Science fiction

Did someone call you out as a Trekkie?

Actually, I like it sometimes. I also think that if you like fiction in general, separating out the "science fiction" is a bit trickier than you might think. Do you like fiction in general? What do you hate about science fiction? What is dangerous about it?

Heart disease, obesity, etc.

Too much of blatant attempt to cause a car crash here Dom. Should've been subtler.

Unless you have Jagz or Jez coming as 5th column.

do ... not ... rise ... to ... challops ... bait ...

looks like dom got barred from the of slugs and stars facebook group

oh boo
i hate taking things seriously when they're not meant that way
:(

Too much of blatant attempt to cause a car crash here Dom. Should've been subtler.

Dom?

Subtle?

I hate like 95% of it

It is becoming a slow day. Shock therapy won't work. Well, it might. We'll see.

http://www.dragondrop.org/hello/233/984/640/wookies.jpg

Topic conceived while thinking about how, due to the limited cultural and social experiences of many people working in the field of "letters", how more has been written on an explanatory and critical field about trash like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The X-Files rather than, say, The Sopranos, The Wire, or Mad Men. Surely this is going to have implications for the upbringing of our children, and our children's children. Especially when they introduce TV scripts onto English literature courses, and Domenico Passantino Jr III is being forced to write 5,000 words about Reaper.

http://catmas.com/images/2007/i-are-dunecat.jpg

space is boring

nah space is ok

Isn't Buffy the Vampire Slayer also a really creepy concept, when you consider how, throughout literary history, the vampire was an anti-semitic caricature? And then all of a sudden you have an hour on TV a week delighting in a blonde-haired, blue-eyed devil killing racist caricatures of Jews?

They're easy to write about coz they have organised fandom, which is waht a lot of the blather is about. (xpost)

Spike wasn't a jew he was a hunk.

I'm helping you out here.

I'm talking about intent rather than intangible details.

more has been written on an explanatory and critical field about trash like Buffy the Vampire Slayer

welcome to ILX

this thread is totally scifi

dom is absorbing all the challop energy from the rest of ilx and harnessing its power to create a super weapon

Spike wasn't a jew he was a hunk.

-- Raw Patrick, 3. juni 2008 12:22 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

I thought better of making that post, but there it is!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51B8%2BrrCRCL._SS500_.jpg

Have you heard this Dom?

Maybe Dom's just been influenced by the lack of professional wrestlers with sci-fi gimmicks.

Is it as good as Unkle?
xp

I like science fiction. I also think The Wire, Mad Men and the Sopranos are way way way better than Buffy or the X-Files. The vast majority of the SF I consume is in book form, which is the medium in which the huge, crazy ideas which are the genre's strong point have the most room to breathe and expand. I have also never been a Trekkie.

Maybe Dom's just been influenced by the lack of professional wrestlers with sci-fi gimmicks.

-- treefell, Tuesday, 3 June 2008 13:29 (7 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

Interesting point you touch on, but I'd argue that while pro-wres and sci-fi are attempting to do similar things (play out a good-vs-evil battle while touching upon socio-political fears of the day), wrestling does so in a more interesting, more effective, and more... aware-of-cultural-history manner. Which is why professional wrestling has always been a mainstream, socially acceptable concern, but why science fiction is seen as something for malcontents.

evidence for the defence: tarkovsky's solaris

Professional wrestling has always been a mainstream, socially acceptable concern, but science fiction is seen as something for malcontents? Wow, this is news to me.

play out a good-vs-evil battle while touching upon socio-political fears of the day

The entire multi-media genre is not as morally simplistic as its most populist extremes, you know.

I think to dismiss ALL sci-fi is just as dangerous as you're making sci-fi out to be, but you've certainly got a point about the more mainstream, not-really-scientific fantasy-codswallop end of the scale. Oh look, Chap just said it for me.

No, but if were to reduce both sci-fi and wrestling down to their base level, you'd have the blue-eye versus the invader, yes?
xp

Cha(llo)p, however, is a big Doctor Who fan, which is where our concordance falters.

all tv series sci fi is pretty shit, but most movies can be okay.

Professional wrestling has always been a mainstream, socially acceptable concern, but science fiction is seen as something for malcontents? Wow, this is news to me.

-- Maria, Tuesday, 3 June 2008 13:34 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

Think of all the famous professional wrestling fans. Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth II, Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra, Idi Amin. All people who were mainstream figures.

Think of all the famous science fiction fans. John Redwood.

Dom, where do you stand on Asimov, Dick and other such writers? Oh wait xpost I C WAT UR DOIN

Yeah, all sci-fi is shit and evil.

