Extra Credits
Published on 28 Aug 2018From William Gibson’s Burning Chrome which introduced the word “cyberpunk” into pop culture, to modern-day anime like Sword Art Online that explore if technology really isn’t in our control, our anticipation for VR has only accelerated in the last 30 years. Many thanks to Oculus Rift for sponsoring the next two episodes of Extra Sci Fi and giving us a chance to explore our collective definition of virtual reality.
August 29, 2018
The History of Virtual Reality – Cyberpunk, Anime, and the Movies – Extra Sci Fi – #2
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August 28, 2018
Stross in conversation with Heinlein
Charles Stross explains why so many Baby Boomer SF writers fall so far short when they write in imitation of Robert Heinlein:
Robert A. Heinlein at the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention
Via Wikimedia Commons.
RAH was, for better or worse, one of the dominant figures of American SF between roughly 1945 and 1990 (he died in 1988 but the publishing pipeline drips very slowly). During his extended career (he first began publishing short fiction in the mid-1930s) he moved through a number of distinct phases. One that’s particularly notable is the period from 1946 onwards when, with Scribners, he began publishing what today would be categorized as middle-grade SF novels (but were then more specifically boys adventure stories or childrens fiction): books such as Rocket Ship Galileo, Space Cadet, Red Planet, and Have Space Suit, Will Travel. There were in all roughly a dozen of these books published from 1947 to 1958, and as critic John Clute notes, they included some of the very best juvenile SF ever written (certainly at that point), and were free of many of the flaws that affected Heinlein’s later works — they maintained a strong narrative drive, were relatively free from his tendency to lecture the reader (which could become overwhelming in his later adult novels), and were well-structured as stories.
But most importantly, these were the go-to reading matter for the baby boom generation, kids born from 1945 onwards. It used to be said, somewhat snidely, that “the golden age of SF is 12”; if you were an American boy (or girl) born in 1945 you’d have turned 12 in 1957, just in time to read Time for the Stars or Citizen of the Galaxy. And you might well have begun publishing your own SF novels in the mid-1970s — if your name was Spider Robinson, or John Varley, or Gregory Benford, for example.
Then a disturbing pattern begins to show up.
The pattern: a white male author, born in the Boomer generation (1945-1964), with some or all of the P7 traits (Pale Patriarchal Protestant Plutocratic Penis-People of Power) returns to the reading of their childhood and decides that what the Youth of Today need is more of the same. Only Famous Dead Guy is Dead and no longer around to write more of the good stuff. Whereupon they endeavour to copy Famous Dead Guy’s methods but pay rather less attention to Famous Dead Guy’s twisty mind-set. The result (and the cause of James’s sinking feeling) is frequently an unironic pastiche that propagandizes an inherently conservative perception of Heinlein’s value-set.
It should be noted that Charles Stross is politically left, so calling something “conservative” is intended to be understood as a pejorative connotation, not merely descriptive.
But here’s the thing: as often as not, when you pick up a Heinlein tribute novel by a male boomer author, you’re getting a classic example of the second artist effect.
Heinlein, when he wasn’t cranking out 50K word short tie-in novels for the Boy Scouts of America, was actually trying to write about topics for which he (as a straight white male Californian who grew up from 1907-1930) had no developed vocabulary because such things simply weren’t talked about in Polite Society.
Unlike most of his peers, he at least tried to look outside the box he grew up in. (A naturist and member of the Free Love movement in the 1920s, he hung out with Thelemites back when they were beyond the pale, and was considered too politically subversive to be called up for active duty in the US Navy during WW2.) But when he tried to look too far outside his zone of enculturation, Heinlein often got things horribly wrong. Writing before second-wave feminism (never mind third- or fourth-), he ended up producing Podkayne of Mars.
