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Science Fiction Writers Discuss The Future
An Anonymous Reader writes "Locus Magazine asks prominent science fiction writers Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Norman Spinrad, and Ken Wharton to extrapolate the future from current trends in the environment, copyright, terrorism, war, world government, and the upcoming Presidential election. How do large groups make decisions on single issues? Are centralized global systems of governance the way to go? Are stateless diasporas the driving force behind the economic development of India and China? Will there always be war? The answer to these questions and more in a round-table conducted by legendary science fiction writer John Shirley."
I gotta wear shades... but shades that hide deadly robot eyes that shoot laser beams!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I thought Science Fiction wasn't about the future anymore. At least, according to Slashdot...
Will there always be war?
The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continous
Most of the 'hard' SF writers like Niven lean heavily to the libertarian-flavour right, IIRC.
Some questions are hard to formulate - but you carry them around inside you, like Confucius overlong in the womb
Ok ... who developed a recent addiction to sci-fi only to discover that it is not the future and is now disapointed ....
... the 5th one this week
what is this
Could the moderators show their bias a bit more? There's NOTHING in his comment that is flamebait. He asked a question based on the story.
Global to Local:
The Social Future as seen by six SF Writers:
Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling and Ken Wharton
Organized and with commentary by John Shirley
Some questions are hard to formulate -- but you carry them around inside you, like Confucius overlong in the womb, waiting for a way to ask them. I wanted to know about the quality of life in the future. I wanted to know about our political life; the scope of our freedom. I wanted to know what it was going to be like on a daily basis for my son and my grandson -- I wanted to know if perhaps my son would do better to have no children at all. Those are general yearnings, more than specific questions. The questions I came up with still seem too general, and approximate. "I think it helps to use Raymond Williams' concept of 'residual and emergent,'" Kim Stanley Robinson told me, "...and consider the present as a zone of conflict between residual and emergent social elements, not making residual and emergent code words for 'bad and good' either." Residual and emergent: yes. But what will reside and what emerge? From here, the future is just that unfocused. So I simply I asked the only questions I had... and six science fiction writers answered.
#
1) In the past you've written science-fictionally about the social future. What's changed in your estimate of the social future since then? Do you have a sharper picture of where we're going, socially?
Ken Wharton: "I've been pondering psychohistory lately -- not Asimov's big sweeping trends, but how large groups make decisions on single issues. Those with money and power are approaching Hari Seldonesque abilities, gradually steering public opinion using knowledge of how groups think, and I only see that trend increasing as basic human instincts are incorporated into more realistic game theory models. Individuals, on the other hand, often don't have the time and/or inclination to dig into any particular issue for themselves -- meaning that many people will tend to make decisions using the very instincts that are most easily manipulated."
Considering the revelations in the documentary Outfoxed, about right-wing control of news content on the Fox channel, it's a timely comment. It seems to dovetail with Kim Stanley Robinson's: "It also helps me to think of us as animals and consider what behaviors caused our brains to expand over the last two million years, and then value some of those behaviors."
Norman Spinrad: "The biggest change, one which I didn't get at the time, was the rise to dominance of the American Christian fundamentalist far right. Where are we going? If Kerry should be elected, back to the Clintonian middle. But if Bush is re-elected, straight into the worst fascist shitter this country has ever experienced. We're on a cusp like that of the Roman Republic about to degenerate into the Empire. Though in many ways it has already."
Pat Murphy is thinking more about our health risks, the burdens we may have to carry: "I don't know if it's sharper, but it's definitely bleaker. Here are two of the trends I'm currently watching: The emergence and spread of certain diseases -- fostered by human activity. Consider the rapid spread of the SARS epidemic by international travelers, the emergence of Mad Cow Disease (which spread when sheep by-products were put in high-protein livestock), the role that global warming may play in increasing the geographic range of mosquitoes that spread malaria. The increase in children with Asperger's syndrome and autism. Though generally described by the medical establishment as 'disorders,' both Asperger's syndrome and autism are caused by a neurological difference. Affected individuals think differently, particularly with regard to communication."
Cory Doctorow is thinking about control of information and technology as the deciding factor -- leading to a new colonialism: "As you'd expect, I think the social future is tied up intimately with co
Hi,
e ber)?
Does anyone know of a right wing science fiction writer?
John Ringo (http://www.johnringo.com/)? David Weber (http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=dw
Baen has a few.
Bye,
Ori
-- Support a free market in the field of government
...if you look at it one way, it's easy. In the simplest sense, the left is about change, the right is about preserving the status quo. Science fiction writers are preoccupied with change because they speculate about the future. Then again, I think that vastly oversimplifies the libertarian tone and anti-fascism of much science fiction. Science fiction authors tend to look into the future and expect the consolidation of powers, which scares them. Because they think more than the average person about the negative side of the current course of humankind, they are more inclined to want to change it.
On economic issues, sci-fi writers seem to run the gamut.
Of course, if you want to read some nutty religious-whackjob fantasy stuff, I'm sure you can find that really popular Revelations-inspired fantasy series at Walmart or your favorite local Christian bookstore, if pseudo-religious drivel is up your alley. I guess that's close to being "right wing" sci-fi.
As for what this is doing in politics.slashdot.org, that truly beats the hell out of me.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/
So a few rich guys's beachfront houses have to be pulled back a bit. Overall, more arrible land up north seems like it would do more good than harm.
"I wondered why the Titans had not attacked Russia first; Stalinism seemed tailor-made for them. On second thought, I wondered if they had. On third thought I wondered what difference it would make; the people behind the Curtain had had their minds enslaved and parasites riding them for three generations. There might not be two kopeks difference between a commissar with a slug and a commissar without a slug."
I just don't understand some people. Why is their selfishness so out of control that they have to take questions and reply with their political hate? It doesn't provide a fair response to the question.
What I did get from this...
More of the blame the US for the world.
Excusing terroist because of point #1
Ignoring all the other wars and genocide going on because no easy way to blame on the US (sudan anyone?)
Praise the EU and UN.
Bash Bush
You asked the wrong questions
Global Warming is real
Essentially the litany of the left. I guess that could be summed up as Science Fiction.
Just once I would love to read interviews where they kept their political crap out of it. I don't need Bush haters or Kerry haters let alone US haters - if thats your opinion then fine, do not corrupt an interview with them on an entirely separate subject.
I've found myself liking what I call the "past-future" more. Things like Sky Captain or that animated feature that will come out later this year about a world powered entirely by steam. These kinds of things seem very interesting to me. If you want to make a movie or book about the question on whether or not replacing people's jobs with robots is good or bad, why set it in the distant future? The robots could be powered by nukes, sure, but you could also power them with steam! Or hampsters! Or SOMETHING other than some kind of atomic battery.
The future has been done. It's time to lay off the true future for a while, and look at the alternate futures that won't be. Use what people thought the future would look like in the 1880s, or the 1920s, or something like that. I've seen enough "future of the 1990s/2000s". Show me something different.
Just a thought.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Orson Scott Card opinions on keeping marriage gay-free to save the future of civilization puts him a bit right of center.
I think that's true. You don't find many current republican SF writers, because Bush turned the Republican party into the Party of the Fundimentalist Church. You don't see anti-stem-cell preaching in SF works.
Guess I've been living under a rock!
Meanwhile, when Vernor Vinge talks about the future, I sit up and listen. Er, read. Whatever.
I read Usenet for the articles.
The legendary John Shirley? I've never heard of him, nor has my sci-fi addicted wife.