I think if you're going to start defending your position here by reaching for the dead white guy canon, Louis, you're pretty much admitting you've lost.

The only way to win on this thread is to have never read it.

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Beam/DeathStar3.jpg

Where's the MiB memory-eraser when we need it?

too late Jarl

think I'll check back in an hour

The power of belief

Reality is described as spread thinly on the Disc, so events may be affected by expectations, especially those of 'intelligent' species such as humans, dwarfs etc. Such a world is not governed by physics or logic but by belief and narrative resolution. Essentially, if something is believed strongly enough, or by enough people, it may become true. Jokes such as treacle mines and drop bears are real on the Disc; in reality lemmings don't actually rush en masse off cliffs, on the Disc they do, because that is what people believe (actually, since mass suicide would seriously foul up natural selection, they tend to abseil down them instead). This is also exploited in both wizard and witch magic. For example, if you wish to turn a cat into a human, the easiest way is to convince him, on a deep level, that he is a human.

okay discworld is a completely justified target for your wrath, dom.

not that any scifi has actually been mentioned on this thread yet

The energy cannot be seen in its pure form. It takes the form of things and ideas. As the beauty of a flower is a form of the energy, so is the thought you just had to get some ice cream. The energy mutates at will and without it there is nothingness. The void of no perception.

The closest to a pure form of the energy is love, for love is very similar to the energy itself. Love is watered down well whiskey on the rocks while the energy is perfect whiskey tasted without it ever touching anything but your lips. Life is the glass, the water and the ice.

When the energy mutates, it leaves a void in the form it leaves behind. Life mutates into another form of the energy and death fills the void. Love continues to exist. It does not mutate as well as life. When that love cannot be given or expressed, a well is created. The more that we love and are left with no open way to express that love, the greater becomes our need to give that love where we can.

Love is what happens when the energy gives birth to life, for all things depend on it in some form. Love is how souls communicate with each other. They are otherwise alone within their own realities. If souls do not find ways to communicate with each other, they begin to atrophy.

Love is what happens when souls communicate.

The connection between certain forms of love and reproduction is not coincidental. Souls conceive as well as bodies. If the souls are not communicating at the moment of physical conception, a void remains that must somehow be filled.

Because the act of sexual reproduction naturally exposes two people to each other in many ways, it is very rarely that souls do not communicate during conception.

The energy may take the shape of love only for an instant in time, or it may maintain that shape forever. Most forms of love fall towards the shorter, those that increase in intensity over time are to be treasured.

Souls form bonds over time by communicating with each other. The strongest bonds are those forged in the creation or relighting of souls, conception.

Each soul travels and accumulates and loses energy. It takes a certain amount of energy to be relit in various frames. The lower frames require little energy to relight a soul. The higher frames require a great deal of energy before allowing a soul to be relit within them. The lower one sinks, the more difficult it is to rise to a higher frame. One must work to accumulate positive energy in order to rise in the frames. The giving of love is the greatest generator of positive energy. That positive energy is greatly reduced when one gives, not just of love but of anything, while expecting a return on investment.

Love is not an investment.

Negative energy is created by taking, and it is much stronger when nothing is given in return or when what is taken is not offered. The thief, the rapist and the murderer accumulate more negative energy than they can balance in one lifetime. A liar creates as much, if not more, negative energy than a thief.

A soul remains in one frame and its equivalents as long as it remains in balance. When it is stronger in positive energy, it rises. When it is stronger in negative energy, it falls.

A soul can be destroyed by falling too low, beyond what can be framed. Soul death is the result of having no other soul to orbit, either within the nothingness beyond frames or where no other soul will enter its orbit.

A dead soul is as immortal as a living soul.
It floats forever alone and unable to feel anything.

Those who accumulate enough positive energy to rise to a higher level of being experience enlightenment. Their souls may be able to communicate with souls at a higher level of being. The soul begins to travel before the body. The soul always connects with the next frame before the body, however it may only be an instant. Souls exist on a different concept of time where an instant outside in a frame may be as long as a thousand years within the soul.

A poor starving man, beaten and cheated by his cruel overlord has more opportunity to travel higher than he who dines at the overlord's table.

The souls of a liberated people have less opportunity for higher travel, but a frame can itself rise higher when the souls of its people as a whole generate more positive energy than negative energy. Prophets have spoken of frames rising and teachers have attempted to pass the knowledge that it can be done.