Trying to examine the systemic racism of mid-20th century US society without being plugged into the internal dialog of the civil rights movement resulted in the execrable Farnham’s Freehold. But at least he was trying to engage, unlike many of his contemporaries (the cohort of authors fostered by John W. Campbell, SF editor extraordinaire and all-around horrible bigot). And sometimes he nailed his targets: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as an attack on colonialism, for example (alas, it has mostly been claimed by the libertarian right), Starship Troopers with its slyly embedded messages that racial integration is the future and women are allowed to be starship captains (think how subversive this was in the mid-to-late 1950s when he was writing it).
In contrast, Heinlein’s boomer fans rarely seemed to notice that Heinlein was all about the inadmissible thought experiment, so their homages frequently came out as flat whitebread 1950s adventure yarns with blunt edges and not even the remotest whiff of edgy introspection, of consideration of the possibility that in the future things might be different (even if Heinlein’s version of diversity ultimately faltered and fell short).
August 22, 2018
The History of Virtual Reality – A New Place to Call Home – Extra Sci Fi – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 21 Aug 2018From Aldous Huxley to Philip K. Dick, early references to virtual reality simulations abound in science fiction literature, and tremendously impacted consumer anticipation for VR technology available in the modern day. Many thanks to Oculus Rift for sponsoring the next two episodes of Extra Sci Fi and giving us a chance to explore our collective definition of virtual reality.
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August 15, 2018
Robert Heinlein – Highs and Lows – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 14 Aug 2018Heinlein’s novels made science fiction mainstream and even contributed to modern libertarianism. His novels vary widely in the philosophies they explore, but ultimately they all reflect how Heinlein saw himself: as the self-reliant “competent man” protagonist of his stories, despite glaring inconsistencies.
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August 14, 2018
Demon Hunters S.O.L.: Cleanup Crew
Zombie Orpheus Entertainment
Published on 23 Jul 2018Honor. Glory. Adventure. The Clean-Up Crew gets none of these things. What they do get is every dirty, stinky, nasty job on this plane of existence. When you need a demon slain, call someone else. When you need that demon’s corpse to be disposed of per Guideline 345b while keeping the normies none the wiser? That’s when you call the Clean-Up Crew. It’s a dirty job, and they are the ones who have to do it.
Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License.
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August 9, 2018
Robert Heinlein – Rise – Extra Sci Fi – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 7 Aug 2018Before we delve into Robert Heinlein’s famous works, let’s look at an overview of his writing career and the philosophical ideals he was known for: particularly his libertarian worldview, although even this is still hotly debated.
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August 2, 2018
Books on the ISS
No, that’s not books about the International Space Station, but physical books on the ISS:
The International Space Station is featured in this image photographed by an STS-132 crew member on board the Space Shuttle Atlantis after the station and shuttle began their post-undocking relative separation. Undocking of the two spacecraft occurred at 10:22 CDT on 23 May 2010, ending a seven-day stay that saw the addition of a new station module, Rassvet, replacement of batteries and resupply of the orbiting outpost.
Via Wikimedia Commons
The astronauts on the International Space Station are obviously busy people, but even busy people need some time to relax and unwind. In addition to a well-stocked film library (particularly strong on movies with a space theme, including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Gravity), there are also plenty of books in their informal library.
Some are brought up by the astronauts – Susan Helms was allowed ten paperbacks and chose Gone With the Wind, Vanity Fair and War and Peace in her carryon. Others come with space tourists such as billionaire businessman Charles Simonyi, who brought Faust and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Authors whose works appear several times in the list include Daniel J. Boorstin (3 books), Terry Brooks (5), Lois McMaster Bujold (11), John Le Carré (3), and David Weber (13).
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August 1, 2018
Isaac Asimov – Foundation & Empire – Extra Sci Fi – #3
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.
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July 26, 2018
Isaac Asimov – Laws of Robotics – Extra Sci Fi – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 24 Jul 2018Asimov is famous for coining the Three Laws of Robotics, but to him they weren’t the “answer” to how robots could be used in the future — they were an intentional reflection of humanity’s potential failings.
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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 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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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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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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