Global to Local:
The Social Future as seen by six SF Writers:
Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling and Ken Wharton
Organized and with commentary by John Shirley
Some questions are hard to formulate but you carry them around inside you, like Confucius overlong in the womb, waiting for a way to ask them. I wanted to know about the quality of life in the future. I wanted to know about our political life; the scope of our freedom. I wanted to know what it was going to be like on a daily basis for my son and my grandson I wanted to know if perhaps my son would do better to have no children at all. Those are general yearnings, more than specific questions. The questions I came up with still seem too general, and approximate. "I think it helps to use Raymond Williams' concept of 'residual and emergent,'" Kim Stanley Robinson told me, "...and consider the present as a zone of conflict between residual and emergent social elements, not making residual and emergent code words for 'bad and good' either." Residual and emergent: yes. But what will reside and what emerge? From here, the future is just that unfocused. So I simply I asked the only questions I had... and six science fiction writers answered.
#
1) In the past you've written science-fictionally about the social future. What's changed in your estimate of the social future since then? Do you have a sharper picture of where we're going, socially?
You have to admit, science fiction writers tend to be pro-science (duh) and the Bush administration doesn't have a very good reputation with respect to science.
Science fiction writers do seem to be overwhelmingly liberal. Given the recent news story about brain differences between liberals and conservatives, the liberals having more empathy, this makes some sense. Writers need empathy to write from different character points of view. Just a theory.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Colonialism...the developing world has been strong-armed into affording IP protection to foreign ideas... A guy in Maastricht worked out that if every Burundi copy of Windows were legitimately purchased, the country would have to turn over 67.65 months' worth of its total GDP to Microsoft. This is the impending disaster, a new form of colonialism that makes the old forms look gentle and beneficent by comparison
I don't know about the historic forms of colonialism appearing "gentle and beneficent", but I think this is a particularly insidious way the developed world can extort from and suppress the developing. Eventually the developed world's fundamentally impalpable IP and financial management of the rest of the world will burst. What will matter in the end is that the manufacturing capacity is in Asia, the cheap farmland and farm labour spread across the third world and the IT solutions in India. Britain lost its position as "workshop of the world" after the 1870s (already happened in the U.S.) and it took only one major war to make it lose its financial centrality (all the U.S. really has left). How long can the developed world as it currently is really hold on to its unnatural domination? Kudus to Doctorow to his very apt parallels between the old and new colonialisms.
Slashdot pronognostication is offtopic for a Slashdot article on predicting the future??
These are pretty well-known science fiction writers, at least in the sf community. All have published novels and most have awards of one kind or another. Most of them have very strong science backgrounds. Ken Wharton is a physicist, for example, at San Jose State.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
As I stated in my blog:
www.geocities.com/James_Sager_PA
People in more educated societies want to preserve wildlife. Poverty is what really endanger animals. If people globally grow at a faster rate than their infrastructure can hold them, then poverty will increase. This will result in more pressure on the environment. Its imperitive that science and technology play its role in the advancement of the human species so we can achieve sustainability.
Its funny too because often protestors who stop the construction of a hydroelectric plant indirectly cause more damage to the environment than they're saving.
God spoke to me.
In short, science fiction writers have a unique perspective not only on what may happen in the future but what is actually happening right now. So it is very interesting to see what they have to say about a present that is quickly becoming more and more like a science fiction scenario with AIDS, SARS, 9/11, RFID, TIA, ubiquitous computing and ecommunication, etc, etc... Our culture is obsessed with these things so why hasn't Locus done a roundtable like this until now?
and it didn't come directly from any of the sci fi futurists, one of them just mentioned it as his best quote:
"Then I heard Lenny Bruce say: 'If you want to imagine a world government, think of the whole world run by the phone company and nowhere else to go.' "
A-MEN!
Will there be flying cars???
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
In Playgrounds of the Mind, Niven says that Pournelle, an ex-communist, now "likes to describe himself as a 13th century liberal. (`The king is taking too much power to himself! The rights of the nobles are being unjustly eroded--')".
NOrman Spinrad has been predicting the end of civilization as we know it, and/or the collapse of the US into fascism, for thirty years that I remember.
Bruce Sterling has been pushing the end of US innovation and the collapse of the economy for most of that time.
I know most of those people, more or less, and while I love much of their fiction, I can't think of any one of them that I would consider other than a negative predictor.
If they are all that worried, we must be in pretty good shape.
A bunch of folks at a party at Pournelle's came up with Star Wars/SDI back in the 80s.
These are pretty good writers, with quite a number of awards between them. They're all also experts in science/technology. Have you read any of them? Care to explain why you think they're so bad? Or, barring that, who do you think the best sf writers are today? Preferably living ones.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Just curious, do you have a source for this or is that your interpretation? The interesting thing about the society in High Castle was that it flowed from the idea that the other guys had won WWII. A street marketplace with asian stuff doesn't evoke that to me, and even if I were to agree about the filming conjuring a sense of hustling and hanging on I don't think that points uniquely or compellingly to High Castle either.
Anyway, I agree that Sci-Fi is enfeebled as a genre when people reduce it to, or require of it, visions of the future, and I'm not trying to start a /. bitch-fight .. I'm really just wondering if you would elaborate on why you see the society in High Castle portrayed in BR.
John Shirley was cyberpunk's patient zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent. A Carrier. City Come A-Walkin' is evidence of that and more. (I was somewhat chagrined, rereading it recently, to see just how much of my own early work takes off from this one novel.)
Attention, academics: the city-avatars of City are probably the precursors both of sentient cyberspace and of the AIs in Neuromancer and, yes, it certainly looks as though Molly's surgically- implanted silver shades were sampled from City's, the temples of his growing seamlessly into skinstuff and skull. (Shirley himself soon became the proud owner of a pair of gold-framed Bausch & Lomb prescription aviators: Ur- mirrorshades.) The book's near-future, post-punk milieu seems cp to the max, neatly pre-dating Bladerunner.
So this is, quite literally, a seminal work; most of the elements of the unborn Movement swim here in opalescent swirls of Shirley's literary spunk.
That Oregon boy, with the silver glasses.
* * *
That Oregon boy remembered today with a lank forelock of dirty blond, around his neck a belt in some long- extinct mode of patent elastication, orange pigskin, fashionably rotted to reveal cruel links of rectilinear chrome spring: "Johnny Paranoid," convulsing like a galvanized frog on the plywood stage of some basement coffeehouse in Portland. Extraordinary, really. And, he said, he'd been to Clarion.
Was I impressed? You bet!
I met Shirley as I was starting to try to write fiction. Or rather, I had made a start, had abandoned the project of writing, and was shamed back into it by this person from Portland, point-man in a punk band, whose dayjob was writing science fiction. Finding Shirley when I did was absolutely pivotal to my career. He seemed totemic: there he was, lashing these fictions together and propping them in the Desert of the Norm, their hastily-formed but often wildly arresting limbs pointing the way to Other Places.
The very fact that a writer like Shirley could be published at all, however badly, was a sovereign antidote to thesinking feeling induced by skimming George Scithers' Asimov's SF at the corner drugstore. Published as a paperback original by Dell, in July 1980, City Come A-Walkin' came in well below the genre's radar. Set in a "near future" that felt oddly like the present (an effect I've been trying to master ever since), spiked with trademark Shirley obsessions (punk anti-culture, fascist vigilantes, panoptic surveillance systems, modes of ecstatic consciousness), City was less an sf novel set in a rock demimonde than a rock gesture that happened to be a paperback original.
