Pixel Scroll 9/23/17 Appertained Horror

(1) APPROACHES TO MILSF. Greg Hullender’s review of “Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan” for Rocket Stack Rank includes this analysis:

Make Love not War

The stories take the following attitudes toward the military:

Hate it. Soldiers are doing evil: 7

Despise it. Soldiers are wasting their lives: 3

Admire/respect it. Soldiers are heroes: 5

All of the recommended stories are from the last group, which is a little odd. It’s perfectly possible to write a great story from an anti-military point of view or with an anti-war message (e.g. Catch 22), but that’s not what we find in this volume. Perhaps it’s just a lot easier to write good military SF if you don’t actually hate the military.

(2) I SCREAM. Freddie In Space and artist Frank Browning invite you to cool down with Ben & Jerry’s Horror Movie Ice Cream flavors. There are over two dozen like this –

(3) LET DARKNESS FALL. Coming October 10 at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination:

The recent solar eclipse transfixed the world. People in the path of totality marveled at the corona and how the air temperature dropped briefly and, in some parts of the country, the cicadas began to sing as if it were night. But the eclipse also offers a world of possibilities for scientific discovery. Jay Pasachoff, Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College, joins us at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination to discuss his observations of eclipses–66 solar eclipses, including 34 total solar eclipses–and the NSF and National Geographic supported discoveries these have yielded. Dozens of cameras, including a pair of frame-transfer CCDs, were trained on the corona to isolate the specific emissions of 13-times-ionized iron (“the coronal green line”) and 9-times-ionized iron (“the coronal red line”) at high cadence, to attempt to distinguish among models for how the corona is heated to millions of degrees. Dr. Pasachoff will discuss this work and plans for future total, partial, and annular eclipse observations over the next few years, including the 2023 and 2024 American eclipses.

(4) REFORMAUTOMATION. The Babylon Bee promises “New Martin Luther-Shaped Amazon Echo Will Rudely Answer All Your Theology Questions”.

Dubbed the “Amazon Luther,” the new device is programmed to answer all your theology questions in the Reformer’s trademark aggressive tone and style.

An Amazon rep gave a demo at the press conference announcing the device, showing off some of its dynamic responses:

“Luther, can you tell me about the Pope?”

The Pope is a mere tormentor of conscience. The assembly of his greased and religious crew in praying is altogether like the croaking of frogs, which edifies nothing at all.

“Luther, am I a good person?”

You are a sinner, you’re dead, you’re eaten up with corruption. Every free choice of yours is evil and not good.

“Luther, is Joel Osteen a solid preacher?”

Yes, Joel is an excellent person, as skillful, clever, and versed in Holy Scripture as a cow in a walnut tree or a sow on a harp.

(5) DANIEL OBIT. Actress Jennifer Daniel (1936-2017) died August 16. Her film appearances included the Edgar Wallace Mysteries film series, Gideon’s Way and the Hammer horror films The Kiss of the Vampire (1963) and The Reptile (1966).

(6) WE LIVE IN HIS VISION OF THE FUTURE. The New York Times eulogizes architect Gin Wong, who died September 1: “Gin Wong, Who Designed Futuristic Buildings in Los Angeles, Dies at 94”. He put his creative mark on the city with CBS Television City, the Los Angeles International Airport theme building, and his 1960 design of a Union 76 gas station in Beverly Hills:

— that remains one of his most beloved and enduring. With its red, swooping canopy angling toward the sky, the gas station wed the space age to the mundane task of filling up in a city devoted to cars.

Mr. Wong designed the gas station while working for his former teacher and mentor, William L. Pereira, around the time that he was also credited with creating the startling, spider-like Theme Building at the Los Angeles airport. Writing in The Los Angeles Times in 2010, the critic Bob Pool called the building “part spaceship, part flying saucer” and said that Mr. Wong had “set out to create a futuristic building that would both reflect its relationship with aviation and stand the test of time.”

