quit badmouthing your mother. At least she's trying. ;)
We are so distantly related that she doesn't show up in my copy of
of the family genealogy, which takes some serious doing for someone
named "Atwood".
Ian Montgomerie
>Then you're not paying attention.
>
>I witnessed personally--if a personal anecdote will do--the animosity
>toward SF and technology and science generally at my Clarion class
>when the head of the English Dept. of MSU went on a tirade about all
>three. He considered SF a perversion of art because it comingled
>things which ought not to be comingled. He also thought it was
>impossible to teach people How To Write, that all we were engaging in
>was Crit-Lit.
Personal anecdotes don't really do, actually - at least not single
ones. (Now if you knew half a dozen English professors who were
rabidly anti-science, that would mean something).
Everybody's got a weird anecdote or two. I myself took a university
level philosophy course in anarcho-capitalism (as in an
"anarcho-capitalism is the greatest" course, not a disinterested
survey). If I were to extrapolate from this that anarcho-capitalism
dominates North American philosophy departments, I would be somewhat
off. (Also last I checked UW has two seperate "SF" oriented English
courses, one focused on SF and one focused on fantasy).
>Delany recounts a pervasive aversion in the Academy to what he calls
>"paraliterature"--and Delany has taught in some of those institutions
>and witnessed it firsthand.
Um, I know a lot of people who don't much like SF but who are not even
vaguely close to being "anti-science".
I have a lot of sympathy for them, actually. Only a small minority of
SF (even of science fiction, discounting fantasy) has anything
significant to do with actual science, which SF authors tend to know
surprisingly little about. It's hard to find (for example) good
character-oriented SF not dripping with genre cliches, unless you know
exactly what you're looking for. And most people don't know exactly
what they're looking for unless they've read a broad range of SF.
Personally I "paid my dues" with very broad reading habits in high
school. If I hadn't, and hadn't found resources such as this
newsgroup with good reviews, I'd probably now be completely unable to
find SF novels that meet my standards of things that I actually want
to read.
(Just as another anecdote, I attend a regular nonfiction book club.
As far as I know I'm the closest thing to an SF fan in it, and on
average I read maybe a couple of SF books a month. But the club
selections alone feature more serious science books than I suspect the
typical member of this newsgroup reads. So I get regular exposure to
a fair number of people who are very pro-science and don't like SF).
>I know a few teachers at Columbia University (Missouri) who have seen
>first-hand the subtle and at times not so subtle intimidation art
>students get when they peak into a science course or two--from their
>peers as well as their teachers.
This has nothing to do with "high culture" or philosophy of any kind.
Most kids grow up thinking science is kind of geeky. Since it's not
easy for some people, they often manage to avoid it beyond high
school. I've often seen among arts students a sort of extension of a
high school mindset that willingly taking science and math courses is
something the nerdy kids do. This was just as true half a century ago
as it is today. Probably _more_ true, actually - as I grow up I've
seen it become more socially acceptable for kids to be interested in
technology, especially computers. The internet is now putting some of
what was once "geeky" into the lifestyle of the average kid, although
this probably doesn't extend to, say, biology.
>But they read book reviews and when Sven Birkerts tells them that SF
>is inferior because it can never be true literature they pay attention
>(because it "elevates premise over character").
At first you were talking about postmodernism spreading an
anti-science mindset through culture in general, but now all you keep
mentioning as support is people who don't like SF. Are you claiming
that SF is now much less accepted than it was at some time in the
past? That's not what I see looking at history. SF was ghettoized as
soon as it became a recognizable genre, the 50s pulp authors were
already ghettoized. SF was only respected by critics when it didn't
exist as a category, when Jules Verne's futurism and so on were new
and unusual things.
Now if you go outside literary critics and look to the average person,
I'd say that SF is at the height of its acceptance. Star Trek, Star
Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Dungeons & Dragons are worldwide cultural
phenomena. Fans are seen as geeky when they take these things to
excess, but it's not at all remarkable for an average person to like
any of them. And if you look at the top grossing movies, it is
remarkable how many of them basically count as SF, compared to how few
of the top selling books count as SF. Not to mention that video and
computer games, the major new time sink for kids in the 90s and
beyond, are *HEAVILY* SF even more so than movies.