Shirley made the plastic-covered Sears sofa that was the main body of seventies sf recede wonderfully. Discovering his fiction was like hearing Patti Smith's Horses for the first time: the archetypal form passionately re- inhabited by a debauched yet strangely virginal practitioner, one whose very ability to do this at all was constantly thrown into question by the demands of what was in effect a shamanistic act. There is a similar ragged-ass derring- do, the sense of the artist burning to speak in tongues. They invoke their particular (and often overlapping, and indeed she was one of his) gods and plunge out of downscale teenage bedrooms, brandishing shards of imagery as peculiarly-shaped as prison shivs.
Mr Shirley, who so carelessly shoved me toward the writing of stories, as into a frat-party swimming pool. Around him then a certain chaos, a sense of too many possibilitics -- and some of them, always, dangerous: that girlfriend, looking oddly like Tenniel's Alice, as she turned to scream the foulest undeserved abuse at the Puerto Rican stoop-drinkers, long after midnight in Alphabet City, the visitor from Vancouver frozen in utter and horrified disbelief.
"Ignore her, man," J.S. advised the Puerto Ricans, "she's all keyed up."
And, yes, she was. T
Well, they're obviously more fore-sighted than most people. Seriously though, left vs right in the real political arena isn't about ideas. It's about placating the most people for the next brief moment in time.
I mean, we're talking about a populace too busy wiping the grease off their faces to think about how much their obesity will cost their children.
Of course, some left-leaning SF writer might talk about free voluntary government-funded stomach-stapling for American citizens, but does that make it a bad idea?
So?
I think your a little confused. Both sides seek out change which benefits their stance. The key difference in left vs right is that the left believe laws are subject to wide interpetation while the right sees a narrower interpetation.
As to sci-fi writers. They run the gamut though a few of this bunch have definite chips on their shoulders involving the current administration. It would have been nice for them to reply to the questions at hand instead of inject political views into it, especially rabid ones.
I did note that these guys are basically wusses. They seem to bend over backwards to not offend certain groups. They bought into the blame us for them craze. I did find it humorous that a few of them look toward the EU or UN as examples of what it could/should be like. Considering that the UN is a bureacratic nightmare that cannot act as no one can agree and the EU is quickly moving that way I wonder if they know what they wish for? A government so weighed down it cannot act?
Orson Scott Card comes to mind.
http://www.hatrack.com/
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
Was this before or after Ronald Reagan told everyone about it?
This is a really good point, because quite a lot of the "right-wing" science fiction writers like Heinlein were certainly not socially conservative. Orgies/incest appeared in a lot of Heinlein's books. Someone above made the point about Niven being Libertarian, and that's certainly more consistent with the default right-wing sf writer from the ones who come to mind.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
L. Neil Smith is a libertarian Sci-Fi / Fantasy writer. Try "The Probability Broach" first.
If you want to imagine a world government, think of the whole world run by the phone company and nowhere else to go. -- Lenny Bruce
Except people in the coming years may find a contradiction between "phone company" and "nowhere else to go", making it harder to understand the analogy.
Technological advances make amazingly precise bombing possible -- but the inevitable human error leads to mistakes like the bombing of refugees in Kosovo and the Chinese embassy in Belgrade The bombing of the Chinese embassy was no mistake... they were housing telecommunication equipment for the Serbian military... and CIA had to send a messege...
liberals having more empathy
Yes there is the old joke:
Republicans are the party for people with no hearts.
Democrats are the party for people with no brains.
Hmm... maybe I really missed something while skimming the article, but the tone I got was disappointment, not hate. These people seemed to really care about the direction that the US is going. Do we now equate criticism with hate in this country? I think that mentality scares me more about the right-wingers than anything else about them.
Parents will scold their children when they misbehave, but that does not mean that they hate them. They scold them because they love them and they care how they develop. America is still a young country, and it does still do stupid shit -- and will under any party. But we should never let our country get to the point that the citizens cannot condemn the actions of our govenment when it does do something wrong. We citizens are still the stewards of our government.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Ironically, both of which have collaborated on more than a few books. If you want some modern space history done 'right', go and hit Weber's 'Honor' series. I'm talking the modern day rise, decay and fall of socialism framed in the future tense spanning at least, what, is it six books now? Social and political depth combined with a deep tactical warfare drama that's infinitely more readable than Tom Clancy's stuff. It's a stark contrast to half the scifi's out there featuring communism and socialism being the pinnical of human government, which is even more scifi fantasy than the material itself in light of human nature.
Personally, I want the budget of Lucas' next movie put into his books just for the epic fleet engagements alone. My favorite author to date.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
LOL Did you notice who put the roundtable together ? John Shirley. The man might as well be a communist. If you read the his song Called Youth Trilogy (the eclipse books, highly recommended by the way). He does nothing but trash what could be called mainstream american values, as he has a caricature of America destroy Europe. He Selected on the norman spinrad who felt that a working missile defense would be bad thing, Kim Stanley Robinson whose first round of books turned america into a dystopia in 3 different ways (each one he seemed to applaud) and Ken Wharton who had the amazing epiphany that news organizations manipulate the news (or in his case just right wing news organizations (Dan rather or james carville hardly come to mind on the left)
Current conservative philosophys have a fundamental hopefull cornerstone that free people can make their lives better. So you select a panel with a moderator and 4 out 5 members who regularly conjure dystopias and bemoan the world is going to heck in a handbasket yes you get a very left leaning presentation. Cory Doctorow is the only one of the panelists who sees technology as an empowering and positive force.
As to Rightwing sciencefiction writers if you look to science fiction writers who are actually technologists you find plenty of them. This is not to say all but more than enough. Jerry Pournelle wasn't there, Marc Steigler wasn't there, nor F Paul Wilson, Heck he didn't even get Vernor Vinge or John barnes. While he is no longer with us I give you probably the greatest of all time Robert A Heinlein.
What you saw in that forum was a typical problem with know it ails of both the left and the right. You got a preselected group of people together so they could engage in groupthink. There wasn't room for dissent and they knew they were right/
Finally, the king, John Shirley. The grandfather of cyberpunk, he wrote "City Come A Walkin'" (of which Gibson says was his major influence), and later the Eclipse trilogy. He's all over the map in terms of writing styles, but he's been doing SF & horror for a good thirty years. He might not be as famous as Clarke or Asimov, but his writing style is very slick and his works are all eminantly readable.
Granted, these folks might not be the most famous SF writers, but they are certainly talented. When Shirley speaks, *I* sit up and pay attention.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Robert Heinlein
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
You, sir, are a master of understatement.
Science fiction writers do seem to be overwhelmingly liberal.Given the recent news story about brain differences between liberals and conservatives, the liberals having more empathy, this makes some sense. Writers need empathy to write from different character points of view. Just a theory.
If by "liberal" you mean "open-minded," sure. If you mean "liberal" as "leftie," there are plenty of counterexamples in science fiction, such as Robert A. Heinlein, and (ugh) ol' homphobic Orson Scott C*rd.
Sorry, Shirley's been writing for about 25 years. Didn't want the wrong facts to get in the way of what I was saying.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Science Fiction Writers Discuss The Future!
Annnnd...? Don't take this the wrong way, but so what? They write fiction for a living. Hey, Earl, Fred and Myself are getting together and discussing the stock market. Because we're all experts in the stockmarket and our opinion will undoubtably be considered with some weight at the-- Well, Ok. Maybe we're not exactly experts. But we know stuff. Actually, we just complain how we didn't get the Microsoft stock back when and act like we know something about investment by playing 'Monopoly'.
