Gene Wolfe, death of a master
Gene Wolfe, Acclaimed Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 87. Wolfe’s prose could be challenging to read. I actually read The Book of the New Sun trilogy twice because of some elements of impenetrability in the style, though there’s a reason Wolfe was acclaimed. In general, I’m not a fan of “science fantasy” or the “dying […]
Complementarity in the 21st century
The late Gordon R. Dickson wrote a series of books in a (mostly) future history termed The Childe Cycle. I’ve read a substantial number of the books in this series, and it’s rather uneven. On the whole, I would say that the earlier books are better than the later works. Dickson died before he could […]
Harlan Ellison, R.I.P.
Harlan Ellison has died. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is one of the most disturbing things I have ever read. Over 20 years after reading I still remember how appalled I felt as I finished the last sentence. Ellison was a powerful writer. Some of his innovations have become cliche (e.g., Ellison […]
On the passing of Ursula K Le Guin
About four months ago Jerry Pournelle died. He and Ursula K Le Guin did not get on, in part because of their political differences. And despite my differences with both, I read them with appreciation. Well, Le Guin passed away today. A science fiction and fantasy great she was. I appreciate especially her defenses of […]
Jerry Pournelle, 1933-2017
A few years ago I stumbled upon Fred Pohl’s weblog. Born in 1919, for a few years there before his death in 2013 Pohl was a living breathing window back to the “Golden Age” of science fiction. He knew men like Asimov and Heinlein personally. He was a witness, a participant, to history. It was […]
Tales from the Middle Cosmos
Over at Marginal Revolution Tyler Cowen positively mentioned an anthology of Chinese science fiction, Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation. I got a copy and I have to say it really is good (on reading only a few stories). #Recommended and #Seconded. It is often said, correctly, that science fiction is mostly a […]
Earthsea is Earth
Slate has a respectful take on Ursula K. Le Guin‘s oeuvre by Choire Sicha up. By way of surveying her contributions to the domain of fiction the author takes issue with those who would elevate ‘literary fiction,’ a term whose bound…
Shades of preference in storytelling
Humans seem to have a strong bias toward narratives. We like stories. This is obvious when you read sports columns. Most of the time there’s really no substantive value-add. If you want substance, just check box scores. But we want a story. So sports columnists give us a story. Usually something mildly counter-intuitive, general platitudes […]
Terra Nova half-browns
There’s a lot buzz on the internet for a new show called Terra Nova. Didn’t we already do this? It was called Earth 2 (Steven Spielberg also had an indirect role in that show). I’m not going to watch it. I don’t have a television, and my online television watching is very circumscribed. But I […]
The force was with him!
In my post below where I focused on patent law it was noted that even more obviously blatant abuses of the spirit of intellectual property occur in copyright. So I was interested to see that George Lucas has lost a law suit in the United Kingdom in rel…
A world almost built
By now you’ve probably seen headlines such as A Habitable Exoplanet — for Real This Time. Phil Plait has a more sober assessment. Still, he concludes:
But perhaps the most interesting and exciting aspect of all this is what it implies. The Milky Way galaxy is composed of about 200 billion stars, and is 100,000 light […]
Nazis in space
Really interesting trailer for a movie which is premised on a “secret history” where a group of Nazis flee to the far side of the moon at the end of World War II, and are returning imminently in the near future from their exile.
Wired has the back story of how this group of film […]
Avatar & the death of “Star Trek aliens”
Since readers of this weblog tend toward nerdishness I’m assuming they’re following the buzz around Avatar: The Movie. I only got interested in it last night trying to figure out the references in yesterday’s South Park episode, Dances with Smurfs. Che…