…While running Mr. Pereira’s company in the late 1960s, Mr. Wong oversaw the design of the Transamerica Pyramid, the striking 853-foot-tall building that pierces the sky in San Francisco.

(7) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • September 23, 1846 — Planet Neptune was discovered.
  • September 23, 1962 The Jetsons aired its very first episode.
  • September 23, 1968 Charly premiered in theaters, based on Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

(8) SFF MADE IT HAPPEN. Lezli Robyn thanks the sff community for donating to her GoFundMe appeal all the money needed for her eye surgery.

I am feeling so very overwhelmed, happy, and so very thankful. Gofundme donators have now raised the entire $8000 needed for a new and 100% successful cross-linking surgery on my eyes to halt the progression of my Keratoconus !!! I would love to thank my family and friends and the many authors, editors, publishers, artists and readers/fans of the sf/fantasy field for amazingly generous donations made to the surprise fundraiser my boss, Shahid Mahmud (who deserves the most thanks!), created to help me raise the money.

I have so many people to thank. I am especially thankful to the readers who donated—the people who, like me, might not have too much to spare, but still donated anyway. Even one of the first fans of my writing, a voracious reader, donated and left such a lovely message on my fundraiser (I’m looking at you, Jo Van Ekeren) that it moved me to tears.

In fact, I have been brought to tears several times over the amazing outpouring of generosity of the donations and the lovely messages written by those who have shared the fundraiser all over the web. And, let me tell you, it’s quite the bittersweet experience for me when I cry. My tears fill in the thinned parts of my corneas that the Keratoconus has eroded over the years, creating a more even, rounded, surface. So even if it was sadness that had caused my tears, for that split second my vision sharpens I experience a moment of wonder and surprise as I see how beautiful and vibrant the world really is, until gravity or the blink of an eye causes the tears to fall to my cheeks.

So, I thank you for the tears; I thank you for your generosity. I have always maintained that the sf/fantasy community operates a lot like a family. It might be a sometimes dysfunctional and controversial family at times, but it is a field notorious for paying it forward to the younger generation. Well, you guys have paid it forward this month to give me sight, in a field I like to think is full of vision for the future, and I can’t show my appreciation enough. Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart.

(9) LAW LAW LAND. A new legal specialty: “An Accident On The Moon, Young Lawyers To The Rescue”.

…Boggs and her two teammates are the North American finalists for this year’s competition, and next week they’ll go up against teams from South Africa, Greece and India for the big prize.

Each team argues both sides of a case set in the future, in space. This year’s case is, in the broadest terms, about a traffic accident on the moon….

Titan believes that Perovsk’s mining operation is releasing pollution and contaminating experiments, so they send a rover to investigate.

“They collide,” says Boggs. “Now everyone’s upset.”

Perovsk sues Titan over the damaged equipment in the International Court of Justice. Titan accuses Perovsk of breaking the law by polluting the moon. It’s unclear who should pay for what, and why. Rovers don’t carry insurance, and there’s a larger question about who has the right to use, or pollute, the moon in the first place.

Boggs says the case exemplifies one of her favorite things about space law: it’s ambiguous.

“It’s sort of hard not to say anything controversial in space law because everyone has a different opinion about what space law should do,” she explains. Space law is largely based on two treaties, the Outer Space Treaty and the moon Agreement, plus more general international law applied to space. But there’s tension within the treaties about what space should be used for.

(10) IT’S GREAT TO BE A GENIUS, OF COURSE. Brian Niemeier, in “The Convergence of Science Fiction”, joined a YouTuber to share his unique insight into sff history.

YouTuber Max Kolbe recently had me on his show to explain how the SJW convergence of tradpub science fiction happened. Max is particularly interested in the sudden shift from stories that took the Christian worldview for granted to overtly atheistic, anti-religious works. We discussed how John W. Campbell ended the reign of the pulps and how the Futurians fomented a Marxist revolution in SF publishing.