I mean, isn't this about on level with Hollywood actors weighing in with their expert political opinions? Excuse me while I sit out this meeting of fiction authors speculating on real trends and events...
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That "Nimrod" guy actually said he didn't like that the Soviet Union was gone (!?!).
I recommend he move to China, Cuba, or North Korea.
Self-determination.
Think of it like an inheritance hierarchy of governance where the Object class, the class from which all other Objects inherit their properties, is imbued with precisely those attributes and methods necessary to guarantee that when someone wishes to pursue a way of life independent of the majority within which they live, they are assisted in migrating to a point in the inheritance hierarchy consistent with that way of life. Many will find this frightening of course -- since there is always something that we consider an "abomination" that cannot be allowed to exist anywhere. But rational consideration of how experiments work -- with control groups and variations -- necessitates that the minimum we must provide at the Object class of government is no more than the guarantee that anyone who says: "Enough -- I want out!" is set free to pursue his life's experiment with those of like mind.
As it turns out this is also the way to end prisons and to send life to the furthest reaches of space.
Seastead this.
Cory Doctorow "A guy in Maastricht worked out that if every Burundi copy of Windows were legitimately purchased, the country would have to turn over 67.65 months' worth of its total GDP to Microsoft. This is the impending disaster, a new form of colonialism that makes the old forms look gentle and beneficent by comparison."
"Those with money and power are approaching Hari Seldonesque abilities, gradually steering public opinion using knowledge of how groups think" -- Ken Wharton
At the risk of jumping on him for what might be a comment that has been taken out of context:
That's an interesting way to envision how the unpredictable actions of huge collectives could be predicted: just assume that they will be manipulated by demagogues, and that the demagogues' aims will be obvious from their (necessarily public) rhetoric.
Still, I don't buy it, except over such short timespans that no particular skill is required to make predictions. For example, "bin Ladin Determined to Strike within the United States." What was their first clue? His declaration of war on the US in 1998?
The lessons of the post-Cold-War period are that history is driven as much by chaotic regions like Afghanistan as by tightly controlled ones like North Korea. By definition, events in chaotic regions cannot be predicted.
Another source of chaos is diseases like SARS and AIDS. Just as Chernobyl hastened the end of the USSR, poor government responses to such diseases could result in the collapse (or reform) of those governments. We could quibble about whether a disaster like Chernobyl was or was not predictable in the decaying USSR. We can also debate about whether it's all that important in the grand march of history -- maybe it sped up the collapseof the USSR but not by much. OK, but (for those who credit Reagan for ending the Cold War by playing chicken with the USSR) consider how different history might be, had John Hinckley's aim been a little different.
Control, and predictability, are illusions. At least, to the degree proposed in Foundation. I seem to recall however that Foundation acknowledged the difficulties posed by unruly leaders coming from out of nowhere.
CBS is pushing phony documents in an attempt to sway a presidential election, and Slashdot won't take an entry on that topic. (Yes, I tried.)
But we can discuss a random circle jerk of science fiction writers.
Stuff that matters, eh?
...and based on that, I'm completely disinclined to listen to anything else he has to say. They marketed the talk around the idea that it would be based on his vision of what the world will be like when manufacturing processes catch up with simulation technology, but it was really just one big self-indulgent orgy of buzzwords and vapid counterculture. I'm a pretty intelligent guy, I love science fiction, and I'm perfectly willing to listen to smart people propound off-the-wall viewpoints, but I also have a pretty good bullshit detector, and Bruce literally didn't say anything the entire evening. I don't know how he got away with it: I guess you make up enough weird terms like "spime wrangling" and people just assume you must be cool.
The highlight of his address was when he claimed that Steve Jobs has cancer because the air isn't clean enough. After that, I basically stopped listening.
Does anyone know of a right wing science fiction writer? (Ron Hubbard notwithstanding)
;)
I've noticed that sci-fi writers cover the political spectrum from liberal to conservative/libertarian, but I would be hard-pressed to identify any as 'right wing'. The far right wing of the conservative movement seems to be dominated by a religious and moral authoritarian movement that seems very opposed to the sort of social explorations that many science fiction writers engage in. Ironic really, considering Bush has allied himself with space aliens.
The Bolachek Journals
You might try L. E. Modesitt Jr.; he held a (very minor) post during the Reagan adminstration. Like much of the right (and like Dubya), his characters largely have no qualms about the ruthless use of military force when the solution requires it. In particular, you might consider "The Parafaith War", and moreover it's sequel "The Ethos Effect"-- which can easily be read as simultaneously as strong support for the recent invasion/demolition/whatever of Iraq, and a thorough damnation of the US administration that did it.
On the other hand, while his characters will use force, they tend to make sure it is the absolute last resort, and will accept the consequences if the guess wrong. As an example, were Dubya a major secondary hero in a Modesitt novel, he would indeed have struck unilaterally on the suspicion of WMDs... but when the evidence turned up so thoroughly negative, would have resigned, and agreed to extradition for a trial at the Hague on charges of Conspiracy to Wage an Agressive War.
Also, his characters largely have a respect for the environment that makes a Greenpeace anti-whaling ship look like the crew of the Exxon Valdez; I suspect "Club of Rome" leanings. He also seems to have a distinct bias against religious fanatics of all sorts, exhibited in his Ghost of the Revelator and Parafaith War series, as well as his newest.
On yet another the other hand, his characters seems to have the "most people are morons" attitude I get from the few conservatives I associate with.
On the last limb of this octupoid, I should note that it's may be a mistake to assign the views of a character to an author. He may just be taking an interesting position, not one he agrees with.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Wow. Is it just me, or did you just completely rip off wholesale--typos and all--this guy's post? It's one thing to try to accumulate karma on slashdot, but it's an entirely different thing to steal someone's ideas and claim them as your own.
Actually, in this essay, OSC refers to himself as a Democrat.
As far as I'm concerned, war's been around as long as mankind has. I don't think a circle-jerk organization like the United Nations is going to make a shade of difference about it.
I repeat: SF is about the possible.
That's what makes science fiction
interesting. Now, what's possible
may be a dystopian nightmare [Orwell],
a high tech Singularity [Vinge], in-
telligent dogs [Simak], spacefaring
dolphins [Brin], terraforming Mars
[Robinson], the elimination of menses
[Willis], or ugly chickens [Waldrop].
The reason so much science fiction is
placed in the future is because that's
where all the possibilities are. Freighting
science fiction with the burden of allegory
kills the wonder and vision of the genre.
I love science fiction and it took
me long time to figure out why. It's
because realizing there are possibilities
is the beginning of happiness. Even
the dark visions -- hell, even Ellison
at his most malignant -- gave me a kind
of satisfaction. Perhaps the same sort
you get when you learn from your mistakes.
Fantasy? Well, fantasy is about the
impossible. And that can be fun to read
about, great fun. Because it's the only
way to experience those worlds. And some
of them are good stories. And, heh, a lot
of fantasy works just fine under a load of
allegory.
A lot of science fiction has been moved
to the fantasy camp... because we've
learned a lot about what's not possible
and what may be possible, but is so
damn improbable, it might as well be
impossible. Good science fiction, especially
that branch known as "hard" science fiction,
is increasingly difficult to write because
the frontiers of science are increasingly
esoteric and sophisticated. I like Greg
Egan's books because they're edgy, both
in terms of story and science, but I find it
more difficult to push him onto people who don't
have a certain scientific literacy level. In
comparison, John Barnes works are often compared
to Heinlein, and I think it's not just because
he's a hella writer, it's because lay people
can pick him up.
