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U.K. SF Writers Dominate Hugos
gollum123 writes "The BBC reports that For the first time in its 63-year history, all the writers nominated for the prestigious Hugo award for the best novel are British." From the article: "Mr Stross says that what an author writes is a reflection of his society, and currently US genre writers are mirroring the 'deep trauma' that 9/11 wrought on America. 'What we write tends to reflect our perceptions of the world around us,' he says, 'and if it's an uncertain world full of shadows it's no surprise you get wish fulfilment or a bit downbeat.'"
But what about your bombs? Where's your trauma?
Did anyone else ignore the U.K., read SF Writers Dominate Hugos and then think, oh those Slashdot editors?
You can't hear the cool accents in writing. I don't get it.
I certainly did. Provided a little chuckle.
I appoligize if I've spelt the name incorrectly, but I purchased the book at some of the acclaim I heard about it, but does it's odd stylictic grammar happen to bother anyone else?
I'll be reading along and all of a sudden the lack of a period after Mr. or, if I quote the first sentence of the book, "Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians." I must be dense, but I had to read it twice to actually understand what Clarke was saying. The sentence structure, the grammar, it all just appears very foreign. Is this a normal British thing? I'm honestly at a loss.
Not at all surprising, considering that all Americans are able to write nowadays is "rotf lmao lol!!!11!! gwbstehgraetestest"
P.S.: the captcha was "mammas". I like "mammas".
Hey, I live in Ecuador, and I've always looked for sci-fi written originally in Spanish, but darned if I can find much. What authors write in other languages, and do they ever get Hugo awards?
Wikipedia has the details here
Do you play with your Willy?
One: Backlash against US dominance in SF&F beforehand.
... or ...
... good thing one of the security gaurds was a fan, but nowadays I'd never even be able to do that [looks like a rocket/mortar]
Two: Backlash against Pacific NW (esp. Seattle and Vancouver) dominance in SF&F beforehand.
maybe they just wrote cooler stuff and filmed all the cool SF&F stuff up in Vancouver so we got shut out of the running?
back in the days of being a SMOF, i took Bill Gibson's Hugo from Australia to Vancouver thru customs
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I read Perdido Street Station and King Rat,I thought they were jus OK.. I hope Stross gets it. I can't beleive Richard Morgan didn't get a nod for Broken Angels.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Bloody, hell. Star Trek goes off the air and Dr. Who comes back to the air. There are too many British actors on Battlestar Galactica. Now the red coats are taking over literature. I guess this is the end of Pax Americana. Where do I surrender?
Very surprising to me is that amongst all these British nominees, there was not even a nod for Rowling's fifth book in the Harry Potter series (HP & The Order of the Phoenix), given that book #4 in the series was the Hugo Best Novel Winner when it was released in 2001.
Yeah, it *must* mean that U.S. writers are suddenly uncreative morons, rather than mere chance.
Everytime the U.S. (or more broadly: any nation) goes to war, the arts suffer. People are too distracted by the war to put a strong effort towards artistic endeavors. Then, when the war ends, there is often a mini revival of the arts. The U.S. certainly is distracted by 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and look at the result: reality TV shows.
It's called the Nebula Awards.
I don't see the problem. There have been years when almost every author was American, and there have been years when almost every author wasn't. Statistically speaking, this isn't that unusual. Maybe it was just a really good year of British writing. I say congratulations to the British, don't sweat it, and maybe we'll do better next year.
We should put together an American version of the Hugos and just ignore them
Oh please, not another Academy Awards... besides, the Hugo people got a point. I'm sick tired of american talks, TV shows, and even a movie about 9/11. Yes, it was shocking, but the world doesn't move around Uncle Sam.
I've paid little attention to where a writer is from, I just revel in the superb work that's being done these days. Yes, China Mieville evokes a bizarre London, but I'm finishing up Singularity Sky from Stross, and it doesn't seem particularly "British". As for Alistair Reynolds, Dan Simmons, George RR Martin, Peter F Hamilton, and many others, as long as they keep producing brilliant works, I'll keep reading.