The Futurians? So…. The SJW Convergence happened…before World War 2? Before Heinlein published his first story? Before the invention of the paperback? Not just before TOR books was started, but before Tom Doherty enrolled in kindergarten? Talk about reductio ad absurdum….

(11) IN VINO SFF. Paste says “Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary Commemorative Wine Will Be a Thing”.

We’re used to something like a coin, a keychain or at the very least toilet paper as commemorative items—but Square Enix, along with The Wine House in Los Angeles, are taking the more classy route. The two wines offered will be limited edition, one being “a 2016 Château des Bois red wine with hints of strawberry” called “Ifrit Rouge,” named after the classic fire summon from Final Fantasy. Along with Ifrit Rogue will come its counterpart, “Shiva Blanc” (after an ice summon), “a well-balanced 2015 Château des Bois white wine.”

Both bottles will be adorned with a 30th Anniversary logo, and will be packaged in boxes featuring art of the summons the drinks are named after. Of course, you have to be of the legal drinking age of 21 to order these online, with Ifrit Rogue available online here, and Shiva Blanc here. According to The Wine House’s website, these will ship in the beginning of this November to arrive by the end of that month

(12) CLASSICAL AND NEOCLASSICAL TREK. Alex Zalben watches a succession of Star Trek series pilots/first episodes and tweets his judgments. This pair will get you into the thread.

(13) RECALL BOOK WE WILL. If this Saudi artist is never heard from again, you’ll know why:

A social studies textbook in Saudi Arabia was recalled for including a photo depicting a Star Wars character next to a king.

The black and white photo, by Saudi artist Abdullah Al Shehri, features the small, green Jedi Yoda seated next to King Faisal as he signed the United Nations Charter in San Francisco in 1945.

…Shehri, a 26-year-old artist who goes by the nickname Shaweesh, created the image as part of a series that inserts pop culture characters into historical photos and learned it had turned up in a textbook through a text from his mother.

“I am the one who designed it, but I am not the one who put it in the book,” he told the New York Times.

Shehri said he decided to insert Yoda into the photo because he reminded him of King Faisal and is the same color as the Saudi flag.

“He was wise and was always strong in his speeches,” he said. “So I found that Yoda was the closest character to the king. And also Yoda and his light saber — it’s all green.”

Sure, absolutely, I don’t doubt it for a moment.

(14) THE WAY THE FUTURE WASN’T. Noah Smith in “What We Didn’t Get” in his blog Noahpinion compares the successful predictions of the cyberpunk era to the failures of 1950s sf writers to adequately foresee the future and concludes that the reason Silver Age writers didn’t adequately predict the future was that “we ran out of theoretical physics, and we ran out of energy.”

If you watch Star Trek or Star Wars, or read any of the innumerable space operas of the mid-20th century, they all depend on a bunch of fancy physics. Faster-than-light travel, artificial gravity, force fields of various kinds. In 1960, that sort of prediction might have made sense. Humanity had just experienced one of the most amazing sequences of physics advancements ever. In the space of a few short decades, humankind discovered relativity and quantum mechanics, invented the nuclear bomb and nuclear power, and created the x-ray, the laser, superconductors, radar and the space program. The early 20th century was really a physics bonanza, driven in large part by advances in fundamental theory. And in the 1950s and 1960s, those advances still seemed to be going strong, with the development of quantum field theories. Then it all came to a halt. After the Standard Model was completed in the 1970s, there were no big breakthroughs in fundamental physics.

(15) THE KID WHO NEVER STOPS INVENTING. Well, that kind of negativity won’t fly with Molly!

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Cat Eldridge, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]

97 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/23/17 Appertained Horror

  1. 2) I SCREAM – If I were to eat ice cream, it wouldn’t be banana, but I really want a tub of this in my freezer. It would make me happy every time I opened the door.

    8) SFF MADE IT HAPPEN – Oh, that whole item is just lovely. I’m so glad she’ll be able to have the surgery.

    10) OGH, thank you for reading far and wide so I don’t have to (in order to shake my head in wonder).