The fact is that SF in general is at an all time high with the
populace, regardless of the fact that written SF is not nearly the
dominant genre of novels for the novel-reading populace.
>If any of them are
>well-educated, they also know that Sven Birkerts has written many
>essays and published collections of them that exude technopohobia.
I consider myself well educated and I've never heard of the guy. I
would guess that most people who fit any reasonable definition of
"well educated" probably haven't either.
>The general public doesn't have to know what postmodernism IS in order
>to have their tastes affected by it, since at a high level critical
>discourse takes it cues--both pro and con--from Lacan, Derrida, and
>Foucault. This then goes to the next level down where lit classes,
>lit magazines that aspire to a standard of taste, and people who talk
>on radio and tv about "fine art" on such venues as Charlie Rose or
>Breakfast With The Arts, all draw their examples of what art must
>aspire to from the critical work done by the likes of Birkerts and the
>subsequent pronouncements of writers like Atwood.
Um, exactly how many Americans do you think watch Breakfast With The
Arts?
>Coupled with the
>obvious disdain for genre labels which result in absurdities like J.K.
>Rowling being told by her publisher et al NOT to show up to accept the
>Hugo Award because "dear, you don't want to be associated with SF" and
>kindred flaps like Mary Doria Russell shunning SF for the same reason,
>even though her first novel owes a debt to an SF classic.
Now on the one hand, SF has a stigma among many critics. On the other
hand, JK Rowling wrote a bunch of fantasy novels which have sold
approximately 9 bazillion copies. I don't think this supports your
assertion that postmodernism is turning typical people away from SF.
>It is the infighting within these various circles that sends out
>shockwaves--or vibes, if you will--which people pick up on. It
>reinforces an aversion to the scientific and technical which has been
>with us since the end of the Sixties,
Um, who is this "us"? I rather doubt that any social scientific
evaluation of US culture would find that public opinion of science
dropped in the latter half of the twentieth century. Science - as
opposed to industrial technology - came to the forefront with the
nuclear age, the space age, computers, biotechnology, etc., etc. The
science curriculum in public schools was greatly expanded from what it
was before the 1950s, in response to the US getting beaten into space
by Sputnik. And the critics of scientific orthodoxy can only maintain
their respectability by using the language of science - by getting
actual or metaphorical guys in lab coats to say that smoking doesn't
cause cancer, evolution is wrong, etc.
>I made the claim about post-modernism as something of a jest. But it
>is part and parcel of a top-end anti-intellectualism that denigrates
>the technical and scientific. Barring fundamentalism animosity toward
>godless western culture (homegrown or otherwise), this denigration
>comes from SOMEWHERE.
Um, when it comes to US society, religious fundamentalism has several
orders of magnitude more influence than any "elite" perspective like
postmodernism. And as I mentioned before, there really is a noticable
anti-intellectual trend in US culture that's been there all along.
Ian Montgomerie
wrote:
>The only really bad experience I had with Post-modernist thinking was a
>Shakespeare course that I took. It was supposed to be a survey course but it
>was taught by this really strident feminist...so we ended up reading all the
>Bard's gender conflict pieces.
>
>On the final day of class, a young lady raised her hand and asked the
>instructor, unironically, "So why is Shakespeare considered such an important
>writer?." In her zeal to fill everyone's head with gender politics in Taming of
>the Shrew and As You Like It, she hadn't managed to communicate the most
>important thing that she had to teach. Nor did she even manage to synthesize
>her teachings into any sort of coherent conclusion for the course because she
>was supposed to be teaching mainstream stuff not gender studies.
"Postmodernism" is not the same as feminism, whether everyday feminism
or "obsessed with gender issues in everything" feminism.
Postmodernism is most notable for a rejection of the possibility of
approaching objective truth, asserting that the content of anything is
so tied up in the personal/cultural/political biases of the writer
that you can never give it any real validity independent of those
biases. Being obsessed with looking at gender issues in Shakespeare
isn't the same as a postmodern assertion that (for example) a man
fundamentally cannot produce science that is valid for women.
