Hard News: Problems
289 Responses
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Somewhere on the internet there's Mark Harris/Robbery slash fic that someone has written, or is thinking about writing. Y'just know it.
Gah, rumbled!
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Dude, there are *limits*.
Hah. Don't forget, I've read your fanfic, Lucy.
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Hah. Don't forget, I've read your fanfic, Lucy.
Yes, my massively vanilla PG-13 hetfic will surely lead to my public humiliation one day. (Now, if you had access to my bookmark list, *then* you might have some good blackmail material.)
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None of the BSG discussions I've ever been involved in have really discussed spaceships as such. Certainly none here. More like the elements of drama that's been about, well, a collapsing society with political leaders that have lied to their people and wrapped it up in a greater good argument that regularly gets challenged and re-examined.
On a couple of pages that spent a lot of time on the League scores, focusing on BSG as a non-serious distraction from the real issues of the day seems a bit mistargeted.
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Yes, my massively vanilla PG-13 hetfic will surely lead to my public humiliation one day. (Now, if you had access to my bookmark list, *then* you might have some good blackmail material.)
I'll bribe Tui...
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Rich, I'm no satellite expert but aren't you confusing coming up with an idea - which I had always understood was original and well enough developed in this case (unless you have evidence otherwise) - and turning it into reality.
To me invent means 'actually made it work'.
Lots of people thought about people flying. Da Vinci did some drawings of some early handglider and helicopter contraptions.
The people who invented flight however were the first people to build and test fly balloons, planes, helicopters, gliders etc.
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Sure, allegory is no substitute for action, but perhaps you're confusing this space with a political organising forum, Paul.
Please. I may be crazy but I'm not dumb, as someone else once said.
But why blame spaceships? Why not blame Paris Hilton, or the All Blacks, or U2? They all distract people from Serious Discussion, after all.
Because people seem to think the spaceship stories are terribly important, because discussion of events in fictional stories has replaced discussion of events in real life.
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Publish, register or otherwise stand behind your concepts and I'm sure you'll get some credit too when the talking shiny ones take over.
I guess I just did, at least for the purposes of boring people with 'told you so" in twenty or thrirty years. I could also point to the idea as "prior art" that would negate any future attempt to patent the concept (as opposed to details of the implementation).
I only really want kudos or money for things I've actually made work.
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Because people seem to think the spaceship stories are terribly important, because discussion of events in fictional stories has replaced discussion of events in real life.
Okay, fine, I give up, sci-fi is going to cause the death of civilisation.
But seriously - replaced? I don't know what world you're living in, but it's not the one I see every day. Now that does sound like sci-fi.
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I'm going to have to join the chorus here. What's this thing about 'spaceships', Paul? As an invective, it's puerile. There is a ton of political science-fiction (Nineteen-Eighty Four, Fahrenheit 451, The Handsmaid's Tale etc. etc. etc.), of science fiction of ideas (all of Greg Egan, most of Bradbury, etc. etc. etc.), capable of reflecting on the present and inspiring change as little or as much as any other artform, but at any rate worthy of respect and due consideration even if you took the position that art needs to be those things - political, of ideas - in order to be valuable at all. Which I don't think you do.
I think you need to examine the reasons of your seemingly visceral dislike of some genres of fiction and even - gasp! - comic books. The latter gave us Maus, for Pete's sake. Beat that with a rolled up graphic novel.
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Because people seem to think the spaceship stories are terribly important, because discussion of events in fictional stories has replaced discussion of events in real life.
Now, you could take that as commentary on just about any organised religion and its scriptures...
Just sayin'.
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Okay, fine, I give up, sci-fi is going to cause the death of civilisation.
Heh, someone should totally write a book about that.
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Please. I may be crazy but I'm not dumb, as someone else once said.
Away with your frivolous popular music references!
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I wish I had not got involved with this.
Giovanni: yes, there is lots of good political Science Fiction, most of it in book form, most of it written decades ago, a lot of it written by writers who are not specialists in the genre (although 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale don't really count: they are novels of possible political futures. not Sci-Fi). The stuff that is made for television today is simply banal by comparison. And don't get me started on graphic novels.
Lucy: how many people belong to Labour now and how many belonged a few decades back? What is the average age of party members? Political engagement has largely vanished. I am not saying that Sci-Fi is destroying civilisation, but it is a part of a culture where the very people who should be involved, the educated young, are largely absent from debate.
Russell: these cats think I am some sort of square, daddy-o.
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Lucy: how many people belong to Labour now and how many belonged a few decades back? What is the average age of party members? Political engagement has largely vanished. I am not saying that Sci-Fi is destroying civilisation, but it is a part of a culture where the very people who should be involved, the educated young, are largely absent from debate.
Pretty staggering leap of causation. Lots of things are part of the culture, and I think you'd have a pretty hard time proving that reflexive pieces of fiction - as BSG would appear to be according to what is being reported to us - are a cause of disengagement and not rather part of the solution. Besides, since you brought up the Labour party - which in the days of its mass membership was a Marxist organisation - I'd have to point out that according to that tradition analysis *is* action (although hardly exhaustive of it).