    Reading: I raced through the first half of Planetfall (oh, so good) and then it all slowed to a crawl. I have been stuck with 32 pages to go since Tuesday and I just can’t. If I could read the way I watch old horror movies (hands over my eyes whenever the tension becomes unbearable or a jump scare is coming), I could probably get over this latest painful scene and read to the end, because I love the writing and the main character so much, but that’s not really possible without a reader. Even reading nearly a thousand pages of L. M. Montgomery short stories hasn’t been enough.

    While I wait for Provenance, I’m reading Central Station.

  2. @10: teh stoopid (made-up facts) just piles higher and deeper, doesn’t it….

    @14 is interesting like SF: good bits and flailing. In particular he doesn’t seem to know that cyberpunk’s man-machine interfaces have been ~concluded to be as improbable as pocket reactors due to differences in data rate and storage (i.e., try it only if you want brain fricasee); the links I’ve sent on various prosthetics are a very different class.

    @Walsh: ISTM that “editor” is a soft concept; I suspect one could come up with 50 editorial people, but nowhere near 50 people of authority (i.e., who can say buy/don’t-buy this book, or even speak directly/convincingly to such deciders).

  3. 11) Is it Ifrit Rouge or Ifrit Rogue? (Autocorrect was really unhappy with that first word.)

  4. Lenore Jones / jonesnori on September 23, 2017 at 8:56 pm said:
    I’d bet it’s “rouge”, as it’s red wine. (It gets misspelled a lot.)

  5. 10) So now it’s not just communists under the bed, but atheists, too.

    I also really hate how the pulp revolution offshoot of the rabid puppies co-opt long dead pulp authors into their movement.

  6. Cora: So now it’s not just communists under the bed, but atheists, too.

    Hell, that’s nothing. Some idiot over on Twitter has now retconned the false narrative of “a cabal of SJWs rigging the Hugo Awards” into “a bunch of old white men who demanded POC’s kiss ass to win Hugo’s.”

  7. JJ on September 23, 2017 at 9:53 pm said:
    I don’t know who that idjit is, but they’re clearly a puppy-believer with no clue how the Hugos work.

  8. (9) So many questions run through my mind. For instance, would law firms move all their new lawyers to offices on, say, Venus to extend their potential billable hours? Does service by drone count? What’s the best way to get kicked out of space jury duty?

    Spent the day buzzing on super potent coffee and finishing up my Hawaiicon blogging and writing hula filks. It’s always sad when vacations end, but on the other hand, it’s nice to be back on my comfy couch with my social justice credential happily shedding beside me.

  9. @JJ

    Hell, that’s nothing. Some idiot over on Twitter has now retconned the false narrative of “a cabal of SJWs rigging the Hugo Awards” into “a bunch of old white men who demanded POC’s kiss ass to win Hugo’s.”

    Puppy narrative is getting crazier by the minute.

    @Charon
    Love the Hawaiicon reports and photos.

  10. oh my. We are like thiiiiis close to the first episode of Star Trek: Discovery.

    On the one hand, I’ve developed zero expectations (and thoroughly avoided most of the hype, except for some annoying mentions of “This is going to be Star Trek inspired by Game of Thrones!”, ummm say what now?).

    On the other hand, I think if there’s one thing I can’t possibly not try, it’s a new Trek series. Maybe because Trek has been a multiple-series show since I was a kid; it’s supposed to have spinoffs. Maybe just because I miss the format so much.

    sigh. I am not going to be heartbroken over this one. But if it turns out to be any good, that would be kind of awesome?

  11. (1) I think that breakdown might be insufficently nuanced. Eg, one common thing I’ve found many of the better stories in MilSF focus on, where the story is written by veterans of war, is the alienation from civil society, and such stories do not fit neatly into Hullender’s structure.

    (10) So John W Campbell is too much of a SJW for some puppies now?!?

    (14) And the little fact that the cyberpunk era authors were mainly working near-future, and taking full advantage of Gibson’s quip “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed”, has nothing to do with it?

