We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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Discussion Dept Vol. 1: Heinlein, Vietnam Drinking Games, Sony, and Stupid Arguments About SF
Reading Time
Every once in a while I feel like complaining about a few things instead of engaging the issues in a more sustained manner. Usually I don’t blog about such complaints (which sometimes aren’t complaints so much as confusions or general “mehness”).
And that’s why I’ve created the
Complaint DepartmentDiscussion Department feature: to give me a little space to complain or babble about a few things without sustained thought (or to point out stupid things people say and do in the SF/F community).Here goes:
Complaint #1 — Connie Willis and the Heinlein Award
She won it. Alright. That’s fine. I haven’t read most of her work (though Jason Sanford tells me her latest novels aren’t very good). But then you read the mission statement of the Heinlein Award and the red flags go up: “For outstanding published works of science fiction and technical writings to inspire the human exploration of space.”
I’m sorry? What do Blackout or All Clear have to do with that? Nothing, you say? Then why did she win this particular award? That’s like giving a major league baseball player an award for MVP in the Superbowl. He might be a great athlete, but the award is way outside his field.
Does anyone have any insight on this? Did Willis write a short story set in space that changed the SF game or something?
Complaint #2 — The SF Writer Vietnam Drinking Game
Here’s how it works:
Complaint #3 — Sony to Ban Users Who Refuse to Waive Right to Sue
Because no corporation is immune to acting like a total and utter dickhole, Sony is apparently making it a requirement to waive your right to sue them if there is a security breach. If you don’t sign the new ToS? You get banned.
That’s right: you will not be allowed to use their system unless you agree not to sue them in the event that your credit card and other sensitive information are acquired because their security system wasn’t good enough to fend off hackers. Who wants to bet that in a few years they’ll stop putting so much money into security?
Thanks, Sony. You’ve just lost a customer for life.
(Note: The new ToS does allow you to go through arbitration, but this is done via an arbitrator selected by Sony. How many red flags does someone in HR need at Sony to realize this is a really dickhole idea?)
Complaint #4 — Science Fiction is About the Future
You know, that stupid argument that people make about SF that completely handicaps the genre by claiming it is about something it can’t fulfill, no matter how good the writer may be. I’ve babbled about this topic before. In two parts. I don’t deny that a lot of the classic SF authors (and perhaps most of them today) believed they were predicting the fortune by writing SF, but using that as a basis for saying that the genre is about extrapolation (as opposed to saying extrapolation is sometimes a part of the form) is sort of like saying you buy your friend’s argument when he says “I only eat apples” while munching on an orange.
SF is always about the present (with rare exception — and, as we know, exceptions prove the rule). This annoying focus on extrapolation does nothing but make the genre look like a silly game of “guess who.” Who cares if jetpacks came true? We got space shuttles, advanced medical technology, and smart phones instead. Who cares whether a prediction is “accurate?” Asking such questions seems absurd to me. The future is unattainable the further you move away from the now. Let’s worry about realistic stuff, like what tomorrow will look like and how we can make it better. You don’t need SF to do that for you.
That’s what I’ve got. What about you? What has been bugging you this week?
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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
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Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
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2025: The Year of Something
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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