@Shojo Bat: Here's my review of Touched by Venom from Strange Horizons: [www.strangehorizons.com]
There's a great book called I, Zombie by Doris Piserchia (writing as Curt Selby). A teenage girl institutionalized for having Downs Syndrome tries to kill herself and ends up with a lot of other dead people with brain implants shipped off to a horrible space colony to be an enslaved worker. She's big and strong and the implant makes her smarter. She figures out ways to resist the abusive overseers, befriends the other dead people (sort of ) and helps out the native frog aliens by stealing a fission engine for them. It's pretty much amazing.
That's just so "Gate to Women's Country". Maybe that book is secretly about beetles!
For most companies that make equipment or provide services for people with disabilities, their customer is NOT the person with a disability. It's the insurance billing, Medicare billing, and the big medical companies. They don't have any incentive to treat people with disabilities as human beings. Quite the opposite. It's a systemic problem, a very horrible serious one, in addition to this one guy being a jerk.
Dunno but women and Mayans are always happy to die so that some rich wangsty white guy can have a spiritual journey. It's okay... because he feels true love!
I don't understand what you mean... "experience" something without simultaneously mediating it through the lens of my own cultural output? Just a sec while I get my cameraphone and take a photo of the screen and myself looking puzzled.
this is the best comments thread ever
I looked into PernMUSH now and then, and played what seem like hundreds of different muds and text adventures, but my main hangout was an Envy MUD called Arcane Nites, where I was a coder and builder for a few years. The geography of that world is built into my memory in a scarily real way!
Awesome!!! We're in THE FUTURE! and we get a cool tshirt and stickers too!
Wow Annalee, for the first time I actually want to see a zombie movie!
I'm amazed you liked the characters and thought they were deep! I agree with Crash Launching - they had like 3 qualities each.
Your point about the science & whether information should be free, though, I totally see. Though... if they really thought so, why don't they just release the darn code already! Information doesn't want to be free, for them, information wants to be profitable for your weird libertarian corporation!
I did enjoy Infoquake though I just mocked it in a friendly way...thanks for the rec!
Here's my review - [blogs.feministsf.net]
@okeribok I totally yelled "BLUE STEEL" last night watching this scene but no one got the joke.
Oh, also, what everyone said above. YA books are for middle schoolers or smart upper-elementary kids. Not for high school kids!
We had a good discussion at WisCon about YA fantasy (and some mention of SF too, mixed in.) I liked Sharyn November's definition that YA is whatever you're reading as a teenager. A bunch of librarians in this panel and in online discussions agreed that they recommend books-that-are-in-theory-for-adults to teenagers and elementary school kids all the time - but they have to develop those lists on their own.
So yeah, it's a marketing category that doesn't always hit the mark.
About the creepiness of adults reading YA books or books with young protagonists, I see your point, and have always thought for example that a huge amount of adult men fetishize characters like YT from Snow Crash in a not very healthy or well thought out way. On the one hand it's good they can think of a girl as a cool protagonist. Yet I do think there's an ick factor. I thought Stross exploited yet made fun of this exact issue, with his Wednesday-Adams-ish goth girl character in Iron Sunrise.
On the other other hand, I like reading books with kids as protagonists. I would point to Peter Dickinson's books, or Nancy Farmer's recent dystopian YA book House of the Scorpion, as great examples of YA books.
I just recently read "Shanghaied to the Moon" and it was super great YA space opera. Total Information Awareness, hacking, rocketships and detailed space-piloting action scenes, near-FTL travel, weightlessness... all very cool.
Dude. This is possibly even worse than the "date rape isn't so bad" drunk video. What next?
@annalee This is an awesome interview! Please stop jinxing the forensic reconstruction of the Civil War... my god how happy that would make me if Gibson wrote it!
Did you read Spook Country? It had a really good dreamy poetic feel to it.
Oh the humanity!
Aaaah! I love them! I wish they'd come to San Francisco!
@Epaminondas take a look at Perturbed on Pern and how the first 2 Dragonrider books are full of scenes of Lessa being smacked around by F'lar. It's like a rape and domestic violence manual. Not really the best thing to give your daughter!
