(1) SURREAL CEREAL. “When I just saw this, I did suddenly wonder, ‘Is nothing sacred?’” says James H. Burns.
(2) RED LIGHT AT MORNING. Bob Byrne’s “The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: ‘Rudolph’s Performance Review’” at Black Gate continues his tradition of holiday humor.
You’d think the reindeer with the shiny red nose would have knocked his annual review out of the park after that foggy Christmas Eve, eh? Well, that Santa is one tough reviewer. Read on, and I wish you a safe, happy and blessed Merry Christmas….
(3) DON’T LINK. Jenneral Geek’s theory about Doctor Who’s most popular episode suggests “’Blink’ Might be Even More Timey-Wimey Than You Think”.
Now, you may also remember a flirtatious babe from the same episode named Billy Shipton. Billy is a detective investigating the disappearance of people in relation to Wester Drumlins. This is what brings us to the lovely meet-cute in which Billy Shipton and Sally Sparrow flirt in front of a dusty blue police box. Billy gets Sally’s number and when he asks for her full name she retorts, “Sally Shipton” without thinking, followed by her instant mortification and departure. Cut scene and fast forward – Billy gets Weeping Angel’d back to 1969 where he receives instructions from the Doctor not to contact Sally Sparrow until after their original encounter. Billy lives his life back to 2007 and calls Sally. They re-meet minutes later for Sally and 38 years later for Billy in his hospital room. An elderly Billy tells Sally Sparrow information that is relevant to the plot, BUT he also tells her that he married a woman coincidentally named Sally from the 70’s. He even shows a picture of his dearly beloved, Sally Shipton.
I know this is timey-wimey enough as is, but what if there is more? At this point of the episode I had to press pause because my mind was going through the time vortex. Hey, how cool would it be if Billy Shipton actually married Kathy Wainwright’s daughter? So, I couldn’t resist whipping out my handy dandy calculator and pretending like I don’t blow at math.
(4) RETROSPECTIVE. TCM Remembers 2015 honors actors, actresses and filmmakers who passed away this year, among them Leonard Nimoy, Christopher Lee, Rod Taylor and Wes Craven.
(5) BSFA AWARDS. Nominations are open for the British Science Fiction Association Awards through December 31.
Who can nominate?
You may nominate a work if YOU:
- Are a member of the BSFA
AND
- Send or give your nominations to the Awards Administrator to arrive by the 31st December of each year.
See here for further details.
(6) SEE ME. Now I’m surprised John Scalzi didn’t drop in this morning to support Buckaroo Banzai in Hampus’ next set of brackets.
All these science fiction reboots and sequels and franchises AND WHERE THE HELL IS MY GODDAMN BUCKAROO BANZAI REMAKE PEOPLE
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) December 15, 2015
I swear to God. Someone give me the rights. I WILL MAKE IT MYSELF AND IT WILL BE PERFECT LIKE TOMMY
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) December 15, 2015
But John, do you mean Perfect like Perfect Tommy, or like Roger Daltrey’s Tommy?
(7) ACKERMANSION II. There’s a petition at change.org calling on the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission to “Declare Forrest Ackerman’s house a historic monument!” The Commission considered an application at its December 3 meeting – I don’t know what they decided.
Forrest Ackerman is considered “the father of science fiction.” He was a magazine editor, science fiction writer and literary agent who represented Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, J.P. Lovecraft and L. Ron Hubbard, among many others. His magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, was an inspiration to writers and filmmakers like Stephen Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Stephen King, J.J. Abrams and Guillermo del Toro. Ackerman housed his extensive collection of sci-fi memorabilia in a private museum at 4513 Russell Ave. in Los Angeles and this home was dubbed the “Acker-Mini-Mansion.” The Smithsonian described Ackerman’s home as “one of the 10 best private museums in the country” open to visitors every Saturday since 1951 until Ackerman’s death in 2008. Please support designating Ackerman’s house a historic monument to prevent its demolition by developers who want to “put up a parking lot.”
I’m guessing “put up a parking lot” is a reference to Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” rather than an immediate plan for the property.
(8) THE VOICE. Last summer Natalie Luhrs raised $5,125 from folks who wanted her to livetweet her experience reading a Theodore Beale novel, and unlock another major incentive. And now that incentive has arrived — “Bad Life Decisions: Mary Robinette Kowal Reads Theodore Beale. Sexily” — at Pretty Terrible.