That the nominees are almost always boy-girl-boy-girl. It's so hilariously PC.
Ya know, I was deeply affected by the events of 9/11. I've been a volunteer firefighter nearly my entire life, and I feel a bond of brotherhood with the guys from FDNY, despite the fact that they're career and I'm a volunteer, and the fact that they're up in NY and I'm in NC. I felt like I lost 343 brothers on 9/11.
But as painful as it was, the events themselves and the loss I felt on that day, isn't what I find most traumatizing about the whole ordeal. What bothers me most is the reaction TO 9/11 by others. Specifically I'm referring to actions taken by our government, done in knee-jerk fashion, which accomplish nothing and will infringe on the freedoms that Americans consider their natural birthright, for many years to come. Things like the Patriot Act, that thing authoring the director of DHS to do basically anything he wants, etc., in the name of the "War on Terror." That is what is truly traumatic.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
I'd rather see American writers focus more time writing things that educate Americans in a global manner. There is already more than enough sci-fi,fiction written from the past 50 years, we don't need anymore startrek potter.
American education literally revolve around European history. I feel like we were only taught Hitler was the greatest leader of all time from highschool. I find myself doing research on the House of Saud and other foreign matters just to keep up on today's news. Who cares about the Hugo award. Shift focus, lets read something else.
On a side note, a friend of mine for a very long time didn't know that Octivia E. Butler was a woman. I haven't told him yet that she's also African-American.
That said, I'm a little surprised Alastair Reynolds' "Century Rain" didn't get nominated, as it was also an excellent novel and, perhaps, especially relevant to the /. crowd. I've been meaning to write a review forever (since nobody else has) but I'm lazy, so I just write comments about it hoping someone else will.
My vote is for Charlie Stross .
It's not that I'm not ready to see the soldiers doing their thing in Iraq. I was a soldier myself, so I appreciate watching soldiers going about their business without any "analysis" from those doing the filming. Rather, I avoided the film until now because I was so angry at the monumentally stupid way in which the war was approached, from its rationale and build up to the invasion, to the beginnings of the occupation stage, to the large-scale operations in Fallujah and elsewhere.
It is supremely frustrating to see American soldiers doing their jobs with as much humor and professionalism as they can, all the while knowing that the civilian leadership at the top of the pyramid has let them down in a monumental fashion. I experienced something like that on a much smaller scale myself, when my unit left Somalia after not quite three months in country. A few months later, all American forces left Somalia. We had done our job very well, but because the American government had no real plan of action beyond immediate food security operations, a few casualties was all it took to send the global superpower packing.
So every time I see video footage of Americans in Iraq, I think back to Somalia and the way in which our leaders profoundly misunderstood the situation there before, during and after my deployment. I'm not suggesting that we stay in Iraq indefinitely to "make all those sacrifices worth something." I do, however, think that the monumental planning failures at the top of the food chain have done a tremendous disservice to the men and women of the US armed forces.
What does all this have to do with Charlie Stross's comment about the "deep trauma" of America? I think that in different ways Americans have been avoiding complex issues in our movies, our fiction, and our music specifically because we have been more deeply affected by the string of events (9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq) than we care to admit even to ourselves. For me, that means avoiding footage of the war. For others the reaction might be keeping minute track of every skirmish and ambush. Some might prefer to ignore the war entirely and pretend it isn't happening.
Those of us who believe wholeheartedly in the manner in which we are fighting Islamic militants don't want to see anything that will shake our convictions. Subversion in the cultural sphere could easily spread to the political.
Those of us who are profoundly disappointed by our leaders' lack of imagination, failure of vision, ignorance of history, and misunderstanding of the ground truth don't want to see more of the same in our entertainments. We want to be comforted that somewhere, even if only in fictional worlds, people with power are capable of making the right choice.