I can't wait to progress beyond being human. The endpoint I see as a custom being, where the only constant is minimum needed to host sentience. Pop it into a neutron star shell or electric armor and you're nearly invincible.
-I am an elective eunuch.
"[Orson Scott Card] refers to himself as a Democrat."
Yeah, and my mother refers to herself as '39'.
Self-description is generally inaccurate. In Card's case, there is no doubt whatsoever that his opinions and writings adhere closely to what even an American would call Right Wing. That said, his stories don't leave the tenets of fascism unquestioned, and he invariably uses conscience as a leavening factor in his plots.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
R.A. Heinlein, perhaps? He was pretty active
in Barry Goldwater's 1964 Presidential campaign.
If that don't make you a right-winger, nothing does.
--chuck
"On yet another the other hand, his characters seems to have the "most people are morons" attitude I get from the few conservatives I associate with."
i actually get the exact opposite...it is my libral friends that have the "most people are morons" attatude. On slashdot you get the same thing like 'all conservative christians are idiots' the thing is that the majority in the US are conservative christians or at least they are the largest minority.
stendec@gmail.com
"I'm not convinced that these guys have our best interests at heart.";
Really- Living frick'n proof that sci-fi writers aren't full of trite witticisms.
Christ.
Stick to fiction guys. You're more believable.
Talk about the history sure brings John Titor to mind..
:/
http://johntitor.strategicbrains.com/
Apparently he is a time traveller from 30 years in the future who got lost in our time and foretold that in this year, there will be a civil war starting in the states, which would escalate to WW3 until 2011
Well, I don't know what to make of it, but look at today's headlines, so korea set of a nuke. I can see that there are many in the US who are sick of GWB, but without any doubt, through weird 'election policies' and 'political contributions' who can you see as president of the US of A?
John Kerry? Come on, don't kid yourself. We all know the outcome now, what with E-voting and such.
This year is gonna be a fun year if that guy is for real
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
All the authors who think the EU is a successful organization don't live there. But I suppose it's just a case of the grass is greener on the other side of the ocean.
Starship Troopers is one of my all time favourite books and I found the concept of a "Fair Witness" in "Stanger in a Strange Land" very interesting, even though I didn't enjoy the book all that much.
(b) It is probably true that there's a "left wing" bias among SF writers, but then, there's a similar bias among the population of people who are literate and well-educated.
Point (b) there is nothing to be particularly smug about, of course -- if we tried hard we could probably come up with examples of intelligent and well meaning people screwing things up, and we could also find examples (not necessarily the same ones) of people who regard themselves as really smart, but on closer examination seem to have an inflated opinion...
But there does indeed seem to be a correlation between the dumbing down of the United States and the the swing to the right. Take your choice: Cause, effect, or coincidence.
Does anyone know of a right wing science fiction writer? (Ron Hubbard notwithstanding)
Jerry Pournelle.
Actually, Jerry has been both a leftie and a rightie. Self proclaimed at that.
Have a look here for the book. Yes I bought and read it, during one of those "I'm bored and stuck in an airport's mockery of a decent bookstore, they have to have SOMETHING!" moments. It wasn't horrible. Wasn't great either.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
If you're looking for alternate history, it's not hard to find.
Try say, S.M. Stirling's Isle in the Sea of Time triology where Nantucket gets sent to the bronze age, or some of his earlier stuff like the Drakkan series where South Africa conquers a big chunk of the world in the 20th century.
Harry Turtledove would also be another place to look. The Worldwar series about aliens invading in 1942 has come pretty close to present day. His other alternate civil war ending series started earlier so is still a few decades behind.
Want something a bit more present day with future stuff? Try A Hymn Before Battle by John Ringo. Some good stuff there if you like power armor and lots of military style stuff. It has a few too many Sluggy Freelance references IMHO though.
William Gibson still has some interesting stuff if you haven't read it. (I'll asume everyone on slashdot has read Neal Stephenson at least) Try The Difference Engine if you want past-future. Though these days neuromancer is almost in that category considering it's a book about the information age written 20 years ago on a manual typewriter.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
Well don't forget that at least half the people who consider themselves left wing in this country are still conservative. The atmosphere is so full of anti-soviet propaganda many are afraid to admit to being anything other than capitalist. This is rather a big issue. Example: Star Trek (duh), an apparent socialist paradise created with technology (we don't get to see the kinks).
I personally put my left-wing/right-wing dividing line straight on the socialism/capitalism line. If you are capitalist, I consider you to be economically and probably politically conservative (perhaps socially liberal, more people are liberal there). The same goes for sci-fi authors.
As for democracy vs republic vs fascism, etc, that's a completely different scale.
Actually, I have several books of Niven, and of Niven and Pournelle, and of Pournelle only, and it seems to me that Pournelle is more the right-wing type than Niven.
If you have read Pournelle's monthly columns in Byte, you can gather his right-wing stances from the comments in between too.
In a review of Hugh Hewitt's recent book, If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It, Card lays his take on the upcoming US Presidential Election, Kerry vs Bush.
/ hughhewittcom%22%3EIf%20It
m l
Book:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0785263195
Card's Review:
http://ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2004-08-29-1.ht
Card labels himself as a Democrat, yet deciding Bush over Kerry in this one.
Non-relevant fact:
Orson Scott Card is also a Mormon .
Nope, that happened in the near past.
My friend Jeff thinks that we Americans -- as a society -- deserved this. He said the following day,
"Our imperfections are what we should all be discussing today: We don't vote. (The irony of there being a primary in New York City yesterday!) When we do, we don't elect competent leaders. We don't pay attention to U.S. foreign policy, let alone understand it. We demand nothing from our media other than entertainment, which it provides to the exclusion of all else. We have mediocre schools that do little save train our children to follow the crowd and become more eager consumers. We repress people around the globe because we do not understand them, and worse yet, we increasingly do not understand ourselves and thus commit similar atrocities within our own society."
I told him he's nuts and that nobody deserves this no matter what. But it's a thought provoking idea. Did we as Americans bring this on ourselves?
one thing to try to accumulate karma on slashdot, but it's an entirely different thing to steal someone's ideas and claim them as your own.
especially when the idea is something like "blade runner is like the man in the high castle". i'm guessing that the person who actually came up with this idea hasn't read anything else by philip k. dick and so thought there must be a similarity. blade runner isn't really like any of his novels, but it still feels like something he was involved in. i think the mood is closer to a scanner darkly, ubik, or flow my tears, but only a little. anyway, why am i writing this. its not like the plagiarizer has read any pkd stuff either.
since the original poster seems to like big postmodern-sounding words like "decontextualized" i might suggest steven shaviro's doom patrols, as a very readable, but better thought out collection of essays along these lines.
just to stay a little more on-topic, i think most forms of literature are at least a little dream-like. the original post suggests that scifi is more "decontextualized" (whatever that means), but i propose that this is the purpose of any form of fiction -- to try out ideas that don't happen in everyday life, to take things we are familiar with a little further than we are accustomed to. it's interesting that a lot of scifi writers try their hand at other types of fiction later in life. one of my favorite pkd novels is "confessions of a crap artist". it's not scifi, but it feels a lot like it since the main character is crazy. and contrast this with the vast "space opera" genre, which consists mostly of totally formulaic love stories or adventure stories that are only scifi because they take place on a space ship (most of the original scifi channel programming falls into this category).
i guess the main point i'd like to make is that people who make generalizations about some form of literature or another (or some group of people or another) usually don't know what they're talking about. you should be especially wary of people who make even bigger generalizations about people who make generalizations and post anonymously.
