Extra Credits
Published on 31 Jul 2018Asimov’s Foundation stories were absolutely foundational for science fiction — they introduced the concept of a space empire, bringing along analogies from historical civilizations to the social issues of advanced technology and humanity’s future.
August 1, 2018
Isaac Asimov – Foundation & Empire – Extra Sci Fi – #3
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July 30, 2018
QotD: Buying books but not reading them
Nick Carraway slinks away from Jay Gatsby’s party. In the library he comes across a drunken, bespectacled fat cat who starts going off about the books lining the walls. “They’re real,” he slurs, pointing to them. “What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too — didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?” Uncut pages! If you know how books used to be manufactured, this means one thing and one thing only: Gatsby wasn’t much of a reader. After all, until they’re cut, book pages can’t be turned.
Collecting books and not reading them is, shall we say, textbook behavior. At least for some of you, and you know who you are. Suffering from the condition of racking up book purchases of $100, $200 or $1,000 without ever bending a spine? There’s a Japanese word for you.
Prognosis: terminal. Stats reveal that e-reading doesn’t hold a candle to the joy of reading a physical book. Although e-book sales jumped 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, 2.71 billion physical books were sold in the U.S. alone in 2015, according to Statista. That’s compared with the 1.32 billion movie tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada. As if every American were reading an average of more than eight books annually.
Certainly, it’s unlikely you’re going to hear the word tsundoku on the subway. But in a language where there are words for canceling an appointment at the last minute and the culture-specific condition of adult male shut-in syndrome, how can you be surprised? Other, similar words like tsūdoku (read through) and jukudoku (reading deeply) are in praise of sitting down with a book (doku means “to read”). But we think tsundoku is particularly special: Oku means to do something and leave it for a while, says Sahoko Ichikawa, a senior lecturer at Cornell University, and tsunde means to stack things.
Libby Coleman, “There’s a Word for Buying Books and Not Reading Them”, OZY, 2016-10-03.
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July 18, 2018
Isaac Asimov – Master of Science – Extra Sci Fi – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 17 Jul 2018Isaac Asimov didn’t have a birthday. Nobody knew the exact date of his birth, so he picked one for himself at a young age — and that choice, quite possibly, was what gave us one of his best creative periods.
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July 16, 2018
Deconstructing Zinn’s People’s History of the United States
Alex Usher took to the Twitters to explain why you shouldn’t bother reading Howard Zinn’s ?popular? history book:
Finished Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States". I do not understand how this came to be thought of as a classic because it's a terrible work of history.
— Alex Usher (@AlexUsherHESA) July 14, 2018
Rather than slowing down your page loading speed, here’s the rest of that Twitter thread as a screen grab:
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July 15, 2018
“Reading the fourth Dune book is like doing your 5,472nd Sudoku”
Unlike most of my generation of science fiction fans, I wasn’t a fan of the original Dune by Frank Herbert. I read it, it was okay, but it didn’t grab my imagination as it seemed to do for so many others. I think I started reading the second book in the series, but never finished it. I just checked, and I no longer have any Frank Herbert books in my library, which does indicate to me that I lost patience long before the end of the series. That said, I do see the attraction for attempting to translate the story to the big screen. Colby Cosh (who was a fan of the book) reports on the latest adaptation headed toward a multiplex near you, probably:
The cinema-rumour websites are hissing with whispers about the upcoming adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune from Canadian director Denis Villeneuve.
Folks who still swear by science-fiction movies live in a state of constant unease about tent-pole projects like this. After an adaptation of cherished object X by messianic genius Y is announced, there are still a hundred things that can go awry with the script or the finances or the cast, and one of those hundred things, or some interaction amongst them, usually does. But the buzz is that everything is, so far, in order for Villeneuve to begin shooting early next year.
Dune (published in 1965) is somewhat esoteric and bizarre, and as source material for video it has had a difficult history, one that is itself now the subject of legend. One of the most celebrated documentaries of 2013 was Jodorowsky’s Dune, the chronicle of a failed Seventies attempt to shoot the book with an art-cinema giant at the helm.
The book itself is almost defiantly unfilmable. Dune flings technicalities and background references at the reader to an almost sadistic degree without ever lifting one finger to engage in conscious literary exposition. This was, indeed, part of the reason it revolutionized science fiction. The book is driven by gimmicks, like any good SF story, but the reader is expected to not only solve narrative puzzles (what the heck is a “Mentat”?) but to bring some knowledge of history and science to the game.