Justin Bacon
>Shawn H <s#no#hi...@fas.harvard.edu> writes:
>>
>> I don't think it's that simple. She may not wish to be pigeon-holed or
>labeled
>> (few artists do), but she's been including fantasy or speculative aspects
>in
>> her novels for some time. Handmaid's Tale had a power that spoke to a lot
>of
>> people.
>
>So did _Clan of the Cave Bear_, and they are about equally stupid.
It's always nice when someone comes up with the response I would have said if
I'd thought of it. ;)
On a complete tangent: I enjoyed the first 9/10ths of CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR. Of
course, I was something like 10 or 11 at the time. And when I realized that the
main character had just single-handedly invented or discovered the bra, the
sling, the tampon, and the relation between sex and pregnancy (among other
things), my patience began to evaporate.
Justin Bacon
tria...@aol.com
Kate Secor
Ian Montgomerie <ianN...@ianmontgomerie.com> wrote:
<snip bad Shakespeare prof>
> "Postmodernism" is not the same as feminism, whether everyday feminism
> or "obsessed with gender issues in everything" feminism.
> Postmodernism is most notable for a rejection of the possibility of
> approaching objective truth, asserting that the content of anything is
> so tied up in the personal/cultural/political biases of the writer
> that you can never give it any real validity independent of those
> biases. Being obsessed with looking at gender issues in Shakespeare
> isn't the same as a postmodern assertion that (for example) a man
> fundamentally cannot produce science that is valid for women.
Which branch of the Humanities uses this definition of postmodernism? I
suspect it's only English (or other languages) -- or else all of my
professors were insane.
Every professor I had that was "post modern" (a couple of English
professors, and one history prof) said that the context of a work was
irrelevant, and what we should do was examine the work independent of
historical knowledge of the period and draw conclusions about the work
based on that examination. Worst exercise in ignorant anachronism I've
ever seen.
If postmodernism means what you say it means, then in theory the context
should be *all*-important, and it should be impossible to examine a work
without knowing the history of it. I wonder what caused the difference
in definitions?
Aiglet
(I was a history major, does it show?)
Mark
> Personal anecdotes don't really do, actually - at least not single
> ones. (Now if you knew half a dozen English professors who were
> rabidly anti-science, that would mean something).
Okay.
>
>
> Um, I know a lot of people who don't much like SF but who are not even
> vaguely close to being "anti-science".
Ditto
>
> This has nothing to do with "high culture" or philosophy of any kind.
> Most kids grow up thinking science is kind of geeky. Since it's not
> easy for some people, they often manage to avoid it beyond high
> school. I've often seen among arts students a sort of extension of a
> high school mindset that willingly taking science and math courses is
> something the nerdy kids do. This was just as true half a century ago
> as it is today. Probably _more_ true, actually - as I grow up I've
> seen it become more socially acceptable for kids to be interested in
> technology, especially computers. The internet is now putting some of
> what was once "geeky" into the lifestyle of the average kid, although
> this probably doesn't extend to, say, biology.
Because largely we embrace a culture that undervalues the intellect in
favor of the athletic. But that's a whole 'nother topic. Still, when
you see the lengths universities often go to "forgive" poor academic
performance on the part of star athletes (whose presence presumably
brings cash to the university, an illusion recently exploded by the
former Dean of Hardvard), you have to wonder what this message says to
students at large: brains don't matter as much as a good throwing arm.
Perhaps not directly anti-intellectual, but certainly a-intellectual
(if you'll forgive the rather hamhanded neologism).
>
> >But they read book reviews and when Sven Birkerts tells them that SF
> >is inferior because it can never be true literature they pay attention
> >(because it "elevates premise over character").
>
> At first you were talking about postmodernism spreading an
> anti-science mindset through culture in general, but now all you keep
> mentioning as support is people who don't like SF. Are you claiming
> that SF is now much less accepted than it was at some time in the
> past? That's not what I see looking at history. SF was ghettoized as
> soon as it became a recognizable genre, the 50s pulp authors were
> already ghettoized. SF was only respected by critics when it didn't
> exist as a category, when Jules Verne's futurism and so on were new
> and unusual things.
