The move to New Hampshire (from Florida) is finished.
Now all that remains is to sort everything out and partially unpack; I’ll be moving again in 6 months or so, once my wife and I purchase a new home.
I like having money in the bank during a buyer’s market…
Once the sorting out is all sorted out, I’ll be posting more regularly.
One of the many ways the world might end is at the hands of extraterrestrial policemen. One of my favorite all time SF movies – The Day the Earth Stood Still – brought that message home in thrilling black and white. Now they’re doing a remake and have apparently cast Keanu Reeves and John Cleese! for various parts. A comedy?
A US satellite is decaying in orbit and will might hit the Earth within a couple of days. From the NY Times/AP - “The satellite, which no longer can be controlled, could contain hazardous materials, and it is unknown where on the planet it might come down…” “…officials spoke on condition of anonymity…”
Foxnews reports that a blob is taking over the sewers of a city in Maine. Not that I watch Fox mind you. My wife pointed it out to me. Really.
Kow Yokoyama, a Japanese designer and model maker, created a series of powered-armor fighting suit models back in the early 80s. Entitled SF3D, the back story involves the return of space colonists to an Earth recovering from nuclear war and features the New German forces versus the Australian forces. Fred, over at Texas Best Grok, brought my attention to an illustrated article that had appeared in Galaxy magazine in 1968 and featured powered armor fighting suits. The resemblance between Kow’s imaginings and some of the ‘68 visions is remarkable.
The model kits, originally produced by Nitto of Japan, are once again being produced under the new name of Ma.k. 25. If you’re interested in more, pay a visit to the (un)official site here.
Paul Collins pointed out that I have left people with the erroneous impression that it is his company FORD STREET PUBLISHING that will be producing Jack Dann’s anthology containing the new Chandler story.
The anthology – Dreaming Again (a follow-up to Dreaming Down-Under, a collection of stories by Australian authors) will in fact be published by HarperCollins Australia.
***
Mr. Collins also informs me that Ford Street’s titles can be purchased in the US. All you need is a paypal account to obtain award winning fiction from Down Under. Despite the economy, Australia is still accepting US dollars…
of armageddon news.
After cometary impacts, biological disasters are among the most common causes given for the fall of mankind.
Our ability to create life is reportedly one step closer according to an article in the NY Times here.
This is my favorite part:
“But there are concerns that synthetic biology could be used to make pathogens, or that errors by well-intended scientists could produce organisms that run amok.”
That’s the well-intended scientists. They never even mentioned the evil ones.
I am VERY happy to be able to announce that a new A. Bertram Chandler story will be published in an upcoming anthology being edited by Jack Dann.
Paul Collins, Australian author and publisher, obtained the rights to a Grimes and Kitty Kelly story back in the early 80s (Grimes was Chandler’s most popular character; Kitty Kelly interviewed Grimes on numerous occassions about his various adventures. All of the Grimes-Kelly stories except for this one were collected in the SFBC omnibus edition) and had hoped to do something with it, but those opportunities never eventuated.
I’ll not spoil Paul’s afterword (get the anthology) about how the story eventually got into Jack Dann’s hands, but I can say that Chandler fans and Chandler websites – including my own Rimworlds site and David Kelleher’s Chandler site – were at least partially responsible.
Once publication information becomes available, I’ll post it here and will also hopefully be adding ordering information to the website.
I’ve got another blog on an entirely different subject which has been getting decent and growing traffic. This one, although still new, is dead as a doornail. So, I started doing a little research and found some good, if obvious, advice.
One bit of obviousness is “post every day, two or three times a day and never, ever stop”. Well, lord knows I’ve got enough to say about everything, so that shouldn’t be too big a problem. I’m starting that now.
Another bit was ‘pick a subject you know and like’. Again, obvious, but true nonetheless. Well, SF is something I know and like. But there’s 50 gazillion SF oriented blogs, many of them with built-in name recognition, so I need to be a little more focused than the entirety of an as yet undefined genre.