Conversely, to make the correlation you are making as if it wasn't the historical decline of Marxism itself that led to the decline in political engagement, seems downright bizzarre. Hell, I thought we had been through this.
(To wit: it was Stalin's fault, not Joss Bloody Whedon's.)
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Besides, since you brought up the Labour party - which in the days of its mass membership was a Marxist organisation...
Really?
- I'd have to point out that according to that tradition analysis *is* action (although hardly exhaustive of it).
Which is one reason I am not a Marxist.
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although 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale don't really count: they are novels of possible political futures. not Sci-Fi).
So your solution to people who argue that science fiction isn't crap by providing counterexamples is to redefine science fiction so as to avoid those counterexamples? It's an interesting rhetorical device.
Why are you seeing this as a zero-sum game? Why are you assuming that a discussion on popular culture precludes political engagement? And, particularly, why are you getting annoyed about it here? I mean, the original discussion was just a chat about the political system of another country: it's about as likely to make an impact on the real world as any debate about the popular culture item of your choice.
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Weirdly, I've often thought the Battlestar episode Dirty Hands is the best public argument of the need for a labour movement I've seen in any format in recent history.
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Jack, I am do no such thing. I may be wrong but I do not think 1984 and the Handmaid's Tale are Sci-Fi and no I do not assume that discussion on popular culture precludes political engagement; but frankly I am getting pissed off with being misrepresented so I am not saying anything more here.
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the Labour party - which in the days of its mass membership was a Marxist organisation
I really don't think that's true for the NZ Labour Party. Even when it was explicitly a hard socialist party, the Marxists were a minority.
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I may be wrong but I do not think 1984 and the Handmaid's Tale are Sci-Fi
According to science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, "a handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method." (wikipedia)
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Jack, I am do no such thing. I may be wrong but I do not think 1984 and the Handmaid's Tale are Sci-Fi
To be fair, from Wikipedia (which matches my recollection on widely discussed point in sci-fi forums):
Atwood was offended at the suggestion that the novel was science fiction, insisting that it is speculative fiction instead: "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen" (Atwood to the Guardian); "Science fiction is when you have rockets and chemicals," (to New Scientist, which tagged the interview as: "Margaret Atwood explains why science is crucial to her science fiction"); and on BBC Breakfast explaining that science fiction, as opposed to what she writes, is "talking squids in outer space."
Orwell might have been similarly horrified, for all I know or care. But it's not them who get to decide and I could bring dozens of examples of relevant contemporary and not-so-contemporary authors - Stephenson, Banks, Egan, LeGuin, Joanna Russ, Philip freaking Dick - who have never had any problem whatsoever with describing their work as science-fiction, and who fit in that very same tradition.
Even when it was explicitly a hard socialist party, the Marxists were a minority.
Okay, you're going to have to explain to me how you can be a socialist and not a Marxist.
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The definition if Scifi we use at Bardic Web goes thusly:
In defining the scope of the science fiction genre, we speak of the effect of science on society or people, that is;
· the effect of imagined science
· the imagined effect of actual science
· imagined technology based upon actual science
· imagined technology based upon imagined science
· the effect of science on imagined societies
· the effect of science on imagined individualsIf the society, the person, the technology, and the scientific knowledge base in the story are all standard and realistic (drawn from observed reality), the story would be classed as mainstream, contemporary fiction rather than as science fiction. In some cases, the term "science fiction" generally refers to any literary fantasy including a scientific factor as an essential, story-orienting component. Science fiction is not necessarily futuristic.
Which might make that point - scifi as a subset but different from spec-fic, which includes fantasy - except that if you look at Paul's original objection, he uses the word 'fantasy', not scifi.
Also we don't really give a toss if the distinction between scifi and fantasy gets all soft and blurry, because it is. We just don't want people jamming scifi into the non-spec genres.
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1984 isn't scifi. It's a satire on Britain in the immediate postwar period, grounded in a setting of London under a totalitarian regime. 1984 is 1948 reversed, and the Ministry of Truth is a hyperbolic representation of Broadcasting House.
Animal Farm isn't a prediction that farmyard animals will adopt societ-style communism, either.
For me scifi is writing where a self-contained imaginary reality is created, detached from our present and historical experience. I don't like it, but that's entirely a personal opinion - I also don't do quasi-mystical historical novels set in 1850's Waikato (which rules out 95% of NZ published fiction) but that is also a personal thing.
Works that are often considered scifi, but have that grounding (Dr Who, Quatermass, much of John Wyndham) *are* included in my reading canon.
This is just my personal attitude, everyone is free to enjoy scifi, 1950's crime novels, tentancle hentai or whatever. I just reserve the right to yawn and change the subject if people go on obsessively about it.
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What genre is Iain Banks "Song of Stone" (for those who've ploughed through it?).
There's nothing science based in it, but unlike his other non-scifi, it isn't set in a recognisable place and era. For that reason, I found it inaccessible and dull (and I love the rest of Bank's non-sci-fi output).
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