    No, it’s all the fault of physics being unsufficently pliable to human ingenuity.

  12. 10: It is bad history. Yes, Campbell started editorial duties at Astounding in 1937, but it wasn’t until 1939 that the magazine’s contents actually reflected his own selections.

    And its interesting to see Heinlein go from saint to atheist.

    Futurians were founded in 1938, not 1937. And Damon Knight was not an original member, though that’s minor.

    Perhaps the most interesting thing on display is how badly some “writers” read.

    Side note: Niemeier uses his Dragon Award win and nominations, and his puppy-derived not-a-Hugo Campbell nom in exactly the manner predicted – to present himself as a successful author in the field with the authority to speak on this subject; his distortion of the history of the genre will be accepted as holy write by many.

  13. 10) Wow, the SJWs have been oppressing SF for longer than I ever imagined. Campbell is a villain, now?!

  14. When exactly is the “once” when science fiction was supposedly this “once-dominant” genre? Is that before or after “it is a proud and lonely thing to be a fan”?

    This feels like a TVTropes entry, with the entire past as a theme park, events and characters casually overlapping between the New Deal era, the first white settlers in Massachusetts, and classical Greece.

  15. @Vicki Rosenweig:

    This feels like a TVTropes entry, with the entire past as a theme park, events and characters casually overlapping between the New Deal era, the first white settlers in Massachusetts, and classical Greece.

    Or like the view of the past from the year 3000 in Futurama – Einstein says Hammurabi, “Let’s disco-dance!”

  16. (10) So John W Campbell is too much of a SJW for some puppies now?!?

    The problem the Pups have always had is that their version of science fiction history has never matched reality. When they would talk about how the evil secret cabal had ruined science fiction in the last ten years, people would point out that the style of science fiction they were complaining about predated that. So they would readjust to 20 years, then 30, 40, and so on. When it turned out that the history of modern science fiction was entirely against them, they began saying nothing past the “pulps” was unpolluted. When it becomes clear that even going back to the pre-Campbell era doesn’t purge science fiction of the “taint” that offends them, they will readjust again.

  17. @aaron “Since the Pulps” is a long long time for Science Fiction to have been tainted and failing.

  18. 10: Max Kolbe: “…you can see following “mutation or death” [Futurian screed, 1937] …the ideological atheists have a way of worming themselves in and pushing out anyone who won’t be atheist with them” (at about 38:03)

    Who was pushed out of the first Worldcon? Moskowitz, right? David Kyle printed up those right wing screeds and tried to hand them out to everyone walking in the door, right? Isaac Asimov took everyone to a baseball game to demonstrate the benefits of a capitalistic society, right?

    (From the unpublished True History of Science Fiction Fandom Made Up This Minute)

    Brian Niemeier “What really blew the lid off of science fiction was, recently, we had a concerted revelations of (unintelligible) sad puppies proving the Hugos were a popularity contest where a small ingrained click was just (unintelligible) patting themselves on the back, giving participation medals to each other…” (about 40:00)

    (Answering the question “what are the sad puppies all about?”

    When one chooses a metaphorical device to beat one’s ideological opponents about the head and shoulders, I think a wet noodle is more effective than made up history.

  19. @Paul Weimer: before the right wing attack on Campbell, we experienced left wing attacks on his racism and antisemitism (maybe even some misogyny in there, although I think is puritanism outweighs that…)

    Apparently the guy was good for nothing. Somewhere off in an alternate timeline, he ushered in an era of atheist, racist, puritanical, materialistic hard science science fiction, the negative effects of which we’re just beginning to manage to work out of.

  20. @ Aaron

    So, do you think someone should tell them about Mary Shelly? Or that H.G. Wells was a member of the Fabian Society (for a while) and believed in world government? Surely that means the SJWs have been in charge all along!