When something is taken from you, whether it is a material thing, your life or your dignity, you expel negative energy that is absorbed by the thief in question. A man who stabs another man is wounding his own soul with the negative energy he takes from the man he is stabbing. One can only avoid absorbing negative energy from taking the life of one without any negative energy. Such an soul would absorb and destroy negative energy from those who try to take from him.

The blueprint of the soul is not a document in the sense that documents are defined here. It is a living document comprised of the energy, defined by those who have written in it by existing. It is the heart of the energy.

Religions become a necessity in creating gatherings for passage together into a higher frame. At the heart of any true religion are the same teachings, surrounded by a myriad of rituals and trappings. These help to define a higher frame, and often to define a lower frame. Passage together to a frame conceived within the collective reality of the religion allows those who accumulate enough positive energy to advance to that higher frame. For those who would not follow the heart of the teachings and seek to expel negative energy, it is pointless to expect any frame advancement. For those that do follow, and believe, a convergence of souls occurs within the higher frame.

Most religions have at their heart the same code, although the translations are done within different collective realities and therefore vary within that context. The particulars change. Any religion with the code as its heart will be able to penetrate the core of individual souls, focusing their fundamental spiritual reality on a shared vision. Souls place their faith in a higher being's guidance and wisom, thus granting power to that being. A kingdom in a higher frame is more powerful and means something different than it does within this frame. The subjects of a higher frame often come to that frame through their faith in a higher being there.

It is easier to follow an existing trail into a higher frame than it is to create your own. Not only must one be able to envision the frame and create it from faith, one must then be able to populate the new frame with other souls or one will remain alone there until the guidelines of that frame allow you to exit.

Harmony is the ultimate goal of souls, but each soul's perception of that harmony is different. This is why there are very few souls one can find true harmony with. Total harmony is as easy to attain as soul perfection. We journey in search of the harmony, to experience all things and to be one with all.

"A Cyborg Manifesto" is a socialist-feminist analysis of "women's situation in the advanced technological conditions of postmodern life in the First World" (Penley, interview cited below). The "elementary units of socialist-feminist analysis," race, gender, and class (173) are in the process of transformation. The tools for analysis: Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropological (173) are problematic as they are currently articulated (1985). Problems Haraway finds with each of these "tools" of analysis:

Marxism: 1. Marxist "humanism," we can only come to know the subject through labor; relies upon a Western sense of self. 2. Erases "polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice" (159).

Psychoanalysis: 1. Relies upon the family and birth of the self "drama," which is about individuation, separation, the birth of the self, wholeness before language [Lacan's imaginary]. 2. Freudian and Lacanian (and theories based upon their work) rely upon the category of woman as other; "in this plot women are imagined either better or worse off [better off=eg. woman as goddess], but all agree they have less selfhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral [instead of the written, which is the preferred "technology" of the cyborg], to Mother" (177). 3. Universalizes. In an interview with Haraway, she asks: "Can you come up with an unconscious [which she wants to "keep"] that escapes the familial narrative...or that poses the familial narratives as local stories?"

Feminism: 1. "There is nothing about being female that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices" (155). [However, though "female" is a construction, women are still historically real.] 2. Feminism in the US has been characterized by the "natural" unity of all women, not taking into account, nor allowing room for, categories of race and class. 3. The reaction [in progress?] to this imposed unity risks "lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection" (161). Although a partial solution, why is this problematic?

"I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of 'race', 'gender', 'sexuality', and 'class'" (157). Goals of the "ironic political myth" of the "cyborg"--a utopian, "possible world." (On utopias: "Most utopian schemes hover somewhere in between the present and the future, attempting to figure the future as the present, the present as the future" [Penley, interview cited below]). Why the cyborg as a metaphor for this text?

"Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction" (150) "The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family" (151).

The cyborg does not aspire to "organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (150). The cyborg "is not afraid of joint kinship with animals and machines...of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints" (154). The cyborg is the "illegitimate child" of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.

The cyborg thus evades traditional humanist concepts of women as childbearer and raiser, of individuality and individual wholeness, the heterosexual marriage-nuclear family, transcendentalism and Biblical narrative, the great chain of being (god/man/animal/etc.), fear of death, fear of automatism, insistence upon consistency and completeness. It evades the Freudian family drama, the Lacanian m/other, and "natural" affiliation and unity. It attempts to complicate binary oppositions, which have been "systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals" (177).

Haraway likens "cyborg" to the political identity of "women of color," which "marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship" (156). "Cyborg" though, is grounded in "political-scientific" analysis. This analysis takes up most of the "manifesto."