We were discussing the reason people don't seem to like SF. So we
were talking about people who dislike SF. Where the attitude comes
from. No, I'm not making that claim--in fact, very much the opposite.
But if you ask the question (which you didn't, but it was originally
asked) how come it seems to fare so much worse in relation to, say,
fantasy, then a reason is asked for. I suggest it is a low-level,
pervasive anti-intellectualism that values reaffirmation of innate
qualities (bravery, charm, ethics, etc) over understanding of
processes--scientific, social, or otherwise--which proceeds from a
disdain for reason. This may very well come from the fundamentalism
you talk about--but there is ALSO (which was my point) an entrenched
form of anti-intellctualism at the other end.
>
>
> I consider myself well educated and I've never heard of the guy. I
> would guess that most people who fit any reasonable definition of
> "well educated" probably haven't either.
My apologies--I meant to say "may have heard of him." He's not the
only one. Read Harold Blooms chapters at beginning and end of "The
Western Canon" for a cogent complaint about the state of the academy
in regards to the politicization of learning and its effect on
"dumbing down" of the Academy.
> Um, who is this "us"? I rather doubt that any social scientific
> evaluation of US culture would find that public opinion of science
> dropped in the latter half of the twentieth century. Science - as
> opposed to industrial technology - came to the forefront with the
> nuclear age, the space age, computers, biotechnology, etc., etc. The
> science curriculum in public schools was greatly expanded from what it
> was before the 1950s, in response to the US getting beaten into space
> by Sputnik. And the critics of scientific orthodoxy can only maintain
> their respectability by using the language of science - by getting
> actual or metaphorical guys in lab coats to say that smoking doesn't
> cause cancer, evolution is wrong, etc.
Oh, I think science took a beating in the Sixties and Seventies.
People turned away from it in droves and embraced "New Age" big
time--because science turned out to be science and not magic. The
curriculum that was expanded in the Fifties was reduced in the
Seventies. MBAs are far more popular since then than PhDs in physics.
>
> >I made the claim about post-modernism as something of a jest. But it
> >is part and parcel of a top-end anti-intellectualism that denigrates
> >the technical and scientific. Barring fundamentalism animosity toward
> >godless western culture (homegrown or otherwise), this denigration
> >comes from SOMEWHERE.
>
> Um, when it comes to US society, religious fundamentalism has several
> orders of magnitude more influence than any "elite" perspective like
> postmodernism. And as I mentioned before, there really is a noticable
> anti-intellectual trend in US culture that's been there all along.
Rather than continue defending a position I put forth--I repear--as
something of a jest, I will end this now by stating once more that the
religiously fundamentalist have no impact on SF buying because they
likely as not don't buy much of any kind of popular fiction. They
probably have less impact than "card-carrying postmodernists." It is
the from among those who buy genre that the question was put How come
fantasy seems to be doing better than SF? I suggested that it was the
result of an pervasive anti-intellectualism. Now perhaps the
"background radiation" of anti-intellectualism is born out of
religious fundamentalism, but among the book buying public there needs
to be a further explanation and I suggested that there is in fact an
anti-intellectualism that comes top down, from the Academy.
Higher education is more oriented to Job Getting than it has been
since just after WWII. Philosophy courses are not doing so well.
Understanding for its own sake is not popular. There are several
factors which account for this. One among them MAY be that the
possibility of really knowing anything has been undercut by
postmodernist argument. (Read David Lehman's "The Signs of the
Times", first chapter especially, to see the propagation of
Deconstructionist thinking through out the unviersities.)
To end on a personal anecdote, which I understand doesn't count, but
is still useful as a flag along the route--when I have a conversation
with someone who sports the honorific "Doctor" (as in PhD) and in the
course of discussing western civilization he asserts that "really, all
that technical stuff doesn't make much difference--capitalism is
responsible for everything we've done and everything we've achieved in
the last five centuries" I of course view this with skepticism. Upon
questioning, he then goes on to assert that science has given us
nothing of any real value. "Well, we went to moon," I said, picking a
perhaps obvious and over-the-top example. "But that didn't really
give us anything, did it?" he says.