As promised at the conclusion of the fundraiser, here is Mary Robinette Kowal reading snippets from Theodore Beale’s Eternal Warriors™: War In Heaven in a very, very sexy voice.
(9) OKORAFOR. Nnedi Okorafor has been named the winner of Brittle Paper’s African Literary Person of the Year Award.
Brittle Paper is a blog written by Duke Ph.D. student Ainehi Edoro.
The 2015 African literary person of the year goes to Nnedi Okorafor for the many ways in which Africa inspires innovation in her approach to storytelling.
The way she writes about Africa is refreshingly different. Take for example her 2014 novel titled Lagoon. The novel follows the near-apocalyptic chaos that takes over Lagos when aliens land on its shores. In the novel, she pushes us to imagine a futuristic but recognizable Lagos swarming with aliens and creatures. The novel is a mashup of cultural iconographies that range from alien spaceships and viral youtube videos to Igbo ancestral masquerades and folkloric archetypes to Karl Marx and Danfo buses. She tells a story about Lagos by situating the city, its fears and anxieties, its history and its landscape within a global network of literary traditions and philosophical concerns. A novel such as Lagoon brings to the conclusion that African life is so complex, so rich that to adequately give an account of it we have to draw inspiration from everywhere—from Nollywood but also from Star Wars, from Esu but also from American rappers, from Pentecostal churches but also from underground LGBT communities.
(10) Today In History
- Born December 14, 1900 – The quantum theory
Through physical experiments, Planck demonstrated that energy, in certain situations, can exhibit characteristics of physical matter. According to theories of classical physics, energy is solely a continuous wave-like phenomenon, independent of the characteristics of physical matter. Planck’s theory held that radiant energy is made up of particle-like components, known as “quantum.” The theory helped to resolve previously unexplained natural phenomena such as the behavior of heat in solids and the nature of light absorption on an atomic level. In 1918, Planck was rewarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on blackbody radiation.
(11) TOY AUCTION. An auction of over 600 Star Wars collectible toys on December 11 brought in more than $500,000.
The higher-end items in Nigo’s collection were either rare or still in the original packaging, making them desirable collectors’ items.
A rare Luke Skywalker figure — one of only 20 confirmed — was expected to sell for $12,000 to $18,000. It sold for $25,000.
The highest-selling lot, a seven-figure multi-pack sold exclusively in Canada in 1980, garnered $32,500 at the auction.
Among the items were two sets of “Star Wars” coins which were estimated to sell for between $25,000 and $35,000. They sold for $27,500.
(12) LITTLE TEENY EYES. Supervike is creating Monster Hunter International miniatures.
I paint and model little toy soldiers, and since there really aren’t any commercially available that represent the world of MHI, I’m trying to convert and paint existing miniatures to fit and represent the characters.
The scale of these miniatures is about 28mm. That just means the ‘average’ man of 6ft tall or so, is represented as 28mm tall. So, that’s a bit over an inch tall for us that never could figure out the metric system (thanks Jimmy Carter).
Some are fascinating, like the set in “It’s beginning to look a lot like Fishmen”.
Deep ones, those aquatic Lovecraftian fishmen, are only briefly mentioned in Monster Hunter International. They serve as the badguys in a mission previously mentioned with a SEaL team and a cruise ship.
Turns out that the Deep Ones aren’t just interested in mindlessly attacking humans, they also prefer to lay their eggs inside a human host. I’m assuming the outcome (other than the obvious madness) would be something like these guys. These are Deep One Hybrids, the spawns of such an unholy union.
(13) PATENT FENDING. The Washington Post’s Larry Downs names “The 4 worst patents of 2015” after this introduction:
This was another depressing year for patent law, which long ago lost sight of its constitutional moorings as a balanced and limited source of incentives for innovators. Though Congress, the courts and the Patent and Trademark Office each tried in their own way to rein in a system widely-regarded as out of control, in the end nobody made much progress.
On just one day in November, for example, over 200 new patent lawsuits were filed, as plaintiffs rushed to beat a change in federal procedure that could require more specific claims. Most were from companies that buy up patents of dubious quality and use them to extract nuisance settlements from actual innovators….
