Mars Has Water
It’s confirmed, everyone. Mars has water. We now have a 100% certainty of it. No skepticism. This is a reality. There is water on Mars. Fantastic discovery! (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)
What will we drink in the future?
I don’t mean anything specific by this question, but what do you think we will be drinking in the future? By future, assume I mean at least 100 years from today. Do you think we’ll still be consuming animal byproducts like milk? What about for treats? What new-fangled ninja sodas will spring up from the woodworks? All nonsensical forms are acceptable. Just tell me what you think the future will look like. (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)
Should SF/F authors read in their genre?
Apparently this is the next big issue that people are discussing across the blogosphere, and likely elsewhere. It all started, so it seems, with an interview Pat over at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist did with David Bilsborough. Some people have taken great offense with certain things Mr. Bilsborough said and it has sparked a bit of a feud in the genre world about whether or not authors should read within their genre. Now, to what Mr. Bilsborough said that apparently has some people in a tiffy, and has other people raising their defensive walls: I don’t see why it [fantasy] should be respected. With the obvious JRR exception, (and possibly Bernard Cornwell’s “Starkadder / Vargr Moon”) I have to say that I’m not the greatest fan of fantasy, at least not the swords & sorcery tradition with all its preposterousness and banality. I’ve read a fair few fantasy books in my life, and am always surprised that such stale, hackneyed and vapid pulp should get published at all. I particularly have problems with US fantasy; there are definite exceptions, of course, but in my opinion the Americans just don’t get it, with their phony Olde-Englishness, green tights, bucket boots, square-jawed ‘Rone Garet’ heroes, pretty-but-with-a-hidden-fire ‘Fern Leah’ love interests, hissing insidious black-robed ‘Sith Mordax’ villains, or whatever it is they harp on about in their hollow regurgitations of Conan, Star Wars or Buffy. Is it any wonder spec. fiction has so little respect? This is what has got people upset, and rightly so. What really hits home is his apparent disdain for the genre. He specifically says, “I am not the greatest fan of fantasy.” How much clearer does it have to get that this guy pretty much hates the genre, with some very minor, and, albeit, obvious exceptions. Everyone says Tolkien is fantabulous, because to not do so is akin to telling Christians that the Bible was written by Satan worshipers. And then you throw out Cornwell, another who has quite a bit of respect in the same fashion as Tolkien due to the types of stories he tells. But, anyone can toss those names out without having read them, presuming that liking said authors is an indicator of one’s worth. And then there’s that opening line: “I don’t see why it should be respected.” Excuse me? You’re writing in a genre you don’t feel should be respected? So, by default, we should just look at you as another of those hack writers that you so despise, because, hey, fantasy doesn’t deserve any respect? I don’t really care if you read within the genre. That’s pretty much pointless to me. John Varley told me in an interview he reads mostly mysteries, but he writes science fiction. And he’s good at science fiction. One doesn’t have to be superbly versed in genre to write in it. I simply have problems with this presumption that just because the genre has quite a few writers who basically write derivative garbage that it should be treated with no respect whatsoever, with exception to a pair of writers who only until recently began pushing out of the land of “crap literature” into the literary academia (the supposed “good literature”). If that’s so, then all literature, by extension, deserves no respect. Literary fiction isn’t graced with a tremendous amount of originality, nor has it been founded upon only great books. There are plenty of crappy, completely useless and utterly pointless novels that have been under the label of “literary fiction” (and I have read quite a few of these crappy lit fic novels). The same can be said about every single genre that has been created and will be created. There are great and crappy science fiction novels, horror novels, romance novels, mystery novels, detective novels, etc. There’s no such thing as a genre of perfection, one in which all the novels are great. Yet we give respect to certain genres while shunning others (“we” being the literate and educated, primarily the academia), despite their imperfections and unoriginality. Of course fantasy has an abundance of what one might call “lesser literature”. Yet this is what people want. They enjoy it. It’s entertaining and that’s it’s purpose. Shouldn’t we respect it for that? Just because you don’t like a specific set of writers, or a specific class of fantasy, doesn’t mean we should shun it to the bottom of a well, forsaking it to be consumed by people who, I suppose, have to be mindless nitwits simply because they like such things. Sometimes entertainment is all you need. That doesn’t make those that read it particularly idiotic or mindless. We should be thankful that they’re reading at all, and even more thankful that it’s because of the people reading “such stale, hackneyed and vapid pulp”, as Bilsborough says, that we even have an industry revolving around the act of writing. Entertainment value, no matter how desperately you want to argue against this, is keeping literature alive. So I say celebrate vapid pulp, because without it there wouldn’t be a fantasy genre, or if there was one, it would be so small and under-appreciated that nobody would really care if Bilsborough released a new novel. Lastly, of course, is the comment about Americans, and I put this last for a reason. It doesn’t bother me all that much. Yes, I think it’s rather offensive that because I was born in America I’m suddenly devoid of taste, and that my choice of reading is cause for ridicule. What does being American have to do with it? That’s my question. This is a lot of that “Brits are better” attitude that I find to be rather silly. I think it’s an inborn pride that has never let up, and, of course, Americans have a similar attitude (or some of us anyway). Some of the discussions about the American comment have been somewhat ridiculous, in my opinion. While I would agree that calling Americans phony and essentially useless is offensive, I
Racing To Nowhere
L. E. Modesitt, Jr. has a fantastic post regarding our “race” to maintain what we have and our desire to work harder for it, even though it isn’t working. The real Red Queen’s race is the one that has been around since the beginning of civilization — and one whose effects have been largely mitigated or delayed in the industrialized west for the past century or so. Simply put, we have now reached the point in the development of our civilization where it will shortly become obvious to all levels of all societies that, technology and ingenuity notwithstanding, we cannot physically provide the very best in health care, commodity goods, services, housing, and food to very individual, or even to a sizable fraction of our populations. Good stuff. (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)
Going Potty in Space
Yes, someone at NASA actually had to figure this out cause, well, going potty ain’t very easy to do when gravity ain’t there to help you out. I give you an astronaut telling us how it works: Yeah. Sort of takes the fun out of shooting stars doesn’t it? (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)
The Science of Santa
You know, as silly as this list might be, it’s really fascinating that someone did all the math and physics for this. Just this one alone is impressive: 3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc. This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour. Check out the full list. It’s bizarre and interesting. If you’re really mean you could crush some poor kid’s dreams with this stuff. But I wouldn’t recommend it.