San Francisco, 6:15 PM
Fri Dec 4
29 posts in the last 24 hours
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All of Mes Love The Multiverse |
Congo, I Love You |
Falling In Love Again With Science Fiction Novels |
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io9 
02/15/09
02/15/09
I love Doctor Who, and I love England for loving Doctor Who even more than I do.
02/15/09
02/15/09
At least they're considerate enough to tell you to scram before they try to eat you...
02/15/09
(Oh, and spiritkittkat - I also worked on The Relic...ALSO a blast to work on...)
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02/14/09
On the one hand, it was fascinating going over Heinlein and Lem for credit and being able to discuss them in an academic environment. On the other, during the course NEUROMANCER got released in mass market form without a single word about Gibson ever being uttered.
Take of that what you will, either you can still be connected to SF while being in pursuit of the degree, or that the ivory tower may not produce the best people to examine SF. All said, probably a draw...
02/15/09
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02/14/09
Basically from high school onwards I began to demand more and more hard science speculation from stories and less in the way of decent story or characterizations or plots. I read a lot of truly awful, but technically sound, stuff. Science fiction, for me, was a way to explore the furthest fringes of science without being concerned about pesky details like grants, credibility or politics. I really wanted to know where science was taking our society.
Then in 1988, I read about nanotechnology in Scientific American. Soon afterwards I read Hans Morevec's book Mind Children. These two things pretty much blew science fiction out of the water for me. When Next Generation came on the air in 1989, I just rolled my eyes. Even Gibson and Rucker didn't go far enough anymore. And Vinge was telling me that it may not be possible to write about what happens after superhuman intelligence arrives.
The magic was gone. I knew too much.
And perhaps this is only my skewed perception but it seemed to me that the entire science fiction community, especially the hard SF writers, were shaken by these ideas too. In the 10 or 15 years that followed there seemed to be a sudden vacuum, an unspoken retreat of some kind. Or maybe it was just me. It seemed like authors weren't writing stuff I could suspend disbelief on anymore.
But I think this has recently changed. Maybe we all just needed a decade to think about these ideas to be able to present them in a way that allows me to suspend disbelief again. I don't know.
02/14/09
02/14/09
02/15/09
02/14/09
02/14/09
Of course, with LOST, that might not be completely impossible.
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02/14/09
And in the Engines of Light trilogy, there were even more lovable characters than these I thought.
02/15/09
Lucinda Carlyle, endearing? Hells, no. Human, in every sense of the word? Yes, absolutely, but she made just about every wrong decision she could have possibly made, always because it was entirely within her character to do so. For her, the benefits she imagined far outweighed the risks she perceived, and her experience was that things would never get as out of hand as they eventually did. If she lived in present-day United States, she'd have had an office on Wall Street, where she could carve up sub-prime mortgages to be resold as "swaps" so they wouldn't need to be insured against default under federal guidelines.
That said, she was certainly one of the most interesting characters I've read in years. It's just that with a focal character like her, I find it's much easier to distance myself from her, and if something terrible happens to her I can dispassionately accept it and get on with the rest of the story.
And, granted, this really applies more heavily to Newton's Wake than any of the other MacLeod books I've read, but I found that I didn't care if she "won" or "lost" because she was neither Hero nor Villain. All I cared about was discovering how things turned out in the end, for better or for worse.
02/15/09
02/16/09
Yeah, that's not really where I was going with that either. I neither loved nor hated Lucinda Carlyle as a fictional character (though I'd likely hate her if she was a real person). She was just an exquisitely-crafted character, and I was fascinated with her story, no matter how it might have eventually turned out. I wasn't rooting for her to "win" and get away clean, I didn't demand that she get called to task for her past actions, and I wasn't secretly hoping she'd have a moment of true clarity about all the harm she'd caused in the persuit of her goals. In a way it was like watching a really good documentary.
@Annalee Newitz:
Lucinda is just an extreme example of this. If you really dig into all of the major characters in the Engines of Light trilogy, none of them is really presented as a true Hero. They each have their own motivations, but MacLeod doesn't really invest their actions with any sense of Right and Wrong. Clearly, there are differing opinions throughout the overall story, but all he ever really tells us is which opinions win out in the end, not which ones _should_ have won.
02/14/09
"'I'm Frank Marshall,' he began. 'I've produced all of Steven Spielberg's movies. Interested? Okay, I've got a book written by Michael Crichton. I'm going to get John Patrick Shanley, the Academy Award-winning writer of Moonstruck, to adapt it. It'll be shot by Allen Daviau, who did E.T. Will you make this movie? Well, congratulations! You just made Congo.'"
02/14/09
02/14/09
:( I'll go work on my disaster now.