To give just a sense of just how out of touch the law has become, I asked Daniel Nazer, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to highlight the worst patents he’s come across this year. Nazer, who holds the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents (yes, really), had little trouble coming up with these four, culled from a monthly “Stupid Patent of the Month” post he writes for the EFF site. (The complete list is available here.) Each one highlights a different crisis in our badly-misaligned patent system…
(14) VASICEK. Joe Vasicek’s latest proposition is “Disagreement is not offensive”, at One Thousand And One Parsecs.
If you take offense whenever people disagree with you, chances are that you’ll never be able to cut it as a writer. In order to write well, you have to be able to see things from inside the heads of people who aren’t like you and probably don’t agree with you.
This is why I support Sad Puppies: because the SJW types in Science Fiction are usually the first to cry offense over anything that doesn’t fit into their narrow worldviews. This naturally makes them as vehemently opposed to intellectual diversity as they (falsely) claim that the Puppies are to racial, sexual, and cultural diversity. When you look at the books and stories that these people uphold as shining examples of the genre, their rigidly ideological worldview is as plain as the emperor’s new clothes.
Disagreement is not “offensive.” In fact, it’s a sign of respect. If your opponent thought that your opinion or argument wasn’t worth engaging with, then they simply would have ignored you. By saying “I don’t agree,” they are acknowledging your position in an intellectually honest way. When you willfully misrepresent your opponent’s views, or bully them into silence, it is a sign of disrespect that warrants taking offense. And who is most guilty of that? I’ll give you two chances, and the first one doesn’t count.
(15) THE MAX. Blunt is one way of describing Max Booth III’s “Sad Puppies and The Goosebumps Rap: The Best and Worst Things to Happen to Literature in 2015” at Lit Reactor.
Sad Puppies
The KKK Sad Puppies are a group of white supremacists science fiction writers set on fixing the Hugo Awards. They are very pathetic nerds who won’t be satisfied as long as people other than straight white males are represented in science fiction. Keep the genre pure, they say. Heil Hitler, they probably also say. Our penises are tiny and we need to make others feel miserable to satisfy ourselves, they almost definitely say. So, in 2015, they managed to get Puppy nominees in almost every category. Because of this clusterfuck, many categories were given “No Awards”.
World Fantasy Award
Hey, speaking of racists. This year also saw a very nice and welcome change: Lovecraft was removed as the model for the World Fantasy Award. Many non-terrible people celebrated this victory, and many other terrible people whined about it. Especially ST Joshi, whose recent blog posts are both hilarious and sad. It’s still unknown what will take Lovecraft’s place as the trophy model. I’ve already suggested myself, but have yet to hear back. I’ve also heard many people suggest a dragon, but dragons as we all know, are lame. Honestly, a giant dong might be the way to go.
(16) ONE STAR (WARS) RATING. Milo Yiannopolous argues ”Star Wars Is Garbage” at Breitbart.com.
With Star Wars, liberal Hollywood got it all wrong. They get everything wrong, of course, but this movie franchise really takes the biscuit. They turned the heroes into villains, and the villains into shining beacons of virtue. With a new film on the horizon, I feel duty-bound to warn you about the desperate shortcomings of this particular entertainment phenomenon.
If we’re honest with ourselves, the real wretched hive of scum and villainy is Skywalker Ranch, where George Lucas and his band of morally dissolute bastards created the Star Wars universe, a blight on western civilisation and culture.
This magisterial bit of trolling includes lines such as —
Jabba the Hutt was actually pretty progressive.
And –
Oh, and by the way, Darth Vader’s daughter was installed as the leader of the galaxy after he killed the rightful and democratically elected leader, Emperor Palpatine. I’m just saying.
(17) USE THE SOURCE. A “Google Chrome extension replaces all mentions of Donald Trump with Voldemort” reports the Telegraph.
The Trump2Voldemort extension for the web browser replaces any text referring to the Republican candidate with ‘He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’ or ‘Tom Riddle’
The source is here:
https://twitter.com/Sarah_X_Chen/status/675030881447358464
(18) ULTIMATE TIME SAVER. Michael McNulty’s YouTube video plays Star Wars I-VI simultaneously in six side-by-side windows!
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Jerry Pournelle, and Brian Z. for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day James H. Burns.]
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Tikki
ETA whoa, first fifth! Fifth first fifth time ever.
(18) Which window has Ewoks Battle for Endor?
Wonderful scroll Mike !
I like the troll, counter-troll of 14 and 15 😉
Though now I wish my 8 year old self did not take his Star Wars toys out of the packaging 😉 That is some lofty numbers for an auction.