Might I timidly suggest Dr. Jerry Pournelle? .
I doubt that you'd last one shake of a lamb's tail
if you suggested *he* was left wing
Who cares anyway. Diversity is healthy.
I really do not understand this current obsession with science fiction being about future prediction - from my perspective, science fiction is not about predicting the future - surely it would be called "future faction" instead. Science fiction is about science, about it's impact upon us, about our hopes and fears of progress and about, more than anything else, history and society itself and how technology affects them.
For evidence of this look no further than the fact the old science fiction tends to age so badly - (original) Star Trek, Dr. Who - they all seem so dated now, but I'm sure at they time they must have seemed realistic because they reflected the hopes and expectations of the time. There are some exceptions - Clarke predicted satelites... but then, he did come up with the idea in the first place so this is less an example of future prediction than future creation.
What is more, I think making predictions about the future is lazy thinking. The universe has a sneaky way of subverting everyone's expectations. Everyone whose tried it - from Marx to Fukuyama - has ended up with egg on their face. Trying to predict the future is a just a really good way of giving your critics and open field to dismiss you.
Here are my answers:
1. I have learned a lot more different viewpoints, and I have learned to appreciate the insight they give.
2. My heart say no to stronger government, but my brain say that it does help against terrorism. Countries with a strong government are much better at preventing terrorism than weak governments. Even though US and EU are they main enemies as defined by the islamic world revolution, after 9/11 most "successful" terrorist actions are done in third world countries.
However, the strength of the government is more closely linked to how free of corruption it is, than to how many secret agents it has. This is why Russian government is weak. Thus, cultivating a free press (to combat corruption) is more important than giving more powers to the secret police. Giving up to much liberty will lead to a weaker government.
3. I hope we in the future will have better models for describing social changes, and that we in the future rather than blaming the past for making mistakes, understand why these mistakes were made.
4. We, in the rich part of the world, are in no serious environmental danger. The climatic changes will not be more catastrophic than we can deal with them. At the local level, the environment has become steadily more healthy in the "rich west" for decades. In the "booming east" the same will start happing soon, as material wealth will lead to a larger concern for the environment. Africa is screwed, environmentally, as in any other way.
5. The current trend is a strong religious and national backslash to the globalisation project, which threatens modernism (civil liberties, democracy, secularity...) as well. Of course, the tide will turn again. Look at Iran for an example, where the teocracy is increasingly out of touch with the young population.
6. I believe stronger international organisations and global wealth will eventually make war an exception. Look at Europe, a continent which has been at war with itself for all of written history. Today, war between the EU members seem impossible, and EU is expanding in a way that is pacifying rather than aggrevating its neighbours. The EU rules for joining requires appicants to settle border conflicts, and to treat minorities within the borders respectfully.
7. In a sense, we already have a world government. It is called WTO. I do not believe we will have a world government in the sense of the national governments, there are too much cultural difference for that. But I can see a pressure for WTO to become more transparent, more democratic, and to take on non-economic considerations affecting trade, such as global enironment. This could lead to a convergence with other transnational organizations, such as UN and the international court.
8. I'm not sure the gap between rich an poor is widening, on a global scale. The biggest economic growth are in China and India, with more than a third of the world population, and both comparable poor countries. I see this trend continuing, and eventually even reach AFrica, which is currently left behind. On a local geographical scala and scort time scale, I see a widening in the rich countries, as the middle and lower classes are pressured by the developing countries, and a scrinking in the developing countries, as the new jobs create a new middle class, which need to be serviced thus improving conditions for the lower class. As long as we manage to handle the population growth (and it can be done), I see the living condition growing for most people, which is more important than the size of the gap.
9. You should have asked about the population growth, how to handle it, and what changes it will cause.
I have no idea who will win the US election. In a sense, it is a small version of the battle mentioned in point 5. Kerry representing modernism, and Bush the religious and natinalist backslash.
Jerry Pournelle. You can read visit his Web site (www.jerrypournelle.com to get a better idea of his political views. There are many right-wing contributors to his site; and be warned, Pournelle has nothing good to say about the neocons.
Let's put it this way: in the Known Universe he and Larry Niven created, the U.S. and Soviet Union (they've been writing for a while) colonize space after the invention of the Alderson Drive. The resulting empire has a monarchy and aristocracy for a government.
JA
http://www.johnalex.org/
Actually, in this essay, OSC refers to himself as a Democrat.
So does Zell Miller. 'Nuff said.
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Lord of the Rings IV
We will have all our senses metered by microchip implants. All sensory input will be copyrighted for viewing, litening, smelling, touching and tasting ( they have a patent on ESP, just in case). The chips will directly debit your (insert evil media conglomerate here) account. The cost will depend on the quality of the sensation. If your account runs dry they switch you off, pick you up and turn you back on at work. Some people in the developing world have been "cut off" whilst driving resulting in multi-car pile-ups and long legal battles.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Maybe Zell Miller had it right, I`d love to challenge Bush to a duel.
plz fuck off and die.
kthx.
I think there will always be war, simply because someone will always want power and know the easiest way to get it is war. There will never be a perfect utopian society because not everyone will be satisfied with their piece of the pie. If Bush is re-elected, I believe he will declare martial law by the end of his second term, on the grounds that there is a high terrorist threat. To prove that, he may pay of terrorists. If he loses this election, he may declare martial law within months. I hope he'll just leave so we can get Kerry in there.
You are truly one of the greatest assholes on slashdot. I respect your views, but George W. Bush and his entire admin. with the exception of Colin Powell, are liars, biggots, and crooks. Bush has lied about his military service, not answered questions about drug use, and did campaign work for pro-segregation senators. He's a coward, a junkie, and a racist to boot. He's ruined our ties with other countries, sent us into a war that we cannot win without help or more troops, lied about that war repeatedly, and sold out are environment to corporate interests. Kerry may not be the best alternative, but he is the only one with hope of beating Bush. Vote For Kerry 04'
RAH
Most leftists wallow in fiction
Most Rightists hide behind facts
Only untill they devise a nanotechnology virus that remains dorment untill the host trys to kill somebody then kills the host. ya that would do it.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
The thought that they may have a point never arose to you?
You don't give him enough credit. Have you read Songmaster, with protagonists in homosexual relationships without hint of negativity? While he definitely opposes gay marriage, you can't write off his attitudes/opinions with a simple "dang homophobe." There's a lot more complexity to it than that.
I remember the idea from Starship Troopers where only veterans could claim citizenship. Non-citizens were allowed to live in a country and enjoy all sorts of rights, but they were not allowed to vote. The reason was something along the lines of those willing to put their lives on the line for "the nation" were the only ones worth of having a say in its politics.
Heinlen usually gets credit for being "Libertarian." This veteran-voting thing however is a collectivist nightmare. Let me see if I understand him correctly: the electorate should be restricted to those who endured years of government indoctrination in the armed forces?
Libertarians rail against the "government sponsored indoctrination" of public schools! How could any Libertarian come up with an idea like Heinlen's?
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
There you are analysing the 6 dimensional political/social space:
- socialist versus capitalist
- big business versus petit bourgeois
- factional versus collective
- collective versus individual
- homogenous versus heterogenous
- Smithian versus Ricardian
contemplating the 3.7 dimensional submanifold of the chaotic attractor.Knowledge of the dynamics lets you predict several orbits in advance that the system is going to visit an undesirable region of the attractor. No worries. Even a tiny intervention will blossom exponentially. Knowing the dynamics you can exploit the sensitivity of trajectories on the attractor in order to intervene cheaply and inconspicuously.