For the majority of the American population, who sit somewhere in the middle, the constant bickering between those who know what to do but can't do it, and those who know what not to do but can't figure out what *to* do is infuriating. We're at a watershed in American history, and people know it, even if they don't articulate it. Decisive, capable heroes, preferably unrelated to the current reality, fit the bill.
A friend of mine once said that everyone remembers the cultural achievements of Athens, but not of Sparta. Why? Because Sparta was a completely militarized society, while Athens was not. Perhaps yet another part of the bill America must pay for our hamfisted approach is that as we become more militarized, the creative and free-thinking aspects of our society become isolated and minimized.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
and are really Americans living in the UK ...
hey, when your skills are in your head like writers are, you can live anywhere you want to.
Arthur C. Clarke, for example, lived in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon). Many writers move when they want to, or reside in more than one country.
Besides, does it really matter?
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Agreed. However, I would be interested to know what people think was the best american sci fi. And what scifi people think really demonstrates the effect of 9/11 on genre fiction, because I hadn't noticed it, per se, I just haven't been reading a lot of american sci fi. (except for John C Wright's stuff, which I didn't really care for)
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Don't worry, it's just Karma Whoring.
...and have for a long time.
We Americans have given a good effort, but....
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Possibly because that past was British as well.
I'm 40, and I remember much of the most thoughtful SF I grew up with was British. There were all kinds of TV and movies that would never have been made in the US but had big numbers in the UK. It was always very thoughtfull and hardly ever the action movies stuff that passes for SF in the US. It just seemed to be the British in general were more thoughtful, quirky, and odd and more accepting of those traits than Americans. Its seems they had a lock on most of the media and took a little time to catch up in the novel dept.
Even supposing that this can't be chalked up to pure chance, Stross' comment means nothing. He blames it on 9/11; I could blame it on a decreasing attention span of American writers (so they can't keep a novel together), an inherent anti-Americanism in the nominating process, or one of literally dozens of other possible "reasons." It doesn't make them all true.
Finally, anyone who wants to can find some sort of pattern in the nominees for any given year. (Oh look, none of the nominated authors' names begin with vowels! There must be some anti-vowel force in the universe at this moment...)
This is an interesting occurrence, but it's pointless to try to find a "reason" for it.
I hate the one hundred and twenty character limit for signatures with an all-enveloping, all-destroying, incredible pass
I really enjoy the Harry Potter books, and dread the wait for the next and last book in the series.
But lets get real: We're not talking about great literature or ground-breaking fantasy.
That said, I thought book #6 was the best since The Prisoner of Azkaban. A great read, but still not what I'd consider Hugo material.
Stefan
Some of the best American SF was written by counterculturalists during the 1960s and 1970s. With the exception of Gibson, the "go-go 1980s" and science-fictional 1990s produced vastly worse signal:noise in SF. Americans have to pick another reason for our current decline, other than a couple of planebombs hitting buildings here in NYC, as bad as that was.
Maybe a better explanation is the rise of "faith-based" fiction, and undereducated consumers of SF generally? That "science fiction" has become really just "romance with special effects", with no experimental ideas or social "what-ifs". Or maybe American SF has always been marketing for technology, and we're now so saturated with that anyway, without any new ideas about ourselves necessary, that we just don't have to do the fiction anymore.
--
make install -not war
It may not be quite what you're looking for, but this may be helpful. Amazon.com has a buried section (why, I don't know, and I can't even remember how I found it) called Libros en español that is nothing but Spanish language books.
There's a section under it called Ciencia ficción y fantasía
I'm not necessarily pitching Amazon.com. Even if you don't want to buy off of Amazon.com because of patent issues, it may give you a good list of titles to look for somewhere else.
Another possiblity is to look specifically at Spanish or Mexican online stores. For example, I was looking for a Spanish language book and couldn't find it in America anywhere. I ended up buying it from Spain at Casa del Libro. Yeah, it cost more to have it shipped here and I had to pay in Euro (not a problem if you charge it on a credit card), but it was just what the doctor ordered. Bookstores in other countries will tend to focus more on authors from that country and authors who write in that country's native language.