PS Buckaro Bonazi is wonderful, I hope it made the cut in the bracket.
Iphinome: Which window has Ewoks Battle for Endor?
I’m now kicking myself for that extra ~11 hours I spent on that Star Wars marathon which, it is now obvious, was not necessary. 😉
(14) Vasicek.
Ah, the irony of a Puppy accusing anyone else of having “a narrow worldview”.
ETA: I have a worldview FIVE posts wide!
@JJ How could Bea Arthur singing or Itchy’s VR erotica not be necessary? Doesn’t it make you want Art Carney show up and bring you Life Day presents?
8) The Voice MRK’s sexy readings of excerpts of TB’s work was fantastic. Too much of my favorite related works Are related to the puppy contretemps. I need to get to non-puppy stuff.
14) Vasicek always good entertainment. The puppies are good at putting themselves in other’s shoes? He and I must know/read different puppy leader posts and commenters.
Some kinda fifth.
(11) TOY AUCTION – is this a truth is stranger than fiction moment or did SNL know about this auction when they did their skit? (Ref yesterday’s Pixel Scroll.)
MEMES COLLIDE: Buckaroo Bonsai reboots the original but with Ewoks.
You know how when someone phrases their opinions in such a vitriolic manner that it makes you uncomfortable, even though you are both nominally on the same side? (15)
And you know when you’re familiar enough with a person’s other writing to know they are a total odious person, it doesn’t matter how good their jokes are, you’re not laughing? (16)
(18) Is missing the Christmas special.
I don’t know. I see 14) and 15) as troll-and-troll. Ku Klux Klan? Really?
I like the idea of the Puppies being in favor of intellectual diversity – it explains the multiple John C Wright nominations on the grounds his thinking is all over the place.
Of course, the real troll is Milo at Breitbart. In three years, he will be active in Star Wars-gate and write that he has Star Wars is IMPORTANT for all conservatives, Have been kidnapped by the SJW:s and will start to collect toy figures.
Funny how that small sentence sneaked in though.
Final list for the Science Fiction Movie Bracket here. Bracket will start tomorrow.
Well played…
Triple fifth!
RE: Milo’s latest outpouring
Uh, no. Even in the Expanded Universe, Leia didn’t become the leader of the New Republic until something like 13 years after Return of the Jedi, and was elected to the position. In Force Awakens, she’s apparently a military officer.
I am shocked – shocked – that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.
Oh, and ticky
Wooo! One sleep til Star Wars!
LITTLE TEENY EYES: That is really cool. The world could always do with more collectable miniatures. Who knows perhaps one day MHI ones will fetch a hefty price, just like Star Wars.
I always hoped someone would make a chess set from the Sherri Tepper True Game talents.
Fourth fifth!
Re Milo.
I have seen, argued in all seriousnessi in certain conservative circles, an appreciation for the Empire, arguing for its order and stability and that they are the true “good guys” in the SW universe. I see Milo’s post as just a part of that tradition.
But, then, has anyone else played the old game TIE FIGHTER, where you do play as an Imperial Pilot with a pro-Imperial POV? The game at least makes a coherent argument (if not a strong one) that the Empire is better than chaos and war.
(14) VASICEK
Disagreement is not a sign of respect. Disagreement is disagreement.
Disagreement can be expressed respectfully, but it can also be expressed disrespectfully.
Respect is not an inherent part of disagreement.
And the mere fact of disagreeing does not need to be respected as if it were inherently virtuous, which I suspect is the aim of this little exercise.
What is this (14) the rest of you are talking about? The post goes straight from 13 to 15 over here…
According to J.K. Rowling herself, replacing “Trump” with “Voldemort” is euphemistic.
If disagreement were innately respectful, it would have been respectful when House member Joe Wilson (R, South Carolina) shouted “You lie!” in President Obama’s face while President Obama was giving a speech to Congress.
This is a trolling equivalency.
Peace Is My Middle Name: And the mere fact of disagreeing does not need to be respected as if it were inherently virtuous, which I suspect is the aim of this little exercise.
Yep, it’s the typical abuser manipulation attempt:
@hampus. Oh goody. Can’t wait. It’s not duck season or rabbit season. It’s *bracket* season 🙂
@peace
And because I am in the mood to tie a knot in your bow–if disagreement is inherently respectful as the blog post writer thinks, what does that say about one of the Sad Puppies leaders, namely,Brad, when he decided to change the text of disagreeing comments on his blog to suit his own ends? Was that respectful, too?