But is that the only option? Adjusting the parameters of the dynamics will move the attractor. Events that were likely become deterministically impossible. Events that were deterministically impossible become likely.
What would a parameter adjustment look like? The oral contraceptive is an example. Fertility is a key parameter of society, and oral contraception makes a huge difference to the coupling constant between social pressures and individual desires for fertility and actual outcomes.
I don't have a clue how to construct a Hari Seldon style psycho-history, but that is because I'm stupid. Chaos in dynamical systems is not the problem.
The governments Germany, France, and Italy have all made huge promises to their peoples of generous pensions paid out of general taxation.
The next 30 years will see the unwinding of those promises as demographic changes make them undeliverable.
What bland words for such a dire predicament! Who will innovate in the EU, knowing that their profit will be confiscated in a desperate attempt to pay the pensions bill. Will it even be possible to do business in countries riven by such social stresses? The future will be made elsewhere. The blood of the Europeans will be drunk by monsters from the past.
I've never heard of any of these guys. The fact that they're self-proclaimed (at least) science fiction writers instead of elected officials or respected writers of non-fiction jives with the fact that they're liberal, though. I for one predict that in the future, the world will be over crowded, starving, have no wildlife left. It will be overheated, polluted, and ravaged by nuclear war. Toxins with turn everyone into evil mutants who will beg for the right to abortion on demand. There. Now everyone buy my book so I can write sci fi.
Redundant?? That was the first post to point out the parent's plagiarism, which was ignored by the mods for quite some time as the parent post sat at +5, until they finally noticed scrod's later +2 post. Why wasn't scrod modded down as redundant?
... the mod system fails again.
I agree with the other AC post
In any case, I think the disdain for others has more to do with intellectual leanings and educational background than political spectrum. I am a moderate liberal and I thoroughly disdain the masses for their non-nuanced, poorly thought out views on both sides.
Several points:
Larry Niven created Known Space, which has nothing to do with the CoDominium universe that Jerry Pournelle created. Pournelle invited Niven to work in his CoD universe to wrote The Mote in God's Eye when Pournelle couldn't buy into Niven's Known Space as plausible.
The other point is that you seem to be implying that Pournelle supports monarchy just because he wrote fictional stories about one. Of what demonstrable relevance is Pournell's fictional politics to his real beliefs?
Pournelle's not really either left-wing or right-wing as traditionally defined, I would say.
It was very intersting reading this round table article trying to understand each participant. Here are some conclusions about each author (based on their remarks, books not taken into account):
:) Avoid Pat Murphy and Kim Stanley - they are just some two boring guys.
:)
Ken Wharton - interesting and intelligent ideas. He is optimisting about our ability to handle the climate change (though he [stupidly] thinks we should have stabilised the population long ago). He seems to understand future technology the most.
Kim Stanley - pretty confused guy
Norman Spinrad - left-winger, hates Bush and the American hegemony, hates Christian fundies
Pat Murphy - panic-monger, less government is good
Cory Doctorow - anti-copyright guy, against more government too, doesn't like high American debt
Bruce Sterling - fascinated by other countries and cultures (as always)
So if you want good SF, I suggest you check out Divine Intervention by Ken Wharton (haven't read it, but it must be good), if you want to have an anti-RIAA circle-jerk*, invite Cory. If you want to whine about Bush*, do it with Norman Spinrad. And if you want to watch some anime or eat sushi, call Bruce.
Some things that the authors agree on:
- More government is probably bad
- too bad we wrecked the environment
- we'll have to deal with the global warming
- war will change shape in the future
- and they don't know who will win the elections.
* - not that I am pro-Bush, pro-copyright or anything, but I don't need a science fiction author for that.
P.S. I just hated the "The world seems dangerously chaotic" comment in the beginning. Yeah, as if it never was. Heck, Toffler wrote about it 25 years ago - everyone in the 21st century will be affected by a desease called "Future shock". Too bad, noone (besides him) realises that it is a desease and that it's irrational and harmful to think this way.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I vaguely remember the name John Shirley, but never read any of his stuff. I really had to jog my memory. If he was a legend I'd remember even if I hadn't read any of his stuff. Is he Canadian? If you want a legend's name mention Harlan Ellison or Rod Serling.
What do science fiction writer's know about the future? They couldn't predict television, man landing on the Moon, or personal computers. The predicted things like paper clothes and atomic powered personal helicopters. No the future ain't what it used to be.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Orson Scott Card?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Even with my intentional understatement, I still got a "flamebait" mod. Oh well, teach me to try to avoid distractions from the topic!
I really put factual information very mildly. Scientists and science fiction writers, and I am both, see the Bush administration ignoring science in oh so many ways. It has been documented in numerous places, and if anyone wants to dispute those stories, it still won't change the perception among these groups.
And sure, there are plenty of counterexamples to all sf writers being liberal/leftist, but go to a SFWA meeting and start talking politics and see what happens. My guess is that the field is about 80% liberal -- much like New York City where all the editors and agents live.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
-George Dubya
Aug 02 04
Not to mention:
"Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have."
-John Kerry
Source: Washington Post, In Hindsight, Kerry Says He'd Still Vote for War, Aug. 10 2004
Some choice we've got.
Don't overlook that, in light of the political gamut in other countries (the UE comes to mind), the US Democrats are still, at best, center-right.
You are finite. Zathras is finite. This... is wrong tool.
More of the blame the US for the world.
No, we blame colonialism and imperialism (now functioning as neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism, if you want to get into semantics), which the US has participated in along with Westarn Europe.
Excusing terroist[sic] because of point #1
Maybe you should stop using conservative websites as a source of information about leftists. Unless you consider any armed struggle for liberation terrorism (the standard that was applied to the African National Congress in the 80's, when Reagan considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist), in which case the founding fathers of this country would be terrorists.
Ignoring all the other wars and genocide going on because no easy way to blame on the US (sudan anyone?)
Ever notice how we (the US) only call it Genocide(TM) when it suits our purposes, or after the fact (East Timor, anyone)?
Praise the EU and UN.
First off, the EU and UN are two entirely different things. While the UN had potential, most leftists agree now that it has been rendered totaly ineffective by the veto power of permanent security council members (the US has vetoed more resolutions than anyone).
The EU is mainly an economic bloc. I don't see why they're lumped together with the UN by right-wingers. Unless it's because they're both percieved as a threat to our global hegemony - and I would say, contrary to the conservative opinion, that the UN enforces that hegemony. Even when they don't approve our actions immediatly (Iraq), they never propose sanctions against us, and eventually sign on and give what we're doing "legitimacy".
The EU on the other hand may be a genuine threat to our economic hegemony (though I hardly think that's a bad thing). In any case I don't support many things the EU is doing, and neither does the left at large.
Bash Bush
I get your point, but he just makes it so easy... it's hard to resist sometimes.
You asked the wrong questions
Put anyone on a pedestal and ask them to talk, and they'll discuss what they want to talk about. I don't see how this is a specific critique of the left.
Global Warming is real
Are you saying you disagree?
That's just silly, though. Many european nations are socialist and capitalist (don't confuse socialism (a political system) and communism (an economic system)) - Ireland, Sweden and to some extent Britain are all socialist-capitalist.
nudicle: The interesting thing about the society in High Castle was that it flowed from the idea that the other guys had won WWII. A street marketplace with asian stuff doesn't evoke that to me.