This is why nerds adore Dune, and it is why the pleasure of the sequels is subject, notoriously so, to fast-diminishing returns. Reading the fourth Dune book is like doing your 5,472nd Sudoku.
Despite having been written as if Herbert specifically intended to make adaptation impossible, Dune has reached the screen twice: as a 1984 feature directed by David Lynch (who is what Alejandro Jodorowsky would be if Alejandro Jodorowsky were a grown-up Eagle Scout from Montana) and as a 2000 TV miniseries for the Sci-Fi Channel. All of this is to say that Dune carries a lot of baggage, and the stakes for Villeneuve, whose Blade Runner sequel is thought to have lost a lot of money, seem positively alarming. A directorial career is a tightrope: everyone is one blunder away from plummeting into an abyss, even though particular blunders may be survivable.
Not being a movie fan or TV watcher, I haven’t seen either of the previous adaptations — although the stills from Lynch’s 1984 movie are quite striking — and it’s unlikely I’ll bother with the next one.
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July 11, 2018
The Golden Age of Science Fiction – Modernity Begins – Extra Sci Fi
Extra Credits
Published on 10 Jul 2018The golden age of science fiction represents a very flawed but fascinating American view of the future; authors Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein were all influential to this time period.
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July 5, 2018
Tales of Cromwell tanks
Lindybeige
Published on 6 Apr 2016War memoirs are filled with amazing anecdotes. Here I relate two, and ramble a bit about British WW2 tank units.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LindybeigeI am likely to return to this topic – anecdotes from war memoirs. It is a rich vein of stories. These come from Troop Leader by Bill Bellamy, which describes the author’s time commanding a trio of fast Cromwell tanks in World War Two, when fighting the Germans in Holland.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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June 30, 2018
Wealthy virtue-signalling hurts the poor
At Catellaxy Files, Rafe Champion discusses some of the points raised by Matt Ridley in his recent book:
Essentially, the poor pay for the virtue-signalling of the rich. Dr Matt Ridley opens chapter 14 of Climate Science: The Facts with some blunt claims.
Here is a simple fact about the world today. Climate change is doing more good than harm. Here is another fact. Climate change policy is doing more harm than good.
On top of that he points out that the poor are carrying the cost of today’s climate policy. That is something for the ALP [Australian Labour Party] and the social justice warriors to think about.
This should remind people of another great postwar example of destructive virtue-signalling – massive foreign aid to the developing nations aka the Third World. That did more harm than good for the people of the Third World, apart from the crony criminals in power. The great Lord Peter Bauer was onto that very smartly, starting in the 1940s and his findings have been consolidated lately, notably by William Easterly [in] The White Man’s Burden: Why the west’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good. There are exceptions to the rule such as hands-on medical care and private education.
Ridley mentions in passing some of the cases where apparently smart people have made very bad calls, starting with a prominent and wealthy leftwinger who he debated on TV. Faced with the charge that climate policy was hurting the poor he replied “But what about my grandchildren?”. As though the future wellbeing of the presumably affluent and privileged grandchildren of the talking head might be threatened by policies that help the poor who are with us at present. Ridley also cited a son of Charles Darwin who thought that eugenic breeding programs were essential to save civilization and Paul Ehrlich who in 1972 predicted that millions would die due to over-population (prompting the one-child policy in China).
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June 24, 2018
Life In The Tomb – WW1 Author Stratis Myrivilis I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
The Great War
Published on 23 Jun 2018Get Life In The Tomb: https://amzn.to/2MF8TMZ [Affiliate Link]
Stratis Myrivilis was a Greek Author, but he was also a soldier that fought in the Balkan Wars, World War 1 and the Greco-Turkish War. His experience in the First World War, was the basis for his most famous novel Life In The Tomb.
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June 22, 2018
Lois McMaster Bujold group interview with the Facebook SF book club
For those not on Facebook, Lois posted the body of the piece on her Goodreads blog:
Interview with Lois McMaster Bujold June 2018
FB SFBC: It’s been over 30 years since the epic, bestselling Vorkosigan Saga launched with Shards of Honor, and author Lois McMaster Bujold continues to mine new depths for the characters and settings in her rich science fiction universe. Set approximately 1,000 years in the future in a system of fictional planets (and occasionally on Earth), the series follows Miles Vorkosigan, a man as gifted in military tactics and interplanetary politics as he is at stumbling into trouble.
Beyond the Vorkosigan Saga, Bujold has written books in the Chalion series and The Sharing Knife series. Known for her wit, warmth, and operatic, action-packed plots, Bujold has won the Hugo Award for Best Novel four times, the Hugo Award for Best Novella, and three Nebula Awards.