I think of all the spin-offs from that whole endeavor and wonder where
in hell his thinking comes from.
Well: he was a linguist.
Anyway, my apologies if I offended in any way, but as I say I made the
original claim half (if not more) in jest. But only half.
Shawn H
:> : and "hypothesizing their possible outcomes" for "reason and the
:> : application of intellect."
:>
:> Does that hypothesizing come out of reason, or out of feeling and fears
:> (or hopes)?
: Why not both?
Yes, that would probably tie into my definition of the "best."
Favorite authors being Tiptree, Varley, Sturgeon, and Delaney above all.
But I just started Greg Bear's Eon, so I may actually catch up to the eighties
after all! :)
Shawn
Shawn H
:>So did _Clan of the Cave Bear_, and they are about equally stupid.
: It's always nice when someone comes up with the response I would have said if
: I'd thought of it. ;)
: On a complete tangent: I enjoyed the first 9/10ths of CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR. Of
: course, I was something like 10 or 11 at the time. And when I realized that the
: main character had just single-handedly invented or discovered the bra, the
: sling, the tampon, and the relation between sex and pregnancy (among other
: things), my patience began to evaporate.
I just think of her as the Kara Zor-El of the pre-historic, and then it's all
good!
Shawn
Shawn H
: Shawn H <s#no#hi...@fas.harvard.edu> writes:
:>
:> I don't think it's that simple. She may not wish to be pigeon-holed or labeled
:> (few artists do), but she's been including fantasy or speculative aspects in
:> her novels for some time. Handmaid's Tale had a power that spoke to a lot of
:> people.
: So did _Clan of the Cave Bear_, and they are about equally stupid.
You're talking to a life-long Jean Auel fan. So Ayla invented every technology
known to man singlehandedly? So what!? You gotta suspend a little disbelief now
and then!
Where else can you get detailed descriptions of mammoths mating?
Shawn
Matt Ruff
>
> The fact that [Atwood] doesn't even want to acknowledge that she is, in fact,
> writing science fiction suggests she will never improve in this regard. As a
> result, she's easily ignored.
So how come you're all talking about her instead of ignoring her?
-- M. Ruff
Ian Montgomerie
Well, I actually don't know what postmodernists do within English
departments. But the standard "postmodernist" critique of science is
that objective science is impossible because it's all done by
subjective people who can't escape the world of their personal
political/cultural/gender/whatever. The best known postmodernists
this comes from aren't English professors, they're types from
philosophy, sociology, and anthropology.
A quick google gives this brief overview:
Ron Henry
news:aiglet-71C921....@news-central.ash.giganews.com...
> In article <tj2700pq7vssm8mp6...@4ax.com>,
> Ian Montgomerie <ianN...@ianmontgomerie.com> wrote:
>
> <snip bad Shakespeare prof>
>
> > "Postmodernism" is not the same as feminism, whether everyday
feminism
> > or "obsessed with gender issues in everything" feminism.
I've heard it phrased that feminism (along with linguistics, psychology,
etc.) is one of the several "tools" in the postmodern critic's toolbox.
> Which branch of the Humanities uses this definition of postmodernism?
I
> suspect it's only English (or other languages) -- or else all of my
> professors were insane.
>
> Every professor I had that was "post modern" (a couple of English
> professors, and one history prof) said that the context of a work was
> irrelevant, and what we should do was examine the work independent of
> historical knowledge of the period and draw conclusions about the work
> based on that examination. Worst exercise in ignorant anachronism
I've
> ever seen.
Hm. This sounds more like the text-oriented "New Criticism" approaches
of the 50s than it does postmodernism, to me. Though I have heard
academics unfriendly to modern theory characterize deconstruction as
"warmed over New Criticism", I suppose.
> If postmodernism means what you say it means, then in theory the
context
> should be *all*-important, and it should be impossible to examine a
work
> without knowing the history of it. I wonder what caused the
difference
> in definitions?