Haraway's political-scientific analysis of where "we" are going: "We are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system" (161). Her "chart of transitions" on page 161-62 lists specifics. (This was later modified; in case you're interested in the changes, I've attached the 1989 chart below.) The movement she sees occurring is both "scary" and reason for coalition. Haraway, trained in biology, analyzes scientific discourse as both constructed and as "instruments for enforcing meanings" (164). "Scientific discourse," she says in the interview cited below, "without ever ceasing to be radically and historically specific, does still make claims on you, ethically, physically." Haraway argues that "one important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imagination" (163). The relations between science and technology, largely ignored by feminists, is a material reality which women need to be aware of--not fear or disparage. These relations are "rearranging" categories of race, sex and class; feminism needs to take this into account. Haraway's analysis of "women in the integrated circuit" tries to suggest, without relying too much on the category of "woman" (as a natural category), to suggest that as technologies radically restructure "life" on earth, "women" do not, and are not, through education, training, etc., learning to control these technologies, to "read these webs of power" (170). A socialist-feminist politics must address these restructurings.

"Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity" acknowledges Haraway's debt to writers of "science fiction," and finds in these texts the sources of her cyborg myth. "Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different political possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman" (180).

Since, as Haraway sees it, the world is changing rapidly--and this is due mainly to scientific/technological discourses and the claims they make physically upon "us"--the tools that Haraway (and ourselves) find available and in use are no longer viable. The world/culture/discourses upon which they are based are changing. And the premises upon which these tools rest are those which support capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy, which may be, according to her analysis, dwindling, but only to be replaced by something as bad, if not worse, (and possibly, she seems to suggest, better). She wants to keep some kind of agency (not based upon a whole and individual self), materialism, and a feminism not based upon natural unity between women (contradiction is allowed in the "ironic cyborg myth"). Haraway perhaps isnt doing a lot that is new in this piece. What is interesting is the rhetorical strategy, the suggestion that an anti-science stance is unrealistic and ignores potential pleasures, and the potential value of science-fiction. Haraways cyborg probably wont fare well with many readers, who arent wanting to give up much of what Haraway points to as humanistic.

1989 chart
Representation Simulation
Bourgeois novel Science fiction
Realism and modernism Postmodernism
Organism Biotic component, code
Work Text
Mimesis Play of signifiers
Depth, integrity Surface, boundary
Heat Noise
Biology as clinical practice Biology as inscription
Physiology Communications engineering
Microbiology, tuberculosis Immunology, AIDS
Magic bullet Immunomodulation
Small group Subsystem
Perfection Optimization
Eugenics Genetic engineering
Decadence Obsolescence
Hygiene Stress Management
Organic division of labour Ergonomics, cybernetics
Functional specialization Modular construction
Biological determinism System constraints
Reproduction Replication
Individual Replicon
Community ecology Ecosystem
Racial chain of being United Nations Humanism
Colonialism Transnational capitalism
Nature/culture Fields of difference
Co-operation Communications enhancement
Freud Lacan
Labour Robotics
Mind Artificial intelligence
Second World War Star Wars
White capitalist patriarchy Informatics of domination

I think Dom's gone to lunch

and the Gateway books are uniformly solid

Gateways are dope

been reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons...shit is bananas

any tips

― shirley summistake (s1ocki), Friday, November 19, 2010 1:49 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark

just don't forget that There Ain't No Stealth In Space:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth

that whole site's a fun read

dan simmons is bananas overall and pretty inconsistent afaict. read and enjoyed 'the terror', tried to read 'carrion comfort' and wanted to burn the book after 40 pages.

Isn't Buffy the Vampire Slayer also a really creepy concept, when you consider how, throughout literary history, the vampire was an anti-semitic caricature? And then all of a sudden you have an hour on TV a week delighting in a blonde-haired, blue-eyed devil killing racist caricatures of Jews?

― Dom Passantino, Tuesday, 3 June 2008 13:21 (2 years ago)

SMG is a jew

guessing he knew that

The "bazooka" part is accurate, but not the "hiding" part. If the spacecraft are torchships, their thrust power is several terawatts. This means the exhaust is so intense that it could be detected from Alpha Centauri. By a passive sensor.

SNAAAAAAAAAAP

Ha I have just this moment read a Reynolds short story where stealth by way of directional radiation plays a part.

lol @ dom tryna use fancy pants left wing cult-crit theories to rag on nerds. 'cuz the sopranos is totes pc, right?

Dan Simmons is indeed bananas. I like him.