Paul: what does that say about one of the Sad Puppies leaders, namely,Brad, when he decided to change the text of disagreeing comments on his blog to suit his own ends? Was that respectful, too?
No, no! Pay attention! That was Dignity Culture.
Sheesh, it’s like you’re not even trying to parse the Puppy Logic at all.
My god it’s just like with the custom gun thing. The miniatures guy can’t be comfortable just offering a neat thing. He has to get in a random dig at…Jimmy Carter. Because who the hell knows why.
Note that this rule doesn’t apply in the opposite direction. It is not respectful to disagree with any Puppy argument – this is instead evidence of collusion or naivety, or sinister political machination. And fairly often, disagreeing with Puppies leads to tantrums (see Brad Torgersen).
Also note that insults, threats and harassment can suddenly become classed as ‘disagreement’ depending on the recipient.
Oddly enough, it was President Ford’s administration which tried to implement the metric system in the US in 1975 and President Reagan’s that disbanded it in 1982.
Those of you who didn’t back the Longlist Anthology Kickstarter may be interested to know that it’s now available for general sale from a variety of outlets:
Link
He has to get in a random dig at…Jimmy Carter. Because who the hell knows why.
As best I can tell, he’s blaming Carter for the US failure to convert to the metric system, on the grounds that the conversion would not have been blocked by the Reagan Administration and Republicans in Congress if Carter hadn’t supported it.
It is true that some people flip out at being disagreed with. Or, worse, at being wrong.
When someone posts “Ronald Reagan supported the Taliban” and someone else posts a link showing that the Taliban didn’t even exist when he was president, the sensible thing for the first person to do is apologize and maybe try to make light of it. “I HATE being wrong! :-)” or something to that effect.
But most people can’t do that. They double down. Or just become directly abusive. This isn’t limited to any particular political persuasion either. I don’t think it’s new either; I think it’s been part of the human condition for thousands of years.
(16) Breitbart’s numbers dropping again?
If they are it is probably due to some bad hiring decisions recently.
14 and 15
disagreement (i.e. an argument) i s supposed to be different from abuse.
“M: Yes, but I came here for an argument!!
A: OH! Oh! I’m sorry! This is abuse!
M: Oh! Oh I see!
A: Aha! No, you want room 12A, next door.
M: Oh…Sorry…
A: Not at all!
A: (under his breath) stupid git.”
(14) It would be nice if examples had been given of the “intellectual diversity” of the Pups or the “rigid ideology” of the non-Pups, but then again, that would have required Vacisek to actually come up with examples of each, and I think even he knows that the vacuous nature of his claims would be exposed if he tried.
Greg
There something of a problem with your chosen example; Reagan provided billions of dollars to Muslim fundamentalists to fight a proxy war in Afghanistan after the Russian invasion.
It took a while for the name Taliban to emerge as a label for those Muslim fundamentalists, but nevertheless, without the billions in cash and armaments provided by Reagan’s administration, we would not now be confronted by religious zealots who regard slaughtering the ungodly everywhere as the logical extension of slaughtering the ungodly Russians in Afghanistan…
Perhaps it would be more fair to say President Reagan *created* the Taliban with his funding, since they did not exist before he funded them but the people who took that funding and ran with it became the Taliban.
But yes, it is technically incorrect to say Reagan *funded* the Taliban.
Perhaps a cleaner example might prove the point better. What’s wrong with the actual example we had here of someone implying that of all people President Carter is to blame for the failure of the metric system in the US?
(16) Ok, so i get to be the pedantic SW guy?
Words (and basic research) have once again failed Milo.
First of, Leia was never installed as leader. At the point that the Rebels had taken enough ground to reform into the New Republic, Mon Mothma was the acting head of state and later confirmed by popular vote. In the whole EU, Leia only held the title of Head of State for about five years total, and that was after Mothma and others. Likewise, Palpatine was never elected Emperor. He was elected Chancellor and used the Senate to extend the powers of his office until he could declare himself Emperor. While I’m not surprised Milo wouldn’t recognize a stupidly obvious comparison to the Roman Empire, I doubt his clickbait will work well. After throwing in with Gamergate, which is almost uniformly pro-SW, his fans will not rush to defend him.