Brilliant news for the Kingdom of Fife
Ian Banks stays down the road from me, don't actually know the guy but he's from Fife same as me so he must be a genius !!!!!
You know its the Neo-Copurnicons like you who are comforting our enemies.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
*side note: didnt RTFA.
Appears the person who gave the original quote is (?) British.
He's still a tool though.
That's why the use of 9/11 as a rationale for everything from the USA Patriot Act to the War in Iraq is so absurd. The government stoked the flames of fear and continues to do so to this day.
But there is more to America's reaction that just that. First, being a Londoner, you're familiar with the notion of an enemy reaching out and bombing the crap out of your city. You recognize that taking a hit doesn't mean the end, and that democratic societies are quite resilient.
America's geographic isolation, and the fact that other than a few pesky U-Boats off the Eastern Seaboard and a random Japanese balloon bomb in World War II, we haven't been hit by a foreign enemy since the War of 1812, when you guys came over and torched D.C.
We've been so isolated for so long that we have come to internalize the notion that wars happen in other places, "over there." They certainly don't actually occur here on our soil. Plus, the 9/11 attacks simultaneously targeted the seat of our government, the nerve center of our defenses, and the core of our economic power all at once. From literally out of the blue, we went from a state of relative tranquility to being attacked with a decapitation strike. You must admit, that's not your garden-variety event.
So yes, Americans were a bit freaked out by this. But we're not really as freaked out as we seem, even though our government wants us to be.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I'd mod this up if I had the points.
I can't bring myself to visit the SF & F section of bookstores often these days.
When I do, I'm struck by the large amount of "comfort food" fiction: Either outright fantasy, or fiction nominally set in the future but whose society and technology essentially duplicate that of a familiar and understandable past.
I've quoted this before, but it fits:
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous, and it is amoung the benefits of science that it equips the future for its duties."
Alfred North Whitehead, 1925
" . . . lack of imagination, failure of vision, ignorance of history . . . "
Damn straight.
American politics and culture seem dead set on crawling into the past where everything was swell and things made sense*, and when faced with something scary that might require sacrifice, imagination, and change, a class of professional blowhards, F.U.D. artists, and useful idiots rise to their feet screaming that there is no problem.
We're even losing our nerve when it comes to dealing with opportunities.
Stefan
* Assuming you were middle class, white, and didn't have a goddamn clue or did but didn't care.
Try needle in the grove by Jeff Noon. Or perhaps feersum enjin (sp?) by Iain M. Banks
To nominate a book for a Hugo award, you need to be a member of this year's World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). This year's Worldcon is in Britain. You do the math.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
seriously, get a grip. Not everything is a direct result of what america wants to believe is the worlds worst tragedy. Hey, if every writer was british, that means there was no asian writers! They must all be traumatised by that big wave thing!
It's just our way of dealing with the decline of the American Empire, just like when the British had to deal with the decline of the British Empire.
We'll get over it, learn Mandarin, and be happy serfs, just give us time.
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I'm a big fan of Stross, really like his style.
And I have to say that I agree with him to a point, Stephenson and Gibson both dwelled on 9/11 to a certain extent. I personally felt Gibson probably did it to excess in "Pattern Recognition". Hell even bloody Dan Brown mentioned it in "Davinci Code", but that by no means is a purely American trait.
Hell, Stross himself did a bit of an allegory of it in "Iron sunrise", weapons of mass destruction, nazi types taking over the unverse, etc. etc. In fact in "sky" he also works in the whole war on terror angle. He does however do it in very subtle ways and never mentions it directly like all good escapisms should.
Have to say though that at the moment, the best Fantasy writers are still American, go psycho-analyse that.
Haven't had an English teacher complain yet. And to me, those commas are in quite natural places for pausing.
racist fascist
As for Asian writers, you may see more fiction in the region that relates to disasters because simply people write about their own time, even when looking towards the future and the past.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
Putting commas in place for spoken pauses is a simple rule of thumb that is surprisingly accurate, given that it's wholly incorrect.
