Category: Follies of the Human Condition

David Brin: read these to have sci-fi bragging rights

I’m a sucker for lists of good sci-fi. David Brin puts out a big one, with categories:

But now let’s try something much more ambitious — a bigger, broader reading compilation. This is still just a sampler – for something comprehensive, see the Science Fiction Encyclopedia or the user-friendly Worlds Without End. But any person who has read all the books and stories and authors noted here (and I admit they are heavy on “classics”) can come away with bragging rights to say: “I know something about science fiction.”

For this list I divide the novels authors and stories in my own quirky manner , according to categories…

Of the books on the list, I’ve read ~25, and I have a roughly equal number of unread ones piling up on my bookshelf.

I have to object to his recommendation to read “anything at all by Poul Anderson.” Having read three, Vault of the Ages, Twilight World, and The Winter of the World, I’m not impressed.

Sci-fi-ish links

For Sci-fi fans of all stripes:

If you like Lovecraft (and all fans of classic sci-fi should), check out Arthur Machen: Beyond the Veil: The Fiction of Arthur Machen by Michael Dirda

H.G. Wells: Tono-Bungay By H.G. WELLS reviewed by Michael Dirda

John Buchan: The Vintage Thrillers of John Buchan, by Michael Dirda

William Gibson: Zero History By WILLIAM GIBSON Reviewed by Paul Di Filippo

Meta Sci-Fi: The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown By PAUL MALMONT Reviewed by Paul Di Filippo

Missouri legislative session is off to a solid creationist start

It’s creationism season in my back yard again. The National Center for Science Education has the goods as usual:

First, your typical equal time time bill, complete with inept politicians’ definitions of scientific terms – in defective alphabetical order, no less:

House Bill 1227, introduced in the Missouri House of Representatives on January 10, 2012, would, if enacted, require “the equal treatment of science instruction regarding evolution and intelligent design,” according to the legislature’s summary of the bill. The equal treatment provision would apply to both public elementary and secondary schools and to “any introductory science course taught at any public institution of higher education” in Missouri. Continue reading “Missouri legislative session is off to a solid creationist start”

The literature of the 21st century is science fiction?

Recently I’ve been engaged in a little reading project – reading post-Hiroshima End of the World science fiction side by side with the best mainstream literature of the 1950’s. What I see is that 1950’s sci-fi at the time ignored the last 100 years of development in literature, while the mainstream literature of the time ignored the last 100 years of technological development. Very slowly, this has changed over the last 60 years, and we’ve reached the point where things are getting really exciting…

Guardian columnist Damien Walter on “Why Science Fiction is the Literature of Change: Continue reading “The literature of the 21st century is science fiction?”

John Philip Sousa: recordings will kill music

From Ars Technica, here’s composer John Phillip Sousa coming out against the Gramophone in 1906:

“From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful,” he wrote. “And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters.”

His piece concluded, “Do they not realize that if the accredited composers who have come into vogue by reason of merit and labor are refused a just reward for their efforts a condition is almost sure to arise where all incentive to further creative work is lacking and compositions will no longer flow from their pens or where they will be compelled to refrain from publishing their compositions at all and control them in manuscript? What, then, of the playing and talking machines?”