My pehaps hazy-with-passing-time recollection (it's been over a decade
since grad school) is that while postmodernism is very interested in the
whole cultural context of a work, the approach recognizes that a human
mind can only encompass a certain bounded context, a limited range of
thought and knowledge, when considering any subject, so critics may
focus on a particular slant (whether it be psychological, linguistic,
feminist, or whatever) to the exclusion of the rest of the myriad of
chaotic influences on the production of a given text.
People often confuse postmodernism with deconstruction, which I recall
as specifically a strategy of criticism looking for flaws (or lacunae)
in a text (which often amount to flaws in the author's technique,
psychology, or the social values of his or her society) with which one
can bust the written work apart and examine it spread out on the table.
The metaphors have always seemed uncomfortably violent to me.
For all those who love reading fiction in a less analytical way, of
course, most of these critical approaches also have the flaw of usually
valuing discussion of the work, other critics opinions of the work, and
the slew of socio-cultural biases of the writer, more than the work
itself.
This is not to say the critical stuff can't also be fascinating too,
since it can.
Ron Henry
Mark
"anti-intellectual" for "anti-rational"? Maybe that makes what I'm
saying a bit more contextually relevant.
(I tend to see them as two sides of the same coin--use it wrong or
don't use it at all, net result largely the same--but for the sake of
argument I will concede that I've met a number of pretty intellectual
people who had problems with Reason. <g>)
how...@brazee.net
On 12-Jan-2004, cunn...@jmu.edu (Charles Cunningham) wrote:
> > Well, Verne used cannon in "From the Earth to the Moon" in 1865 to reach
> >
> > escape velocity. Bull demonstrated that such was actually a practical
> > solution somewhat later.
> >
> I don't know who "Bull" is, but it is certainly NOT practical to blow
> someone out of a cannon--the acceleration needed to reach escape
> velocity delivered in that short a time would reduce any humans to
> pulp.
A cannon using charges of gun-cotton as written in the book, certainly.
But a cannon that works by the principles of a rail gun, with the
acceleration going for the length of a mountainside, that's doable.
Bill Miller
>>I don't know who "Bull" is, but it is certainly NOT practical to blow
>>someone out of a cannon--the acceleration needed to reach escape
>>velocity delivered in that short a time would reduce any humans to
>>pulp.
Bull...now that's a story worthy of a novel. He was an engineer with
CARDE who pioneered gun-launched space payloads, working in the 50's
and 60's. After the Canadian funds dried up, he moved to more shady
work. He ended up being assassinated by Israelis because of his work
for Iraq on a super-long-range artillery weapon and SCUD derivatives.
Of course, he wasn't launching _people_....
Bill
Keith Morrison
He was the real life version of the fictional Scientist Who Is
Beyond Politics. According to most reports I've seen, his work
on artillery was to pay the bills while his heart was really in
the space launch thing. Even the Iraqi supergun was basically,
to him, a form of testbed so he could try out the technology and
prove it worked. In point of fact, Project Babylon was supposed
to be a space-launch system. No doubt Hussein had other plans
in mind for the technology, but I suspect it was his working on
improvements to the SCUDs that caused the Israelis to kill him.
He was probably the most brilliant artillery designer of the 20th
century. Aside from the artillery and Project HARP, he also
did early work on antiballistic missile defense back in 1956.
--
Keith
Ian Montgomerie
> > This has nothing to do with "high culture" or philosophy of any kind.
> > Most kids grow up thinking science is kind of geeky. Since it's not
> > easy for some people, they often manage to avoid it beyond high
> > school. I've often seen among arts students a sort of extension of a
> > high school mindset that willingly taking science and math courses is
> > something the nerdy kids do. This was just as true half a century ago
> > as it is today. Probably _more_ true, actually - as I grow up I've
> > seen it become more socially acceptable for kids to be interested in
> > technology, especially computers. The internet is now putting some of
> > what was once "geeky" into the lifestyle of the average kid, although
> > this probably doesn't extend to, say, biology.