  21. @Karl-Johan Norén

    (1) I think that breakdown might be insufficently nuanced. Eg, one common thing I’ve found many of the better stories in MilSF focus on, where the story is written by veterans of war, is the alienation from civil society, and such stories do not fit neatly into Hullender’s structure.

    I wasn’t trying to analyze military SF as a whole, though. I was merely looking for patterns within that one anthology.

    Seven of the 15 stories at least have elements of what you’re talking about, and for two of them (one recommended and one recommended against) it’s central to the story.

  22. (3)

    The recent solar eclipse transfixed the world. People in the path of totality marveled at the corona and how the air temperature dropped briefly and, in some parts of the country, the cicadas began to sing as if it were night.

    My inner pedant and lifelong Southern girl feels forced to point out that cicadas don’t sing at night. The author is actually trying to refer to KATYDIDS, which are an entirely different critter.

    /pedant

  23. So, do you think someone should tell them about Mary Shelly? Or that H.G. Wells was a member of the Fabian Society (for a while) and believed in world government? Surely that means the SJWs have been in charge all along!

    Maybe if we point out that science fiction has always been full of what they call “SJW ideas”, they will leave the genre and go have their self-congratulating masturbatory sessions elsewhere.

  24. (10) The pattern I see a lot at the moment among what I’ll call “alt-writers” in general is that they’re desperate to argue that it’s not the fault of their bad writing that no one reads their books; it’s all caused by a conspiracy among “SJWs” and traditional publishing. All of their revisionist history is bent towards supporting that idea.

    What they love about the pulp era is that badly written stories with cool (or at least amusing) ideas could easily get published. Independent publishing has brought that back in spades. But, also like the pulp era, the people writing the stuff get paid very little for it.

    Someone on Reddit the other day had asked about finding new series to read, and someone joked that maybe he should join Kindle Unlimited, saying something to the effect of “there are lots of series there that are just interesting enough that you can overlook the bad writing and keep on reading to find out what happens next.” That’s pulp, to a T, and that’s what alt-writers (the better ones) actually produce.

    The biggest difference is that the pulp writers knew what they were. The alt-writers labor under the delusion that they’re writing great literature.

  25. @Aaron that would be the optimistic scenario. The pessimistic one is that they go all in on fantasy and one ends up arguing them all the way back to classical mythology and beyond… although given the very vague grasp of historical periods that bunch display, that might not take too long ?

  26. @Contrarius I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t know that distinction until Nnedi Okorafor tweeted about it a while back. My family in SE Texas always called them cicadas or locusts.

  27. @redpanda —

    Nonono, do NOT tweak the pedant’s tail. 😉

    My family in SE Texas always called them cicadas or locusts.

    cicada:
    http://songsofinsects.com/wp-content/uploads/insect_musicians_tibi-prui_WH_WHITE.jpg

    locust:
    https://images.vice.com/motherboard/content-images/article/30023/1453937091285546.jpg?crop=1xw:0.844574780058651xh;center,center&resize=1050:*

    katydid:
    http://www.pwconserve.org/graphics/wildlife/insects/commontruekatydid_4997.jpg

    Cicadas and locusts are active during the day; katydids are active at night.

    /pedant again

  28. The Puppies remember an entirely alternate history of fandom, which really, should be no surprise to any of us. And yet, one continues to hope that facts will have some impact.

  29. How can science fiction (the broad thing we point to when saying it) be anything BUT progressive?

    The moment you look at contemporary ideas, institutions, technologies, whatever, and decide to speculate…

  30. Greg,
    That’s a sick burn. But an accurate one to someone who gave up on giving puppy works a chance during the first year.

  31. Contrarius, where I was, I think it was confused tree frogs in chorus… (There were not audible birds, so I didn’t hear birds stop singing.)