The "other guys" were the nazi's Reich, and the Japanese. In that regard it's consistent. Even more when you consider the setting, the former US being divided east/west between them. And what's the opening scene in Blade Runner ? "Los Angeles, november 2019". That would place it straight under High Castle's Japanese influence.
And of course, the High Castle is the Tyrell pyramid (taller than its surrondings) and the Man is Tyrell himself, knowing the truth about their real condition.
Makes perfect sense.
You are finite. Zathras is finite. This... is wrong tool.
You might see it this way:
- The left is for intellectuals. Professionals, scientists, etc.
- The right is for greedy bastards that sell everything for an extra penny. Economists, business men, pseudo scientists, pseudo intelectuals.
Well, I wouldn't call criticism of President Clinton "hate," but a lot of his supporters did -- and were more than willing to exploit the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing to do so. The whole "talk radio equals hate radio" and "the NRA's fund raising letter motivated McVeigh" were just some of the memes being tossed around by the mainstream media and pundits on the Left. (See Virginia Postrel's 1995 column "Fighting Words" for more on that subject.)
and earlier that year:
Hey Rayonic man, why can't we just be friends, huh?
Oh sorry forget that - just read through your hard right conspiracy theory nutbar posts, trying to make sense of why you decided to go through the trouble of marking me a foe, and I realized that I must have said something that defied your perverted perception of reality at some point, thus making me your mortal enemy. I couldn't be more pleased, and I savour seeing people like you in my freak category. Thanks for adding the psycho tag to your posts.
I've never even heard of half of these "prominent science fiction writers." Guess I've been living under a rock!
Yup. You might want to grab a copy of the Encylopedia of Science Fiction and catch up with the rest of us. My guess is that you're a hard SF / space opera fan, and you haven't heard of the authors listed because they write new wave / cyberpunk SF rather than the stuff you're into.
Cory Doctorow is a new author who has had success giving away his books under the creative commons licence. You might know him better as a blogger.
Pat Murphy has been around for a while. She mostly writes science-fantasy stuff... kind of like a midway between LeGuin and Cherryh, if you've heard of them.
Kim Stanley Robinson writes hugely popular airport newsstand bestsellers. Y'know, those big thumping books with gold leaf on the front. You've probably read his Mars books.
Norman Spinrad is one of my all time favourite writers. He is often compared to Norman Mailer (also a favourite), a comparison I find apt. You'd probably hate him, as he presents a strong criticism of psychology space opera fans in his novel The Iron Dream.
Bruce Sterling is probably best known to Slashdotters as the author of The Hacker Crackdown (full text here) and my sig. He's also a blogger for Wired and the Pope Emperor of the Virdian movement.
Ken Wharton is a relatively new writer, but a long time physicist. He's probably the most convention hard SF type writer of the lot.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Ken Wharton's "Divine Intervention" is good, an examination of some interesing ideas about time and cosmology. His short story "Aloha" which was printed in Analog a few months back is a different take on some of the same ideas. (Basically, time-reversal at the endpoints (Big Bang/Gnab Gib) but there's a bit more to it than that. I'm being purposefully vague to avoid spoilers.)
(I don't know if he has time to do much writing these days, alas... Last I heard, he was having to do all his job and his boss's job, too, after his boss died unexpectedly.)
As for Norman Spinrad -- after he says the end of the Soviet Empire was the second worst mistake of our time (second only in his mind to the election of George Bush) I've filed him in the "Loons from Planet Pinko" folder. Leaving all the other issues alone for the moment - Given all the space all of these authors gave to environmental concerns in this interview, did he read none of the reports of the state of the environment in the Eastern Block that came out after the fall of the Iron Curtain? Or did he just continue to dismiss all criticism of the "Peoples Republics" as fascist propaganda?
Jerry Pournelle on his web page http://jerrypournelle.com/ has described himself as an "old cold warrior" and a "paleoconservative." (As opposed to "neoconservatives", which he has a few sharp things to say about...)
As for social conservatives, though politically he seems more liberal, Orson Scott Card has generated quite a few flame wars on Usenet for some of his articles in the Mormon press.
I'd say don't be so quick to judge him. Have you lived in the Soviet Union? I have and I can tell you it's not that simple. I would disagree with the statement that the fall of the USSR was the second worst mistake, but if you phrase it differently, say "The corruption and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the most terrible things in human history", I would probably agree. You see, there is and there always was a lot of propaganda in the US about the Soviets and it just happened that most of this propaganda was false. Some was true, but the USA needed an enemy and Soviets fitted the profile, so they were painted as black and evil as possible. In reality, while there has been many bad things in Soviet Union, a lot was very progressive.
It is impossible to explain in a short Slashdot post, suffice to say that the simple picture of the USSR that most Americans had in their head was wrong. Think of it - if you portray the French as traitors for not supporting one of your wars, how would you portray the nation that believes there is better way to build a society than on money and profit, that successfully works towards that goal, and that is opposing America on the global arena? Facts be damned, those Russkies are evil monsters! Everything is wrong with them!
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
left?
with so many scifi about mad scientists ruining the world and people lack of "FAITH OF GOD" lead them to destruction, they are more like "EXTREME RIGHT" to me.
Yes, I do have some "Right" opinions, and I do enjoy posting on Slashdot. I put varying levels of effort into my posts, but I believe I am mostly correct.
You seem to misunderstand the Slashdot Friend/Foe system. Marking someone as a Friend or Foe is done purely for one's own benefit -- not to indicate an actual friendship/enmity. Rather, it is to highlight people whose opinions you've come to repect or disdain, and also see who those people consider Friends and Foes.
I can understand that the nomenclature can be confusing. Perhaps instead of "Friend" and "Foe", it should have been called "High Quality" and "Low Quality", or somesuch.
So no, I am not your mortal enemy, as you put it. Nothing so dramatic. But at some point you must have said something particularly egregious -- enough that I thought your basic logic facilities were suspect (at least on certain subjects.)
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Perhaps the joking aspect of the grandparent post wasn't evident enough.
Per the friend/foe categorization, I was hardly serious when I declared you a mortal enemy - I tend to track those who marks me as a foe out of humor. 9 times out of 10 it's a troll, and the other 1 out of 10 it's someone how cannot fathom a world where there are contrary opinions. I suspect that you're the latter. Perhaps one day you'll find your dream board where everyone thinks and acts just like you.
Try reading Baen books. (You can even sample them for free - whole books are available at Baen Free Library)
The political opinions of the authors run the gamut from Socialist (Eric Flint) to slightly right of Attila the Hun (John Ringo, Tom Kratman).
Two books that you might enjoy are Freehold (Mike Williamson) and A State of Disobedience (Tom Kratman)
Isn't that what they always do? ;-)
So, how is that news?
Niven is so far out on the right wing (the solution is BIGGER guns, now what was the question?) that even ESR finds him a bit much. Can it get more extreme??
That said, most of these guys are from the late 80s/early 90s, so you really *should* have heard of them.
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
I agree with you. Larry Niven is more of lefty. If you read his novel and stories there is a little mention of religon and from his discussion of organleggers in his books I assume he will favor stem cell research.
Heinlein.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
> the mainstream media and pundits on the Left
Are you fucking insane? You don't have _any_ left-wing media in your country (I'm assuming you're an American) except for those things that hardly anyone reads like "New Left Review" and "Mother Jones".
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Don't worry, I got your back in metamod...