>
> Because largely we embrace a culture that undervalues the intellect in
> favor of the athletic. But that's a whole 'nother topic. Still, when
> you see the lengths universities often go to "forgive" poor academic
> performance on the part of star athletes (whose presence presumably
> brings cash to the university, an illusion recently exploded by the
> former Dean of Hardvard), you have to wonder what this message says to
> students at large: brains don't matter as much as a good throwing arm.
> Perhaps not directly anti-intellectual, but certainly a-intellectual
> (if you'll forgive the rather hamhanded neologism).
I completely agree with that. And it has to do with what I was saying
about an anti-intellectual streak that has always been there in US
culture. High school and college athletics is held in FAR higher
esteem than it is in many other countries (including my native Canada
right across the border). There was actually a thread in RASFW about
this a while ago. It turned out, informally, that the Canadian
regulars reported that athletics was not a huge deal in their high
schools, while many Americans reported "football stars were
worshipped" style experiences. The influence of this sort of thing -
which has affected the lives of many people for many years - is just
soooo much higher than any kind of recent academic phenomenon could
hope to have. So is the influence of religious conservatism, which
has given a lot of people a religious/ideological interest in
disputing the authority of science since the authority of science
started to really pummel some of their religious views. Religious
evangelism, supernaturalism in general, and the "religious right" as a
political movement are much more influential in the US than in other
countries. Creationism is also essentially a distinguishing feature
of US culture - it's very common in the US but has become far rarer in
the rest of the Christian-majority world.
> > Um, who is this "us"? I rather doubt that any social scientific
> > evaluation of US culture would find that public opinion of science
> > dropped in the latter half of the twentieth century. Science - as
> > opposed to industrial technology - came to the forefront with the
> > nuclear age, the space age, computers, biotechnology, etc., etc. The
> > science curriculum in public schools was greatly expanded from what it
> > was before the 1950s, in response to the US getting beaten into space
> > by Sputnik. And the critics of scientific orthodoxy can only maintain
> > their respectability by using the language of science - by getting
> > actual or metaphorical guys in lab coats to say that smoking doesn't
> > cause cancer, evolution is wrong, etc.
>
> Oh, I think science took a beating in the Sixties and Seventies.
> People turned away from it in droves and embraced "New Age" big
> time--because science turned out to be science and not magic.
The new age movement (and "hippies") may have been a highly visible
phenomena, but they were not particularly large movements. When you
discount people who just dressed differently for a while and listened
to different music because it was in fashion, but didn't really change
their social attitudes, only a quite small portion of the US
population was left. I'm not just making this up, demographers have
actually looked at what went on because there is a mismatch between
the popular conception of late 60s/early 70s youth as
"counterculture", with the overall trend of the "Baby Boomer"
demographic which is actually noticeably puritanical and conservative.
It turns out that the real counterculture was quite a small minority,
who simply happened to make a very large amount of news because they
were outspoken at a young age in a way US society hadn't quite seen
before, and represented a surge of visible nonconformism following
several decades of relative conformity. But most of that age group
was growing up fairly conservative, and when the mainstream Baby
Boomers filtered into positions of influence the social changes they
induced were puritanical rather than counterculture, religious right
rather than new age.
Also, I think there's a false trend seen from just looking at a change
from the 50s. In WW2 technology was vital to the war effort, then
with the coming of the nuclear age and the space race, "science" rode
a tremendous high of public optimism. But this was as different from
the periods before it as the periods after. I don't see the 60s and
70s "non-exuberant" view of science as particularly different from the
30s and earlier.
> > Um, when it comes to US society, religious fundamentalism has several
> > orders of magnitude more influence than any "elite" perspective like
> > postmodernism. And as I mentioned before, there really is a noticable
> > anti-intellectual trend in US culture that's been there all along.
>
> Rather than continue defending a position I put forth--I repear--as
> something of a jest, I will end this now by stating once more that the
> religiously fundamentalist have no impact on SF buying because they
> likely as not don't buy much of any kind of popular fiction.