  32. How can science fiction (the broad thing we point to when saying it) be anything BUT progressive?

    The moment you look at contemporary ideas, institutions, technologies, whatever, and decide to speculate…

    Well, for one thing, there’s all the tropes about mad scientists and inventions gone terribly wrong, which tend to indicate that science and technology are not without their perils, or at least can be used to bad ends. I can think of some dystopias that portray technologically advanced societies as a nightmare and the hero has to escape into a pastoral fantasy (like in Fahrenheit 451, We, 1984). Or think about all the Man vs. Robot/Alien/Monster stuff in which Man most often is shown to win, because despite whatever power the Robot/Alien/Monster has, they don’t have that Earthling creativity or passion or je ne sais quoi.

    For another, if you look at the presentation of a reaction to novelty (such as alien contact or new technology), a lot of the time what the story does is demonstrate that those new things can be made to fit into the pre-existing social structure. In the end the novel thing must cease to threaten the general order, whether that’s because Our Hero has defeated the enemy, found common ground and made peace, discovered a cure, escaped the evil city etc. etc.

    So basically, stories that idealize the past or agrarian/”natural” living while demonizing technology, stories where the goal is to “save the day” (as in to preserve the status quo of the day), stories where science and technology hurt more than they help–these all have a conservative bent, I’d say.

    That said, I definitely would agree that speculative fiction is always and has always been political in some way, whether that’s covert or overt, intentional or not. Verne’s work was political, Wells was political, if you pay attention to the historical contexts in which they were writing. But some people choose to read without knowing the context and just see an adventure story.

  33. Considering the preponderance of Bradbury here at the File, i think this quote appropriate:
    “That’s all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different.” Ray Bradbury (in his short story “No News, or What Killed the Dog?” from Quicker Than the Eye)

    Wanting to make things different is the very antithesis of conservatism. I submit that unless it’s exploring various new and interesting ways of killing off ‘threats’, Puppy-types are completely uninterested in the future unless it leads back to an idealized past.

    “Change is the essential process of all existence.”
    (a Truth straight out of science fiction. imagine that!)

  34. @redpandafraction —

    Cocktail party trivia that I discovered while looking up those pics:

    The only North American species of locust is believed to have gone extinct in the late 1800s, so that North America and Antarctica are now the only continents without locusts. But just to thicken the plot, the “swarming” form of each locust species can be so different from its normal “solitary” form that nobody knows for sure whether the NA locusts are actually extinct or just hiding until the next time conditions are optimal for another swarming event.

    Cue Twilight Zone music….

    /cocktail pedant

  35. @Cassy —

    Contrarius, where I was, I think it was confused tree frogs in chorus… (There were not audible birds, so I didn’t hear birds stop singing.)

    Here in cicada country, I didn’t notice much of a change. I think totality didn’t last long enough to really wake up the night critters.

    Sort of related in terms of temperatures, though — a couple of weeks ago we had a very cool spell. It was interesting in the mornings to be able to hear the exact temp at which the cicadas woke up and started buzzing. 😉

  36. The three tutelary deities of science fiction (Shelley, Verne and Wells) were all progressives in their various ways, so this element has been present in the genre from the beginning. Not, of course, that it was universal – it was clearly not so in the Campbell era – but it was never absent.

    I’m doubtful, though, of the idea that science fiction of its nature must be progressive. ‘Progressive’ as a political term doesn’t just mean ‘in favour of radical change’, but implies a specific view – or at least range of views – about how that change should go. Ayn Rand, for instance, favoured radical change, but would not normally be called progressive. So while (the core kind of) science fiction of its nature looks to the future, that doesn’t commit it to any specific political approach.

  37. ‘Hark to the locusts in their shrill armadas’.
    ‘Locusts aren’t locusts. Locusts are cicadas.’

    (Ogden Nash.)

    Bob Dylan, on the other hand, cheerfully called them locusts.

  38. (10) Why don’t they just be honest and say that they only want right-wing Catholic science fiction?

  39. @Andrew —

    Bob Dylan, on the other hand, cheerfully called them locusts.

    I did too, before I grew up to be a pedant. 😉

  40. Cicadas are giant leafhoppers. (I spent four years in west Texas. Some of the local cicada species were big enough to bruise you if they flew into you.)

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