The correct use for commas in modern English is in seperating list elements (discussed elsewhere in this thread) and for delimiting non-essential phrases, such as parenthetical asides or prepositional constructions. Note that this implies that non-list commas always appear in pairs, unless the phrase begins or ends the sentence, in which case the closure is assumed.
In spoken English, one often pauses at the boundaries of such phrases, which is what gives rise to the common misconception about comma placement.
I suggest looking for better English teachers. Commas should be used for separation of list items, independent clauses, and appositive phrases. The poster's second phrase contains an appositive, and thus deserves the commas, but his "corrected" line contains none of the aforementioned items.
(For the pedants, yes, I am aware that the list above is not fully comprehensive. I am also aware of the requirement for a coordinating conjunction in one of the above cases, but consider those additional cases to be largely irrelevant to the issue at hand.)
Does the author imply that Britain's last 10 years were somehow better than US' years? These are the people who are much more used to terrorist attacks and now don't even question cameras on every street corner. I am sure in proportion to their population they have lost many more lives to terrorism than us. Stop looking for excuses!
Paint yourself into a corner, burn the bridges!, and you will feel the liberty of a man who has nothing to lose!
I was skimming the main page, and I (thought I) saw:
"UK: SF Writers dominate Hugos"
Implying (in my mind) that the United Kingdom was somehow upset that the Hugo Awards were biased towards science fiction writers, as opposed to other writers in other genres. Knowing what a Hugo is, made this seem massively funny.
Then I RTFA, and realized it wasn't near that funny.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Does Mr Stross imply that Britain's last 10 years were somehow better than US' years? These are the people who are much more used to terrorist attacks and now don't even question cameras on every street corner. I am sure in proportion to their population they have lost many more lives to terrorism than us. Stop looking for excuses!
Paint yourself into a corner, burn the bridges!, and you will feel the liberty of a man who has nothing to lose!
"currently US genre writers are mirroring the 'deep trauma' that 9/11 wrought on America."
Bullshit.
They're mirroring the "deep trauma" that being unable to write anything except "Lord of the Rings" ripoffs has inflicted them with.
Enough of this fantasy shit.
If you can't write worth a shit because somebody flew a plane into a building and killed a couple thousand people, then you couldn't write for shit before.
Am I supposed to claim I'm "traumatized" because 150,000 people got killed in the tsunami, or 100,000 Iraqi civilians got blown up by our illustrious warriors (over 1,800 of whom in turn got their asses waxed)? Is that why I can't make a buck?
Where is Thomas Harris - who can write wonderful satire about psychiatrists and cops urning into cannibals - when we need him?
Somebody needs to write a "Catch-22" or "M.A.S.H." or "Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal" about Iraq and/or Afghanistan.
I guess I need to get cracking on my "Transhuman" series of novels - more rabid sex and merciless gunning down of monkeys than anybody has seen since the Marquis de Sade...
I got your "deep trauma" right here, assholes.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Any feedback from any native Great Britainers who might be better at relating the subtilties of "chavs"?
..........FULL STOP.
For a general overview of what happens in British English (aka English English), see the h2g2 style guidelines.
Personally, I would punctuate the above as "Some years ago, there was, in the city of York, a society of Magicians." - and I'm a Brit, and one who tends to be over-zealous when it comes to using commas, colons and periods. Maybe the author was trying to make it difficult to read in the same way that Shakespear is, but he/she should really have read Penny-Arcade if they wanted the likes of me to rate them over Asimov.
looking for better English teachers, and quite another thing to know and describe going about doing it. Then there's the whole, "How am I going to afford a better English teacher," problem. The U.S. education system reeks, and not just the subsidized K-12 part. I currently hold an Associates Degree in CIS, and the English teacher spent the entire course teaching the other students quite low-level things.
Fan voting.... DUH!!!
"Not everything is a direct result of what america wants to believe is the worlds worst tragedy."