In thinking about what ‘kind’ of science fiction I enjoy the most (on a visual scale the differences between enjoy the most and and simply enjoy is measured in nanometers), I’d have to come down on the side of dystopian futures. You know, the world is falling apart, or has fallen apart, either from ecological disaster, alien invasion, runaway technology, disease, famine, pestilence or war. Or, the survivors are barely eeking out a living in the ruins or hiding in the walls of a conquering alien species.
Just off the top of my head, examples of this you may recognize: The Sheep Look Up by Brunner, Armageddon 2419 by Nowlan, Farnham’s Freehold by Heinlein, Alas, Babylon by Frank, The Postman by Brin, etc., etc. Not to mention numerous short stories that have mostly been passed over for decades (Tumithak of the Corridors by Tanner, for one).
So I like apocolyptic, armageddon-inspired, dystopian science fiction. I can’t be the only one judging by the number of successful novels and movies that have shared these themes.
I’ll be sharing more thoughts on this subject. At least three times a day…
I set up a google news report for science fiction. Usually it just contains articles from local newspapers about the latest hometown boy making it big – he just self-published his first SF novel! And the local library has a copy!
Today was a little different. Three different articles – here, here and here trashing science fiction as old hat, a dead genre, what was all that noise about anyway?
Even Cory Doctorow chimes in (although not in a negative way) with a reminder of just how old SF is and how far back into pre-history we have to dig in order to find something relevant for todays press. In this case, Silverberg’s rehashing of the Cleve Cartmill/John Campbell/FBI/Philadelphia experiment conspiracy. Apparently the only way to generate interest in science fiction these days is to obtain secret FBI documents by way of a FOIA request concerning a bunch of dead but famous science fiction authors.
Bruce Sterling and William Gibson chime in offering their rebuttals to the contention that the modern world has left science fiction behind; regional newspaper reporters extol the prognosticative misses of some of our best and brightest and seem to be arguing that since science fiction can’t accurately predict the future, we should dismiss it if not eliminate the genre entirely.
Point 1: SF is not about accurately predicting the future. Its about entertainment.
Point 2: The people predicting SF’s demise and crowing over its inaccuracies aren’t reading (or remembering) the right stories.
I think that science fiction has been wonderfully accurate over the years, you just need to be looking in the right place. Take Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons as a case in point.
Stupid people reproduce faster than smart people. Marketing to and influencing stupid people is easier and less expensive than doing the same with the intelligentsia. A profitable world economy requires population growth…
Apply Darwinian principles to these conditions and you’ll quickly arrive at Kornbluth’s dystopian future, one that horribly reflects and accurately portrays our own.
Or what about the presentation of a rabidly corporate world presented by Pohl and Kornbluth in The Space Merchants?
Advertising and marketing drives everything. The corporation is the state and the state is the corporation. School children are indoctrinated during their most vulnerable years through exposure to advertising disguised as education. Companies operate their own schools, hospitals, housing programs, welfare and even have their own armies. (Blackwater anyone?)
If you want more, pick up John Brunner’s dystopian trilogy The Sheep Look Up, Stand on Zanzibar and The Jagged Orbit. Global warming, overpopulation, corporate greed, ecological nightmares of every kind, uncontrollable and drug resistant diseases…
Or even Del Rey’s The Eleventh Commandment that portrayed a world controlled by fundamentalist religions and collapsing under the burden of over-population.
Science Fiction WAS wonderfully accurate about the future we’re currently living in. You can easily find more such by picking up just about any 50s or 60s era dystopian story you care to mention. The problem isn’t SF’s failure to predict accurately, its reality’s failure to have lived up to the utopian ideals presented by the other half of the genre.
We’re not living on the Moon, flying around in jet packs or enjoying free energy because we gave up on the ideal of striving for utopia and settled for selling Soylent Green to Morons instead…
