Chrononautic Log

December 30, 2005

Figure 1. My happy bunny, or so they tell me.

Yeah, pretty much. Tune in next year and maybe I’ll be facing life with a little more zest.

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December 23, 2005

My appreciation of Lucius Shepard’s “A Walk in the Garden” is up, over at Mr. Schwartz’s ED SF Project.

For those of you who prefer something less wordy, my original ‘appreciation’ is here.

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December 22, 2005

I’m in the middle of some crazy-stressful Big Decisions this month (full story after the New Year, probably) and a lot of stuff has fallen by the wayside. But Rowe’s note that Ikarie will be republishing “The Voluntary State” reminds me to mention that they’ll also be republishing “The Third Party.” Which will probably be easier to translate. So start practicing your Czech!

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December 20, 2005

The judge in the Dover, PA creationism “intelligent design” case has handed the creationists’ ass to them.

We have now found that both an objective student and an objective adult member of the Dover community would perceive Defendants’ conduct to be a strong endorsement of religion pursuant to the endorsement test. Having so concluded, we find it incumbent upon the Court to further address an additional issue raised by Plaintiffs, which is whether ID is science. To be sure, our answer to this question can likely be predicted based upon the foregoing analysis. While answering this question compels us to revisit evidence that is entirely complex, if not obtuse, after a six week trial that spanned twenty-one days and included countless hours of detailed expert witness presentations, the Court is confident that no other tribunal in the United States is in a better position than are we to traipse into this controversial area. Finally, we will offer our conclusion on whether ID is science not just because it is essential to our holding that an Establishment Clause violation has occurred in this case, but also in the hope that it may prevent the obvious waste of judicial and other resources which would be occasioned by a subsequent trial involving the precise question which is before us.

. . . Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

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December 19, 2005

Mad talented writer Victoria Garcia (“Anthropology,” “Wally’s Porn,” etc.) has posted* a thoughtful and sensible essay, cleverly rooted in TESL training, on the best way — or anyway a promising way — to critique writers with relatively low skill levels.

When I was very young, I used to subscribe to the Harlan Ellison notion that the obviously untalented needed to be discouraged, and with flourish. Now, a decade and a half later, that approach has lost its appeal. I am a much kinder, less rabid sort of person. Also, I have become less convinced that I am a sacred, unique snowflake of special, unique specialness. Simply put, I do not have the capacity to be that kind of a prick anymore.

But what then, you ask. Well, you’ll have to read on. Suffice to say that being a prick is less work and probably, for many people, more fun. However, it doesn’t really help anybody, and it’s still being a prick.

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* Posted some time back, that is — hey, V, you knew I’d discover your lj eventually, didn’t you? How’d the retreat go?

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Roger Ebert, on Memoirs of a Geisha: “I know, a geisha is not technically a prostitute. Here is a useful rule: Anyone who is ‘not technically a prostitute’ is a prostitute.”

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I’m talking about Kong, of course. Various folks have weighed in at length (here’s Matt, here’s Gwenda; both of them have links to others), so there’s not much point in me saying much beyond the title of this post. Of course some of the acting could be better, of course some of the minor characters didn’t add much, of course some of the CGI had depth-of-field problems, of course some of the dinosaur fights went on too long.

But seriously, folks (by which I mean, you folks that hated it), if those things had been fixed, would that have made you like the movie? It doesn’t sound like it. And if that’s true — what were you expecting?

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December 16, 2005

Gregory Benford vs. Darrel Schweitzer.

Scott Lynch.

John Scalzi.

(Okay, maybe there’s an implied comment.)

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December 13, 2005

Setting: A cavernous, cavernous café-bar, a block off Basel’s Marktplatz, bright indirect lighting in warm colors, trendy paneling in gray marble and corrugated aluminum, lots of white paint, tables and chairs and couches evoking a campus cafeteria by way of IKEA. Extras: Assorted Basilers, ages four months to forty — it’s a bimodal distribution, with a major peak around, say, twenty, and a minor peak around, say, two.