You got that right. I am an American, and I think 9/11 was blown, and is being blown way out of proportion. But then I live in the Northwest, so it had no immediate impact. Now when Mt. St. Helens has a burp, that is a different matter entirely. It's very important, but only locally.
The problem was that 9/11 was aimed right at where the elite live and work, the Eastern Corridor. A good hit on LA, right at Media central would also be effective at generating prolonged hysteria. But any small town in the sticks would rate a few days mention in the paper, then silence. We lose 10 times as many as died on 9/11 every year on the highways without a thought.
It's all in the presentation. This is not always a good thing, but still true.
Of course the nominees all rock....
# The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
# Iron Council by China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)
# Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross (Ace)
# Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
# River of Gods by Ian McDonald (Simon & Schuster)
Dominate?
all the writers nominated for the prestigious Hugo award for the best novel are British
should not that be
U.K. SF Writers monopolize Hugos
or for a little humor
SLASHDOT PREDICTION; All winners of this years hugos will be from the UK-- because all the nominees are.
Domimate indicates it's not a 100%
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Essentially, all the Patriot Act does is codify and remove structural barriers that were in place to beef up anti-terrorist investigations.
For example, one of the 9/11 hijackers used a Library computer to IM back and forth to Al Qaeda buddies in Waziristan province in Pakistan, as well as check his airline reservations. Knowing the FBI could not access the Library computers. To date the FBI has checked Libraries a grand total of ZERO times.
Sneak-and-peek warrants already existed, however due to varying Federal Court District rulings there were different rules for each district. Patriot Act codifies those rules (still providing for Judicial review, just one NATIONAL standard).
Without the Patriot Act, J Edgar Hoover ran a blackmail scheme, on government officals and FOR government officials. One notorious incident involved Bill Moyers (yes, THAT Bill Moyers) then on LBJ's staff, having Hoover look for gays in Barry Goldwater's campaign staff after an LBJ campaign staffer had a George Michael incident in a DC Men's room.
We do have real terror, and real threats. Arrests of the Lackawanna 6 in Upstate NY, the Virginia Terror Cell, the Lodi Terror cell, the Flordia Jihadis, as well as experience from Madrid and London shows that folks following extremists have to monitored, that means mosques. Everyone rightly cheered when the FBI busted White Power Militia extremists, this is no different and the threat is obviously much greater.
DHS, FBI, and others can't do "whatever they want." They remain under judicial review just as they always were. J Edgar Hoover suggests the best way to maintain liberty is to put good people in at the top, don't let them sit there forever, and demand accountability.
To my mind the Patriot Act is far preferable to doing nothing, and then the inevitable detention camps and mass expulsions when the next mass casualty terror attacks happen.
That you find non-existent "threats" to liberty (media agenda-driven exaggerations, basically tabloid "tight underwear will kill you" reporting), rather than the brutal murder of 3,000 Americans speaks for itself.
Not everything is a direct result of what america wants to believe is the worlds worst tragedy.
A big part of the problem is that Americans cannot escape the images of the terrorist attacks. It is mentioned constantly. It is near impossible to listen, watch, or read any media without some mention of "nine eleven." Never mind the "war on terror" which is some how related to all but the most mundane news.
American's are living in a culture of fear. It is something foreigners have to experience to understand. It is pervasive. The Americans simply can't tune it out.
No Gibson? No PKD? Cryptonomicon classed as SF? Dubious.
Props to them for recognising Egan, and for organising a "Magazine" award which they regularly lose though.
American's are
/. (It is 2000. One must not accept responsibility for one's actions.)
Well that was just sloppy. I blame the poor english I read on
If you read the comments on Slashdot, they mirror the attitudes of the cultural elite, which has completely failed to comprehend the existential threat to the United States, and remains mired in a tragically hip view of themselves as "cool outsiders." This is why most literature simply fails to reach an audience. Hard to be post-modernly hip and ironic, not standing for anything in a time when real-life supervillains like Zawahari can threaten to kill lots of Americans, and experience dictates it's not an idle threat.