Fundamentalists buy lots of fiction, and not just in the "Christian
fiction" market. They're too high a portion of the US population not
to (depends on precisely how you define fundamentalist but it works to
10-20%). But it's not as if "fundamentalists" are some isolated
category that has no influence on the rest of US society. On the
contrary, they're just the extreme end of the Christian denominations
that have quite an influence on mainstream US society. And they're a
major factor in pushing religion, politics, culture, and even popular
entertainment in the US to the right. (Just as a small example on
entertainment, the influence of this demographic is a major reason why
US mass media are more puritanical than other countries when it comes
to swearing, sex, and so on). The influence of relatively
conservative Christian culture is felt across the US in a way that it
is not felt in many other countries. I live in California and
religiousity is more apparent here than in much of Canada, and
California isn't exactly the heartland of the bible belt.
> They probably have less impact than "card-carrying postmodernists."
Um, no offense, but that suggestion is just nuts. By any reasonable
measurement one can think of, religious fundamentalists have VASTLY
more influence than "card-carrying postmodernists". They have their
own huge radio and television networks. They have a great deal of
influence over the Republican party (which currently controls the
executive branch and both legislative houses of the US government).
They have huge numbers of grassroots organizations dedicated to
getting their political and social policies moved forward. They
create a constant struggle in many states over their attempts, often
successful, to actually get creationism taught in science class. And
they themselves are a significant minority of the overall US
population.
> It is the from among those who buy genre that the question was put How come
> fantasy seems to be doing better than SF? I suggested that it was the
> result of an pervasive anti-intellectualism. Now perhaps the
> "background radiation" of anti-intellectualism is born out of
> religious fundamentalism, but among the book buying public there needs
> to be a further explanation and I suggested that there is in fact an
> anti-intellectualism that comes top down, from the Academy.
Why does there need to be a further explanation? I find your
assertion that religious fundamentalists and the like simply don't buy
fiction to be ridiculous in general, and also inconsistent with my
knowledge that a fair number of SF fans in the US are in fact
religious fundamentalists. (Indeed, I used to be a member of a zine
dedicated to alternate history, and out of two dozen members two were
fundamentalists and creationists. That's zine members, which is a lot
more of a hardcore sort of SF fan than your average book buyer).
If you want a further explanation than "generalized
anti-intellectualism" I've got an easy one for you - sex demographics.
Most purchasers of fiction are female. Fantasy features a higher
portion of stories with appeal to the average/typical female reader.
Science fiction, on the other hand, has a disproportionate amount of
gosh-wow gadgetry (appeals more to the typical male), and "science
before characterization" fiction (appeals more to people with a
background and interest in scientific and technical fields, which are
disproportionately male).
> Higher education is more oriented to Job Getting than it has been
> since just after WWII. Philosophy courses are not doing so well.
I'd be surprised if philosophy courses weren't doing quite well in
terms of absolute number of students enrolled compared to 50 years
ago. Prior to WW2, universities were elite institutions attended only
by a small minority of the population. After WW2, and the GI Bill in
the US (and similar phenomena in other countries involving widespread
subsidizing of universities), a university education became a
realistic aspiration for the average person. The proportion of the
population enrolled in university increased drastically. This
naturally led to a university education being more job-oriented
because it became more of a preparation for a typical decent career,
rather than a preparation for an elite lifestyle.
> To end on a personal anecdote, which I understand doesn't count, but
> is still useful as a flag along the route--when I have a conversation
> with someone who sports the honorific "Doctor" (as in PhD) and in the
> course of discussing western civilization he asserts that "really, all
> that technical stuff doesn't make much difference--capitalism is
> responsible for everything we've done and everything we've achieved in
> the last five centuries" I of course view this with skepticism. Upon
> questioning, he then goes on to assert that science has given us
> nothing of any real value. "Well, we went to moon," I said, picking a
> perhaps obvious and over-the-top example. "But that didn't really
> give us anything, did it?" he says.
I would hardly call it a typical "postmodernist" opinion that
_capitalism_ is responsible for the lion's share of human progress.
I'd say that opinion is more typical of the opposite end of the
political spectrum from where one usually finds postmodernism (and
probably emerges from a strain of right-wing thought with far older
roots than postmodernism).
Ian Montgomerie
Well how would we all know he's ignoring her if he didn't do it VERY
LOUDLY?