And as if the talibans weren’t bad enough, US managed to find something even worse to ally with afterwards: The Druglords. Same ideology, same thinking in clans, same brutality, only with less interest to build something and more interested in starting up the opium trade that the talibans had managed to obliterate.
Jim Henley on December 15, 2015 at 4:57 am said:
Do things sell better if you trigger people’s political resentments? I mean, it might explain Fox News.
Greg Hullender on December 15, 2015 at 5:50 am said:
There’s a lot of evidence that, by default, at heart, the human phenomenon “argument” is less “a back and forth testing logic and facts to determine likely truth” and more “a dominance contest to determine who gets to be boss monkey and say what’s what in this situation”
Stevie on December 15, 2015 at 6:24 am said:
Le mot juste.
Words have failed Milo? Part of successful trolling is the inclusion of carefully selected errors, to encourage heated corrections.
Great article from Brittle Paper, with its appreciation of Lagoon, a novel which even I (non-African) found exciting, and reflections on the growing stylistic and thematic diversity of African writing. I’ve been making some effort to discover African SFF this year and been enthused about it. I can’t say whether there’s an increase over previous years, because I wasn’t paying attention before, but there sure is a lot of fine African writing out there this year (see Wole Talabi’s list for some examples).
The interesting thing is, Okorafor apart, it’s all been short fiction. Between anthologies like Terra Incognita, AfroSFv2, and more; the debut of the fine magazine Omenana; Dilman Dila having a collection published; and a great story by Lesley Nneka Arimah, “Who Will Greet You at Home”, reaching a wide audience by appearing in The New Yorker — there’s been a lot, available even in the US & UK. I’m sure African SFF writers also do novels, but if so, publishers aren’t picking them up. So I think that people saying that short stories are losing relevance in the SFF markets are missing this point of view. Actually, during debates about the Hugo categories, people were defending the short categories by saying that they are a venue for new and outside-the-mainstream writers; here’s another data point on that.
@Stevie
Kudos for writing a sensible response. Now I’ll proceed to disagree with it. 🙂
As with many issues in the real world, this one is nuanced and cannot be summarized in a simple sound bite. However, it’s quite a stretch to claim that the leaders the US funded later became the Taliban since the Taliban fought against those people (by then called “the United Front.”) The Taliban is largely a creation of Pakistan, and I don’t believe anyone seriously disputes that.
It would be fair to say that the US program against the Soviets made it easier for Pakistan in several ways, and they certainly recruited people who had been part of the earlier anti-Soviet operations. Not much dispute on that issue either.
Given all that, I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that “Reagan supported the Taliban.” Not only were they not from the same era, they weren’t even the same leaders he supported. They were organized to undermine the leaders he had supported.
By the by, as a gay person who lived in that era, I absolutely loathe Ronald Reagan and blame him for lots of unnecessary AIDS deaths of people I knew and loved. I am not a Reagan fan. I just don’t think we can pin the Taliban on him.
Stevie on December 15, 2015 at 6:24 am said:
It was more complicated than that. The background to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a lot of covert involvement in Afghan politics by both the US and the USSR. The US armed and funded resistance to the Soviet occupation but that resistance was not all “fundamentalist” (whatever that means). The US did participate in the labeling of that resistance as “jihad” and allied with actors pushing an Islamist (preferable term to fundamentalist) agenda, like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and al-Qaeda.
The rise of the Taliban, however, had more to do with the complete abandonment of Afghanistan to civil war, brutal warlords, and Pakistani interference after the Soviet withdrawal.
The larger truth is that throughout the Cold War, US foreign policy favored right-wing religious groups throughout the world over anything tinged with leftist ideas and therefore potentially sympathetic to the Communist bloc.
@Stevie, Greg, Amina,
I sometimes see the Taliban used as a perfect example of blowback — a long-term unintended effect of our actions that comes back to haunt us.
Reagan is an interesting figure for me, because I was young enough to think he seemed like a good guy when he got into office in 1980, and old enough to vote against him in my first-ever presidential election in 1984.
One of the things I really, really didn’t like was our propensity to support terrible oppressive regimes in foreign countries just because they were maybe anti-Communist.
Besides the aforementioned Talabi article and numerous articles on Brittle Paper, there’s some African SF recommendations in this article by Ethan Robinson. I would also like to point out “Soup” by Chikodili Emelumadu, “Birdwoman” and “Madness” by Pemi Aguda, and “The Horse of War” by Mame Bougouma Diene. Anyone else have suggestions?