Jo Zebedee: How integral are the short works to the Vorkosigan universe?
LMB: As integral as any of the novels, in my opinion. (Well, maybe excepting “Weatherman”, which is an out-take from the novel The Vor Game, and thus double-dipping.) The reader may pick up three of the (currently) six in one package in the collection Borders of Infinity; the other two are still ala carte.
Michael Rowe: Did you have an expectation on how we would view the Cetaganda Nobles and the Vor? (One more agreeable one less so?)
LMB: The Vor are an ordinary sort of aristocracy, so that will depend on how one feels about aristocracies. The Cetagandans have a two-tier system, of which the upper level, the haut, turn out to be an ongoing genetics project aiming at creating post-humans. Their one saving grace may be that they don’t imagine they have already succeeded. So that one will depend on how one feels about post-human genetic engineering. (Though of the two, I think the Cetagandans make for the scarier neighbors.)
Michael Rowe: What was the inspiration for the malice hunters in the Sharing Knife series?
LMB: Besides the “Ranger” trope in fantasy, they follow from the nature of the malices, as an ecosystem shapes a species. The notion of the sharing knives, the magical method by which Lakewalkers “share” their own deaths with the otherwise immortal malices, who will grow like a cancer consuming all around them if not checked, is also something of a metaphor for the personal sacrifices made by any culture’s protectors: soldiers, police, emergency workers.
[…]
John Grayshaw: What is the story with your books being free as e-books for a while? How did that happen and why was it stopped?
LMB: I believe you are referring to the CD of my backlist that was included as a freebie in the back of the first hardcover edition of Cryoburn. (Copies of which are still floating around, by the way. Go for it if you want one.)
That was intended as a premium gift for purchasers of the hardcover, not as something to be put up online and distributed infinitely and indefinitely. Jim Baen did give a general permission to do so in earlier versions of this ploy, for other writers’ series, which was sort of the internet version of opening the barn door after the horses were long gone. (Because there is no way to control e-pirates, so why harass customers?) However, I construed that Baen’s permission could only run as long as Baen held the e-licenses for the titles, and when their license ran out, so did the permission. At which point I asked that the online freebies be taken down, which was promptly and courteously done.
A second, separate problem was that the CD was never supposed to contain all of the titles, just a select few. But at the time the CD was put together, Baen e-matters were in some disarray due to their chief e-wrangler being deathly ill in the hospital, and the word of what was to be included (and not) never got passed along to the people actually doing so. By the time I caught up with the miscommunication, the books were printed, the CDs were bound in, and the print run was all on its way to bookstores. So I bit my tongue and reclassified it as a marketing experiment. Which it proved to be.
One of the then-extant books was missing from the CD, so I was able to use its subsequent sales reports as a check against the assertion that free e-books did not hurt sales: a kind of built-in, accidental control sample. In the event, its sales turned out quite significantly higher than those of the other titles. So.
Back at the turn of the millennium, Jim Baen originally conceived of e-books as a minor venture mainly worthwhile as advertising for his paperbacks, and in the early days this was quite true. Then came the Kindle, the game-changer, and e-books shifted from pizza money to mortgage money. I was late to the party with my CD, and ended up wrong-side-to viz this market shift. Live, learn…
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June 4, 2018
L. Neil Smith on his time in the salt mines of the Star Wars universe
Around the time I picked up my first L. Neil Smith novel (Tom Paine Maru), I saw his name on a couple of Star Wars tie-in novels. I didn’t buy them, as I’ve rarely found tie-in work to be worth much unless you’re a huge fan of the larger franchise. By the time I’d gotten around to reading Tom Paine Maru and rushed back to buy all the rest of Smith’s available works, the Star Wars books had gone. I haven’t seen any of them in my travels since then. In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Smith explains how the books came to be:
In 1983, I was chosen (or condemned — it depends how you look at these things), by Del Rey Books, a division of Random House, and Lucasfilm Ltd., to write three little ”exploitation” novels about the Star Wars character Lando Calrissian, specifically because I wasn’t Brian Daley, author of three similar books about another Star Wars character, Han Solo.
“Lando Calrissian, meet Londo Mollari. Lando, Londo. Londo, Lando … ”
The late Brian Daley was one of the kindest, gentlest, most generous men I’ve ever known, a colleague to be proud of, and it was bewildering trying to figure out why the movie company had told the book publisher, when arranging for the second set of books, “Anybody but Brian Daley!”