The protagonist sits at one of the institutional tables, his back to a large radiator, his things (sportcoat, overcoat, wool cap, briefcase, steno-style Moleskine, with Charles Darwin has a Posse sticker, laptop, also with Charles Darwin has a Posse sticker, shopping bag from the Läckerli-Huus) exploding over the table and two of the chairs. He’s a little overdressed, not just for the café-bar but for, from what he’s seen so far, the European continent: blue button-down shirt, charcoal-grey slacks, black wingtips.

On the table next to the laptop is a quarter-liter of Naturblond from Unser Bier (motto: Bier von hier). It’s drinkable, but its main attraction was the convenient placement of the taps: easy to point to.

Two days: Two days of nonstop talk, in between bouts of coughing. Diagramming the Day Job on whiteboards, juggling acronyms, trading product and process horror stories. Discourses in amateur cultural studies and amateur urbanology, the small talk of expatriates everywhere. (Very few of the people the protagonist has talked to are actually Swiss, and the Germans and the French and the English all have their own opinions.)

It’s all seemed to go well, but the protagonist is a little dazed. Two days of Thai red curry, coffee, Thai green curry, coffee, coffee, beer, beer, pineapple juice, fried chicken, fried plantains, yogurt, coffee, roast lamb, coffee, beer (von hier). Two nights of fitful sleep, an hour or two of wakefulness at three or four o’clock, then the sleep of the dead till the alarm goes off at seven like an air raid, followed by bells ringing up and down the Rhine. The protagonist’s metabolic clock is still somewhere over the Atlantic. The protagonist’s brain has been trying for two days to wrap itself around Hochdeutsch and Baseldütsch, two languages he doesn’t speak. Assurances that thirty percent of the people you meet in Basel are foreigners and everyone understands English meaning nothing to the monkey brain, which says Pass through the territory of the other tribe swiftly and without detection. The protagonist has played this game before, but not in a long while, perhaps too long, and he’s not entirely sure he remembers how. He tells himself that the first few days are always the hardest.

And also that this is only the practice round. If all goes well there will be another game, in six weeks, perhaps, or perhaps a month. He can look forward to living through these first days again; playing again, for real stakes.

The protagonist doesn’t know what he thinks. It’s all a little much for the monkey brain to deal with.

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December 9, 2005

For those of you who enjoyed Cory’s “Anda’s Game,” and/or for the WoWers out there (you know who you are), the real-life (real-virtual-life?) version: a fascinating piece on gold farming from one “Paul,” a player who’s spent the time to get to know the farmers on his server.

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December 8, 2005

In the New York Times, of all places. Documented by Tom Tomorrow.

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I’m pleased to announce that All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories made the Locus Magazine 2004 Recommended Reading List. Isn’t it possible — likely, even — that science fiction’s traditional forward-looking orientation is as much a product of the forward-looking Zeitgeist in which it originated as nostalgic SF is a reaction to a Zeitgeist of millenial alienation? That science fiction used to imagine the future because society used to imagine the future, and not the other way around? I want my 20th-century schizoid art. Live veiled Amazons. And there’s ELIZABETH BEAR up there on the video screens over his head in letters two feet high. Man, I would totally become a mystery writer if it meant trenchcoats and fedoras and water pistols. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling pretty depressed about the ultimate fate of the universe lately. And damn William James and Geoffrey Sonnabend for being born half a century apart, anyway. Must. Destroy. Ivan. Tribble. I was going to move anyway. Clearly, going from the movie theatre, to Telegraph Avenue, to an Art Deco monument filled with exotic spuds of all ages, colors, shapes and sizes — following two hours of space cowboys and exploding spaceships with a comforting dip into familiar countercultural strangeness, that with the raucous but innocent carnality of Bow Wow Wow and that with the full-on, space-age, Technicolor, punk-rock superluminality of Devo — was asking to have my brain scrambled. If you weren’t there, we missed you; if you were there, I’m probably missing you already. ’nough said? In other words, as long as I’m in trouble I may as well compound it.

