Mary Dell:
After all, I don't think you can find a more pessimistic tale than The Time Machine, (which, incidentally, features the heat-death of the sun along with the whole evolution story), and that's pretty much the rock on which we've built our church.
"Nightfall." If The Time Machine is part of SF's birth trauma, "Nightfall" ought to be considered part of its growing pains. It's an incredibly downbeat message (civilization won't just end, it'll end over and over again), but it's also a strong, well-plotted, and -- dare I say it -- beautiful story.
Man. It still sticks with me.
and I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer...
paperback writer!
David: The thread was in the Absolute Write forums. It really got interesting a few posts down, when one of the Andromeda Spaceways guys showed up to say that this was why they started their magazine.
Yesterday, on some random bulletin board, I was reading a thread in which several people stated that they didn't read SF magazines any more because so many of today's stories are just too hard to read. Chock full of literary depth and subtle nuances, but without a scrutable plot or sentences you could swallow in one gulp.
I personally like a lot of those lovely enigmatic stories, as long as they say something, but I got the point. Reading F&SF and Strange Horizons and SCIFI.com, it does seem sometimes like all of Delany's proteges have ganged up on all of Asimov's and Heinlein's proteges and beat them to death with flowers.
Then, today at lunch, I read John McDaid's "Keyboard Practice, consisting of an Aria with diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with two manuals" (F&SF, January 2005) on my Treo. It took about an hour. I felt numb afterwards. It's a beautiful story. It is, in fact, too f***ing beautiful. It reads like an Anne Rice vampire: gorgeous, melancholy, and magnificently groping for purpose without ever quite reaching any. It's also really bloody long, and has sentences in it like "Not having any schematic for such a tale, I seek refuge in a broad alluvial fan of context, in which the flickering possibility of the Other World can meander."
It'll absolutely get nominated for the Nebula. And any teenager, or any fan of adventure stories, or anyone who's just in a hurry, is going to wonder why they're reading F&SF when they could be playing something with more plot on their Gameboy. Me, I was impressed by it, but I'm still totally unsure whether I enjoyed it. I might have. I honestly don't know.
Just now I read that Berman essay, and a few more things clicked into place. Berman casts the conflict as nostalgia vs. innovation, and when I look at short SF I see echoes of the same conflict as "pompous vs. fun." Too many writers are trying to be impressive. Nothing inherently wrong with that, except when you lose all of the readers who aren't at your level and who just want to be entertained. When that happens too often, the magazines lose the readers too.
I'm not trying to be a doomsayer here. I do read F&SF semi-loyally, because for every "Aria with diverse Variations" or wistful story about a painter haunted by his artistic vision, it's generally got a "Sergeant Chip" in it too. Diversity is a good thing. At least, it is if you want to be a diverse reader. But not everybody does; and those who don't ought not be criticized for it.
All of which, I think, is an annoyingly long-winded way of applauding Patrick for "channeling his inner 15-year-old," and saying that if this anthology is full of fun stories with cool stuff that happens, then I'll not only be buying it, I'll be harassing all my friends to buy it too. Especially those with no patience for the magazines any more.
FWIW, "Sergeant Chip" was my favorite story from last year. Great choice there. (And a great idea for an anthology, too.)
Xopher:
And, TomB, it explains exactly why CNN won't run it.
Yeesh. No. You're all whittling the world down until it's chip-shaped and fits on your shoulder.
There's a much simpler explanation. It shows children blowing up. Never mind whether you think there ought to be more children blowing up on TV to heighten awareness. Television networks have to consider whether several million parents are going to be more likely to reflect deeply on the geopolitical ramifications of land mines, or scream incoherently at them on the phone, in letters, and in e-mail for several weeks because their brains stopped at children blowing up.
If I was a television executive and wanted to keep my job, I'd probably make the same decision. It doesn't really matter what the commercial's about. Point to one other US commercial that's ever graphically depicted dead or dying children, and I'll begin to consider your conspiracy-of-values theory. Even the freaky The Truth commercials don't actually show kids dying.
Meanwhile, it seems to me that the commercial is succeeding. I just saw it on tonight's RocketBoom, a pretty good buoy on the ocean of buzz. So the message is going out. It's probably getting out to more people because it's not on CNN. Mission accomplished, and cheaper, too.
Because this is the real intent of the advertisers, I suspect. Not to get the ad shown -- if they're smart they'll have figured out that exploding kids wouldn't make it onto TV. Really. Wax indignant all you like, but most of us aren't the archetypal soccer moms upon whom CNN relies.
But to get the ad talked about? To get people hearing about it on talk radio, or in their favorite blogs, and make them want to watch it on the gazillion Web sites it's mirrored on? That they can do.
This road's already been paved by Burger King and Budweiser. Hooray for memetic engineering, and I wish them well. Heck, they might even get people to start talking about land mines as well as the commercial. Stranger things have happened.
All this indicates to me is that people are researching the wrong stuff. I typed in "cat vacuum" and found nothing at all related to writing or procrastination. Just a bunch of papers about vacuums and cats.
(Although hit number eight, "Generating Schrodinger Cat-like states by means of conditional measurements on a beam-splitter," did keep me entertained for a brief while.)
I finally caught this last night. Read the transcript, then watched the stream on iFilm.
What strikes me most is the disconnect between his words and his expression. In the transcript, he comes off angry and fiery. On the screen, he looks tired and sounds more depressed than angry. He struck me as a man who knew he was fighting a pointless battle, but wanted to make a good showing for form's sake.
Carlson had one valid point. Stewart does show a lot of favoritism to his liberal guests. He's way too easy on them, while being appropriately tough on everyone else. His answer -- "We're a comedy show, you guys aren't" -- rings hollow when he's clearly doing the job Crossfire should be doin some of the time. If he'd just be more consistent about it, I think he'd have a lot more credibility when he slams the serious people.
Have Fun,
- Steve Eley
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| 2005 | 8 |
| 2004 | 2 |
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