During the Cold War, the cultural elite played a critical role in yelling "stop" to military adventurism which was dangerous in that it could provoke a confrontation that could spiral out of control into global nuclear war. However, that dynamic ended with the Cold War.
The Cultural Elite has not adapted to the end of the Cold War. The reason Bill Clinton cut and ran on you, and btw encouraged 9/11 (bin Laden says he knew America could be beat when only 18 dead make them run away), was his Cold War view of military force "never solving anything." Well, it sure solved the Aztec problem. As well as the Japanese militarists.
Multi-culti PC crapola blinds the Elite to the reality that tribalists with primitive, superstitious views believe that "killing enough Americans" will magically make the Great Satan collapse and usher in a world-wide Caliphate (with them at the top, natch). Magical thinking has a long history of non-Western losers confronting the power of the West and Modernity. Sioux Ghost Dancers, Zulu Warriors, Aztecs, Incas, Japanese Kamikazes all fell before the West, sometimes at great cost (Okinawa killed 22,000 men, sunk 30 ships, damaged more than 300, killed 5,000 sailors). To the elite every war is Vietnam (just look at the laughable "Over There"). The US is always the bad guy, and the villains are not villains.
The Elite tends to buy Fukuyama, that we are at the "end of History" with no more ideological conflict and that human nature somehow changed magically to make armed conflict a thing of the past. Unlike WWII, the Elite does not like the values of the Country, particularly that of the average guy and the middle class. The Elite wants to be "special" and has a terrifying fear they might be ordinary. Everyone from Alan Ball to Joss Whedon has the literal conception of hell to be middle class suburbia. With the preferred way of life to be cool twentysomethings embracing causeless and cynical nihilism.
Fundamentally, 9/11 in the broad reaches of the country caused a re-appraisal and embrace of the Tolkein-esque "homely virtues" of friends, family, loyalty, sacrifice, and patriotism. No more free passes are given to those who embrace superstitious, primitive, theocratic ideologies out of moral relativism and PC Multi-culti and there is a large desire to see the enemy profoundly defeated as in WWII. We tend to know who we are more, and have very little tolerance for the sort of rhetoric found on Slashdot (Amerikka, terrorists are justified, let's not make them angry, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, etc). A huge disconnect between the vast majority of the nation and the cultural elite (pandering to itself and the Slashdot-like critics) has brought creativity to a dead halt.
This is due at least in part to the central lesson of 9/11. Some idiot superstitious and primitive jihadi can kill you at your desk, with no warning. Hard to be post-modern ironic and stand for nothing with that reality.
Lest anyone think I'm too hard on Slashdot readers, the central reality is that most of America is married, suburban homeowners with kids, mortgages, and ordinary lives with ordinary jobs. No one feels they are very cool or special. This just isn't Slashdot (which yes has it's good points).
America is neither Athens, nor Sparta, nor Thebes. It is not Phillip's Macedon either. It is now an angry and aroused Andrew Jackson like nation, which would have preferred to be let alone but has a terrifying response when the next bin Laden shoe dr
A couple of years ago I started trying to read all the Hugo winning novels, got half way (including some I previously read.) Since I realized what I wrote above, I've picked up the Nebula list and because of some overlap I'm about halfway through that list. (I'm not going in any particular order.)
Honest. It ain't no big thing.
..
Not flaming. Just wishing the modern world were as tough as it thinks it is
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The most disturbing part of all this is not just that nation-states are getting nukes. The ability of rogue actors like bin Laden, et. al. to acquire them is very real. Pakistan, for example, is a known nuclear technology exporter. We all know how tight their borders and civilian control of the military are.
The fact that the Bush Administration just tacitly approved India's nuclear status, and already does so with Pakistan, doesn't make matters any easier. We have essentially opened the floodgates to nuclear arms development by letting the loopholes in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty remain open. We oppose the Comprensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and we've violated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Maybe someone ought to dust off the phrase, "No material. No bomb. No nuclear terrorism."