Brian loved Millennium Falcon. He was like a little kid when he got invited to go out to Hollywood and was most excited that he got to clamber around inside the set. But it turned out that he had accidentally and unknowingly allowed himself to become associated with the losing faction in some kind of petty internal corporate feud and found himself rendered persona non grata.
My editor at Del Rey obligingly brought my name up. I was extremely reluctant to write in anybody else’s corpus, but I needed the money very badly — around that time I’d spent two weeks with nothing in the house to eat but a bag of shredded coconut. When requested, my editor sent LucasFilm a “sample” of my work — a copy of my highly-political libertarian first novel, The Probability Broach. I’d love to have been there, a fly on the wall, when they saw it. Remember Beaker, from Muppet Labs, with a shock of bright red hair, a big red nose, great big eyes, whimpering and terrified of every known phenomenon? It must have been a lot like that.
In any case, LucasFilm freaked out, and, hypocritically asked that Brian be brought back into the project as my co-author, apparently to temper my politically incorrect passions. My editor told me later that he blew up dramatically, and told them “These are authors we’re dealing with here, not Hollywood writers, they don’t write by committee!” They backed down eventually, but I had to promise I would write no politics in the books — which, given the attitude they were displaying, I interpreted to mean as much politics as I could possibly squeeze in before they squealed.
I was told to write about Lando but leave all other Star Wars characters and other things alone (I did end up using mynocks). I told them I would have the spaceship, or I would give the project a miss. Brian started calling us “the Brotherhood of the Falcon”. My editor advised me to politely decline any invitations to come to Hollywood, and stay out of company politics, which I gladly did. I invented a number of animals for the books but was told that only animals made up by George Lucas could be capitalized.
In the beginning, they gave me sixteen weeks to write three books which I regarded as tough, but doable. “But wait! We have to approve your outlines first!” And by the time they finished — altering my arch-villain Rokur Gepta to something other than a “Dark Lord of Sith” and making other insignificant changes, I had nine weeks left. For two and a half months, I got up each morning and wrote. My cute little fiancee came home for lunch and then I wrote. We had supper and I wrote. Then I collapsed and started the whole thing over the next day. Forget anything resembling a real life. This was just before word processors came along, and I did the whole thing in one draft, as Robert Heinlein advised, on a Sperry-Remington knock-off of an IBM Selectric II. It took a long, long time to recover my health.
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May 30, 2018
May 17, 2018
John W. Campbell Reshapes Sci-Fi – Pulp! Astounding Stories – Extra Sci Fi
Extra Credits
Published on 15 May 2018Writer-turned-famous-editor of Astounding Stories, John W. Campbell helped usher in the golden age of science fiction, driven by a new authorial understanding of real science and real psychology.
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Tom Wolfe “would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal”
In the National Post Colby Cosh explains why Tom Wolfe was so significant in the literary world almost from his first published work:
… Tom Wolfe was an educated man: unlike any of the macho novelists he was sparring with, he was entitled to adjoin an honest-to-God PhD to his byline. In the end, he could not escape the prejudices imprinted on him in youth. It is a truth universally acknowledged: a prose artist must excrete a novel to demonstrate his true mettle.
Wolfe described it this way himself in a 2008 interview. “Originally, I was only going to write one novel, to prove to myself and any random doubters that I could do it.” “Random doubters” sounds so dismissive and calm until you remember the amount of work Wolfe was proposing to undertake in order to impress them. He continued: “But that novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was such an astounding success… I’m afraid I got swept away.”
Wolfe, I suppose, was too well-raised to utter the word “money” in front of an interviewer. (The explicit subject of all his work, his journalism and fiction, is social status: but social status and money do travel together mighty closely.) Bonfire (1987) became one of the publishing events of the epoch, and he would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal. The dabbler in the novel had proved too much: he had proved that the novel really is still in a class by itself as a social phenomenon.
More novels in the vein of Bonfire — deeply researched, socially prescient, full of truculent conservative squareness — followed. I myself would not trade The Right Stuff, Wolfe’s 1979 nonfiction book about the Mercury astronauts, for the whole pile, Bonfire included. (And I say this knowing full well that there is some quantum of sheer bull in The Right Stuff.)
Wolfe continued to insist, returning to the interview already mentioned, that “Nonfiction remains the most important literary genre in American literature of the past 60 years.” He still, 20 years on from Bonfire, felt the need to half-apologize for abandoning non-fiction. My instinct is that it was indeed a mistake, but I am only a consumer of Wolfe, looking back at the corpus from without: none of us readers had to meet Wolfe’s dry-cleaning bills.
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