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And if your imagination isn't firing on all cylinders today, you can also read the book.

Read Stanislaw Lem's Microworlds. He variously suffers from elitism, spurned-author petulance, and a predilection for Hegelian phraseology, but he offers up real ideas where few ideas roam.

Here's a bit from his essay Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case — With Exceptions:

Probably the pressure of trivial literature has crushed many highly talented writers with the result that today they deliver the products that keep highbrow readers away from science fiction. This process brings about a negative selection of authors and readers: for even those writers who can write good things produce banalities wholesale: the banality repels intelligent readers away from science fiction; as they form a small majority in fandom the "silent majority" dominates the market, and the evolution into higher spheres cannot occur.

Therefore, in science fiction, a vicious circle of cause and effect coupled together keeps the existing state of science fiction intact and going.

Another essay which I thought had some real substance: Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans

Here is a fragment from my own notes, concerning an essay I wasn't able to later pin point:

[Lem] makes some rather complex arguments that separating the good from the bad is a lot harder than it looks, but the critic must first identify the correct mode of parsing a work, should it deserve one.

He also points out that the working critic with the skills to properly perform this work are ever in short supply.

With some of Dick, Le Guin, or Vonnegut I do feel like challenged to identify the correct mode of parsing the work. Vonnegut never settles for just a single dark layer.

I feel the extra depth sometimes with Gibson, Clarke, Niven, to name a few that I've liked, but I also perceive the banality, too. Gibson makes it up with tone, Clarke with his natural ability as a raconteur, and Niven with his larger-than-life extrapolations. Talent 3, genre 0.

A major problem with SF is often that our little pinprick of a blue marble is so often beaten to a bloody pulp by the Total Plot Device Holodeck, which constitutes 90% of SF's dark energy.

I, for one, welcome the new tidal wave of science fiction, social justice flamewars, and legislation that follows this. This is so promising, I may buy popcorn futures.

Mz. Sheldon, your future has arrived.

We just need to wait roughly three hundred years at this point. The science fiction relies more on genetics than hormones, but you can make the extrapolation.

This isn't something new, my undergrad university (DePauw University in Indiana) has been sending balloons 100,000 feet (I think our record is about 110,000) with digital cameras for about 5 years: http://www.depauw.edu/acad/physics/base/ Each student had a pod with their own designed experiment, a requirement for a physics course. We bought our system from Taylor University, who have been doing it twice as long.

things like a missing line in a file can happen easily. what i find much more disturbing, is that microsoft had their worldmap (the one, displayed in the time settings) wrong for years. from windows 95 up to (and including) windows xp this map had poland entirely erased! instead of the large country the map showed sea. here's a link to a screenshot of the map in question. http://www.depauw.edu/it/helpdesk/images/DST_screen.jpg

If by "greatly admired" you mean "reported to the FBI"...

"Speed: It will turn you into your parents." -Frank Zappa

And the admiration was mutual: read "Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case - with Exceptions" and "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans", from Microworlds.

From Stanislaw Lem's web site:

On September 2, 1974 Philip K. Dick sent the following letter to the FBI (Please keep in mind Mr. Dick was most probably suffering from schizophrenia):

Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2, 1974

I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.

What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA.

Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).

It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.

http://www.depauw.edu/laptop/

They're requiring 2006 freshmen to buy either a Dell or Apple laptop... Maybe I'm missing how Indiana State University requiring 2007 freshmen to do the same makes them the first?

Incidently, I found your comparision to Dick both apt and ironic, given that their interesting history.

1. Reduced dependence on software vendors. Somewhat true. I'm still locked in to the product- switching will be an enormous pain, with lots of conversion costs no matter if we're proprietary or Open Source. Switching would actually be easier with a commercial product- conduits exist for Blackboard to WebCT and back. Nothing of the sort exists for Dokeos and Sakai, the project we'd most likely move to. Plus, I've also had to deal with a fork where the lead developer took his ball and went home. That was a little tense.
2. Lower total cost of ownership. Almost certainly untrue. Yes, Blackboard would rape us on fees. But you can hire Blackboard training and support people cheap. Dokeos realistically requires a programmer to support. Luckily I like to program, but my job description when I was hired never mentioned that. (I'm rewriting it this week)
3. Easier to customize Very dependent on product. The user interface of Dokeos is vastly less configurable than Blackboard. On the flip side, since I can tweak code I have it firmly embedded into half a dozen systems here.
4. Higher level of security Very, very doubtful, again with a few exceptions. Back in the days I installed Claroline (Dokeos' parent) it required register_globals=on. There have been other places where the developers have found SQL and code injection points.

Makes me wonder what kind of fanboi he'd be if alive today. (This is where someone can mention Norman Spinrad's book The Iron Dream with Hitler as a sci-fi writer. [review by Ursula K. Le Guin])