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
As an Australian I am getting tired of this lack of standardisation in the English language. So I propose that a proprietary language be developed. Microsoft can develop the language and we can all buy a copy. Inevitably some irresponsible person who hasn't bothered to use their antivirus will become infected and the English language will crash. Then we will all speak French! Or Finnish perhaps!
"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains..."
In life, wherever you have to do somthing really difficult there is always someone in the group with the loser "but it's too hard" mentality. Sometimes it takes more than a few days to get something done. If you think this world situation sucks just wait till the future as the technology to commit widespread chaos becomes more and more accessible and the ability to more to another place in the world becomes easier and easier.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
There are too many British actors on Battlestar Galactica.
Well, that's probably because there are a lot of bad guys in Battlestar Galactica...
Actually, I'm not sure that was intended to be 'funny'. (Spoiler follows for those who haven't seen the first hour of the new Battlestar Galactica mini-series); I noticed that they had an English guy play the unheroic self-preserving computer geek who inadvertantly lets the Cylons into the defence computer.
Yep, there's always a 'British' actor with the required accent (whether they're a good actor or not takes second place to the accent) willing to take the part of the bad guy. They did it in Firefly too, though I found myself warming to the character forced to be the English/British (*) baddie in the middle of a strange western-in-space mythologisation of America's past.
Truth be told, I watch just over an hour of Battlestar Galactica, then didn't bother with the rest. Well-made or not, I wasn't interested in seeing a very militaristic reflection of America's paranoia on terrorism (and make no bones about it, Battlestar Galactica is very much the Earth-representing-America school of sci-fi); I'm not American, and I don't have a repressed desire to indulge my military side.
It wasn't especially badly made, and it looked like they were taking things more seriously than the original series... but in truth, I wasn't interested in watching it.
Simple fact is, most sci-fi on TV in Britain is American, about America and designed to American tastes. Of course, that's the largest target audience, and I'm sure the American producers are interested in reflecting their own society; that's understandable. However, it's also understandable that most TV sci-fi doesn't appeal to me for the same reason (oh yeah, that and the fact it's cliched and cheesey).
As for Dr. Who... I know you were joking, but the new Dr. Who really won't appeal to your average American viewer. They tried it with the 1996 TV-movie, diluted the concept and it still didn't get the viewing figures needed. In short, if you could make a 'Doctor Who' that mainstream America would watch, it wouldn't be Doctor Who.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
He's got a point though. Local-support voting has happened before, if not to the same extent - there are only so many Canadian SF writers writing books. It's unfortunate that some years have a wealth of good nomineees and others don't. For instance, Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis was also far superior to Sawyer's Hominids but, being published in December 2001, it didn't even get a nomination because of the heavyweight competition for that year.
Still, I think Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis is one of the great underestimated books of the last few years, perhaps as a side effect of the disappointment with the hyped-up second Foundation trilogy from the killer Bs a few years earlier. Similarly, Vernor Vinge's book Marooned in Realtime was much better than his later Hugo-winning (and quite good) A Fire upon the Deep but also didn't get properly recognized for its visionary insight until much later. I think that there are some indications that PhC may prove equally prophetic. I also find it highly ironic that Kingsbury's first novel, Courtship Rite, lost out to Isaac Asimov's Foundation's Edge in 1983. Hopefully, Kingsbury will find time to write a few more good novels so that he can get the recognition he deserves.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Much modern SF can't seem to escape ever worsening projections of dog-eat-dog capitalism infinitely into the future. U.S. culture is totally dominated by this ideology, and it is seriously constricting the imagination of SF writers. Cyberbunk seems particularly wrapped up with this idea. Another world is possible, but you won't see American SF writers imagining it.
When you can't imagine alternative social, economic, or political systems, you've ruled out a great many creative possibilities. LeGuin seems almost the only SF author not living at the capitalist pole.
The correct use for commas in modern English is in seperating list elements
Are you sure you're talking about English as opposed to LISP?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Ihad to look that up - Council house is a term for public housing provided for/paid for by the state/government, correvt?
..........FULL STOP.