(Concept kinda-sorta stolen from Mr. Schwartz. I think his madness might have had method in’t, though, unlike mine.)

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Via BoingBoing, an 1863 Geographical Reader, “for the Dixie children.”

THE UNITED STATES.

1. This was once the most prosperous country in the world. Nearly a hundred years ago it belonged to England: but the English made such hard laws that the people said they would not obey them. After a long, bloody war of seven years, they gained their independence; and for many years were prosperous and happy.
2. In the mean time both English and American ships went to Africa and brought away many of those poor heathen negroes, and sold them for slaves. Some people said it was wrong and asked the King of England to stop it. He replied that “he knew it was wrong; but that slave trade brought much money into his treasury, and it should continue.” But both countries afterwards did pass laws to stop this trade. In a few years, the Northern States finding their climate too cold for the negro to be profitable,sold them to the people living farther South. Then the Northern States passed laws to forbid any person owning slaves in their borders.
3. Then the northern people began to preach, to lecture, and to write about the sin of slavery. The money for which they sold their slaves, was now partly spend in trying to persuade the Southern States to send their slaves back to Africa. And when the territories were settled they were not willing for any of them to become slaveholding. This would soon have made the North much stronger than the South; and many of the men said they would vote for a law to free all the negroes in the country. The Southern men tried to show them how unfair this would be, but still they kept on.
4. In the year 1860 the Abolitionists became strong enough to elect one of their men for President. Abraham Lincoln was a weak man, and the South believed he would allow laws to be made, which would deprive them of their rights. So the Southern States seceded, and elected Jefferson Davis for their president. This so enraged President Lincoln that he declared war, and has exhausted nearly all the strength of the nation, in a vain attempt to whip the South back into the Union. Thousands of lives have been lost, and the earth has been drenched with blood; but still Abraham is unable to conquer the “Rebels” as he calls the South. The South only asked to be let alone, and to divide the public property equally. It would have been wise in the North to have said to her Southern sisters, “If you are not content to dwell with us longer, depart in peace. We will divide the inheritance with you, and may you be a great nation.”
5. This country possesses many ships, has fine cities and towns, many railroads, steamboats, canals, manufactures, &c. The people are ingenious, and enterprising, and are noted for their tact in “driving a bargain.” They are refined, and intelligent on all subjects but that of negro slavery, on this they are mad.
6. The large lakes, the long rivers, the tall mountains, with the beautiful farms and pretty towns and villages, make this a very interesting country to travelers.

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December 7, 2005

For those of you keeping score at home, I’m still living in the apartment with the passive-aggressive hair-trigger manager lady, and doing my laundry down at the ’mat. I was going to move, but then I was maybe going to this another job, and then the job didn’t happen, and now . . . well, long story. But I’m so moving out in January, one way or another.

Garbage disposal. I busted it a couple of months ago by trying to dispose of a shot glass. (Unintentionally.) I’d have gotten it fixed, but that was about the same time as the laundry incident, and . . . So I haven’t used it, or that half of the sink, in weeks.

Some time in the last few days it just fell out of the sink.

Is that supposed to happen?

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I finally figured out what all this genre argument reminds me of.

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More Americans Falling For ‘Get Rich Slowly Over A Lifetime Of Hard Work’ Schemes. “Girouard added that steady employment which claims to offer long-term financial gain in the form of a pension plan is nothing more than an elaborate Ponzi scheme.”

Clearly they’ve been following the news about General Motors . . .

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December 6, 2005

A little while ago I started describing myself politically as a “tax-and-spend libertarian.” Now I think I need an elevator pitch for my artistic and philosophical positions. Taking the odd internet quiz only goes so far.

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December 2, 2005

In other words, as long as I’m in trouble I may as well compound it.

