@omgwtflolbbqbye: But certainly not in the sense insinuated by Annalee.
And what is with the unsatisfied male turning to violence meme here and the predicting of the great sexual wars of the near future?
Have I gone to jezebel by accident?
A male surplus is usual in the history of asian countries. China jst happens to be oldest continuous state on earth.
That bit about a sexual revolution is just hilarious. The outcome of this will be normal sexual mores in a western sense. Woman's choice (cause that's what we have - it's not the woman buying the drinks and paying for dinner) and serial monogamy. The only difference will be a serious lack of fat and lonely chicks going home with the fugly jerk after all other options have gone.
So population growth will slow, due to a shortage of women. Isn't that good for old mother earth?
Having massive population numbers and an excess of males means there are still lots of women around. This is not some tropic island we're talking about, this is china. The "yellow menace" is not going to self destruct by not breeding.
@Mathmos: It's never wrong to recommend Wodehouse.
If the topic is not role models...
@ChillbearLatrigue: Nobody said it will be a long book.
I do not agree that there is no sense of wonder at the technological possibilities in modern Sci-fi.
Granted, TV and movies are all about the robot and/or ecological apocalypse. But SF-lit is shockful of augmented supermen, technological marvels and galactic exploration.
Is not the end, or at least the postponement, of biological death practically a given in modern sf? How does this not count as positivism?
Ray Kurzweil et al. preach utopia by AI with the vehemence of televangelists holding forth about the rapture. Not as obnoxiously, but still. And yes, I count this as Sci-fi.
Biopunk is as happy to play with genetic modification as cyberpunk was to play with information technology. I will argue to my dying day that the dystopian (the punk) element in both is solely politic, a failure of adjustment of society to modernity. The tech itself is mostly presented as AWESOME.
The BSG finale was in line with the usual rules of entertainment = conflict in the show, "happy" resolution.
Without conflict, there's no story. The good guys come out on top, or at the very least ride into the sunset. This is how the vast majority of entertainment works. I can not see how BSG was unusual in how it handled this, except that the conflict was unusually dark and the resolution apparently unusually inane.
@corpore-metal: I fully agree.
@Grey_Area: Darwin the Lycanthrope against the pitchfork wielding town mob!
@Roklimber: The A Team was a deep philosophical meditation on the ceaseless and ultimately useless fight of a few good men against the original sin that is called "Homo Homine Lupus".
The A Team are just four new faces of the thousand masks of the hero. Its beginning lies in ancient greek with the myth of Syssiphos and the dualism of good and evil in the ancient oriental pantheons.
There is always a new thug and there always will be! That's why all the stories are the same!! Blasphemer!!! Philistine!!!!
chrxxxxs.......
4 Exclamation Mark Emergency Shutdown...
What do you mean, didn't realize!?
Mr. T is a robot, isn't he? He looks exactly the same as all these years ago!
It's a shock to everybody! Who could have seen that coming?
As soon as P&P+Z made the rounds on the blogosphere and got the sales, follow-ups were inevitable. A fake biography of Lincoln instead of another mash-up is actually more than I expected.
Depending on the execution, it could be great: Abe goes after a Damsel in Distress, fights off the vampires, rebukes as a true gentleman the over-adulation of the victim and swears her to secrecy, gets ambushed by vampire henchmen, escapes and gallops to hold a speech he has written amidst the havoc, barely making it in time. Voila, the Ghettysburg adress, short and tense as befitting its creation. All this in fake victorian style and deadpan delivery.
But than everybody loved the idea of P&P+Z, but nobody seemed to think the writing was worth mentioning. So I'm probably hoping for too much, as usual.
@Lassus: Thirded.
I am quite willing to say the practice of multiple wifes has been around longer and in a larger geographical area than compulsory one man, one woman marriage. Incestuous marriages were a fixture of many ancient religions (see Egypt et al.)
When "Spartacus" came out, christian groups wanted to boycott the movie, because it involved mass cruxification in a non-religious context. As everyone knows, this crucifying thing was specifically cooked up to martyr the christians.
Not knowing stuff makes it oh so easy holding on to your bigotry, declaring it a law of nature instead.
@Evil Tortie's Mom: The brown people missed the boat there. When we brought smallpox to the new world, we followed through immediately. Unlike the browns, who let the plaque come and go without any sustained colonization effort. More than once!
@psthmn: that would be site.
@Evil Tortie's Mom: I think it's the right wing fantasy of the industrialised countries being overrun by the "brown hordes", because the hedonistic seculars don't pop out enough younglings.
5 minutes on a given fundie sight will bring up anything from islamistic majority in europe by 2050 to sharia law getting introduced any day now.
@Qev: I agree. It was entertaining enough as an action romp, but that works better in movie form.
@L3G10N: Far be it from me to defend the latest cheap sf-movie, but I thought the whole movie worked well as far as internal consistency of scenery was concerned. Except for the very last scene, which was crappy. In most cases it's run-down industrial area + cheap entirely to flashy CGI. "Gene Generation" did better.