The first and second Hyperion books are the best things of his I've read by some distance.

been reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons...shit is bananas

― glengarry glenn danzig (latebloomer)

They're a blast, just stop after The Fall of Hyperion. I've successfully convinced myself the two Endymion books don't exist but it took a decade.

I really liked The Terror and much of the Ilium/Olympos pair (though some of the racial/ethnic stuff is a huge mess I had to SMH at). I've had Drood for a while but haven't gone back to it after it failed to grab me. As Omar said, incredibly inconsistant writer but chockfull of ideas.

the Ilium/Olympos pair (though some of the racial/ethnic stuff is a huge mess I had to SMH at)

Yeah, there's some right weird stuff about Israel iirc. Still, lots of dazzling things going on in those books. I loved the Proust-loving robot probe thing.

John Crowley's "Great Work of Time" blew my head up this week

Just been to Tate Britain, saw a piece by Gerard Byrne with Dutch amateur actors re-enacting a 1963 Playboy interview with the great and the good of scifi - Clarke, Bradbury, Heinlen, Pohl, Sturgeon, etc, about the state of the world in 1984 and beyond. Very optimistic, albeit lightheartedly, sometimes even satirically, about automation and leisure, longevity, medicine and recreational narcotics, and especially the space race - space travel cheaper than air travel; the moon by the 70s and Mars and Venus by the 80s. Aside from video calls and conferencing, nothing about the information revolution. Makes you wonder what unforeseen transformations await us in the next 50 years.

lasers

cool i can't hardly wait!

they are coming very soon iirc!

Makes you wonder what unforeseen transformations await us in the next 50 years

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_jOTDyAXEFv8/SwrkgAOVMRI/AAAAAAAAABo/4B4mXqVaRzE/s1600/waterworld-spotlight.jpg

John Crowley's "Great Work of Time" blew my head up this week

Oh, that is a lovely, lovely story. So good!

Anyone read "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi? Read some froth about it being the SF debut of the year. Amazon reviews look intriguing but make it sound kind of daunting.

That sounds right up my street.

whenever I hear the word quantum, i reach for my revolver

...and end unwittingly causing a typhoon in South East Asia.

weird, i was looking at the reviews of Quantam Thief earlier as well! anyone?

I've bought a copy, and it seems genuinely interesting but I've only read one chapter so far.

I've been reading some Adam Roberts, he's pretty good. Not at all hard. Some real oddball concepts and fairly literary.

Also often very funny. He moonlights writing Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter spoofs, presumably for ££.

reading the new culture, am pretty into it

The Quantum Thief is pretty cool. It doesn't take any prisoners though. Rajaniemi is a String Theorist by trade; the weird, cutting-edge science stuff is laid on pretty thick and with no quarter given to those who might have no idea as to what on earth he might be talking about...

just finished the quantum thief - it was great. a lot left unexplained but it had enough of a 'human' (or post-human even) story underpinning the crazy stuff to keep me reading. the stuff abt the exomemory + 'gevulot' was particularly cool

i'm currently reading 'stories of your life and others' by ted chiang....wow

so are there any good SF novels of the endgame of climate change? I could google, but that's no fun.

the bacigalupi(?) thing, The Wind-up Girl touches on this. it's not about that, but is set in a post climate change, post GM crop disaster world. (i didn't like it tbh)

(wow, i spelt bacigalupi right!)

John Brunner "The Sheep Look Up"

I can think of a bunch of books that touch on it or use it as background (Robinson's Mars Trilogy, for example), but that's the only one springing to mind that uses it as the central focus

baccy-go-loopy is more about the exhaustion of resources than climate change maybe? but i did read ship-breaker first. i got the feeling that that was one of the coming areas in the genre, that and the neurological basis of consciousness

I can think of a bunch of books that touch on it or use it as background (Robinson's Mars Trilogy, for example

hm forgot Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather" uses some serious climate change/weather disruptions as its backdrop. it's not very good though.

haven't read KSR's latest but I wouldn't be surprised

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Late_the_Sweet_Birds_Sang

Early Ballard disaster novels? The Drowned World, The Burning World...I haven't read The Crystal World so I can't speak to that one.

http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/greenhouse/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausicaä_of_the_Valley_of_the_Wind_(manga)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pail_of_Air

Kim Stanley Robinson's 2013 is very very good (and has a load of stuff about climate change if Morbs is still checking this thread).

Haha, it's actually called 2312. 2013 is the year we are in.

jonathan frakes telling you you're wrong for 47 seconds pic.twitter.com/zU7HqQjGdN

— *gated reverb snare* (@softsynthbear) April 12, 2019