So, mostly I find these discussions of genre categories either amusing or dull, depending on how cleverly the people doing the discussing write. They never, ever settle a damn thing, not even the particular rhetorical points that get made during the discussion. But that’s okay. Sometimes, by side effect, something interesting comes out of the discussion anyway. There’s a point where for me the crosses over into annoying, though, and that’s the point at which someone says, as a statement of fact, that “science fiction is just a kind of fantasy.”

When you unpack that, it’s really quite a nasty rhetorical move — unintentionally nasty, maybe, but nasty nonetheless. Not only does it say the question’s settled and you should all shut up, but it says it in a deliberately belittling way. It’s an imperialistic move, an annexation of territory and a denial of self-determination. It’s hard to see what good purpose such a statement could serve. The implication that there is no distinction worth making is clearly false, given that the discussion is happening at all — whether you find the distinction worth making is one thing, but other people clearly do, because they’re making it.

It’s probably just a backlash against the generations of Analog types whining about fantasy’s infection of the science fiction section, but that doesn’t make it any more attractive.

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December 1, 2005

Any system of definitions that rolls it all into one big undifferentiated ball o’ fantasy will have to explain why there’s no point in distinguishing the worldviews of, say, “Seventy-Two Letters” and Bone Dance.

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Side note: Ben, now would be a good time for you to post a long screed on your “sources of reader pleasure” theory of genre distinctions.

Shorter Sarah Monette:

Characters and cultures (and authors) interact differently with a world that is predicated on technology from a world which is predicated on magic. . . . Science fiction is about human beings’ relationship with technology, with the machines we build. . . . Fantasy, on the other hand . . . There’s a terribly weird way . . . in which fantasy is always Marxist, because it refuses the alienation between the worker and his work caused by the advent of machines. Wizards’ power is not displaced into technology; it remains in their bodies, in their minds.

Shorter Ted Chiang:

[F]or me, a useful way to understand the difference between SF and fantasy is to consider the difference between science and magic. . . . I submit that what distinguishes magic from science — even imaginary science — is the role of consciousness. Magic has a subjective component — the intention, desire, or willpower of the practitioner — that is explicitly excluded from scientific experimentation. . . . So why would some phenomena depend on a practitioner's will or desire? Because, in fantasy, the universe distinguishes between persons and mechanisms. . . . Before industrialization, it was easier to believe that we lived in a universe that recognized persons. . . . Once conscious intention was removed from the creation of devices, inventions could spread so rapidly that you could see society change within a single lifetime.

Longer but still shorter Jeff Vandermeer and his Evil Monkey:

[Po-mo Thomas Kuhn riff about subjectivity of science] . . . [Ted is] comparing what is done in the real world with science to what is done in the fictional world with magic. Because, as I keep saying, magic doesn’t exist in the real world. So why doesn’t he compare what’s done with science in the fictional world to what's done with magic in the fictional world? . . . [H]e's mostly talking about certain forms of heroic fantasy. . . . Which leaves out surrealism, magic realism, urban fantasy, and all kinds of other things that don’t dominate the best-seller lists but that do constitute the core of the really cool cross-genre stuff being done. . . . Does science fiction really concern itself with progress? I think it assumes progress many times. It assumes it, but it doesn't engage in the implications of it. Which may be one reason I think of science fiction and fantasy as being more or less interchangeable.

Exactly the same length Elizabeth Bear:

[O]n the difference between fantasy and science fiction. I still say there isn’t one.

Bear, you win a prize: You’re the first science fiction writer I’ve heard say that, whereas fantasy writers (Moorcock, Miéville, Jeff . . .) seem to say it all the time. (I know it’s inaccurate to pigeonhole you as a science fiction writer or pigeonhole Jeff as a fantasy writer, but I hope you’ll both know what I mean.)

It’s really easy to find exceptions, shelves full, to any strict definition of the line between fantasy and SF. I’m not going to try to make one here. Instead I’m going to point you at an essay called “Mark Twain” by Gordon Atkinson, aka Real Live Preacher. (Also here.)

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Update: Oops. Fixed link to Jeff’s blog.

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