None of these are Science Fiction. They're all parodies of SciFi stories. The humor is central--story, characters, setting, &c... all just hooks on which to hang the jokes.
Except for Buckaroo Banzai, of course. That motherfucker had some serious science goin' on!
Any time you force humor, it's a bad thing. That's no more true for SciFi than any other genre.
A lot of SciFi is dystopian; because the author is working out a bleak picture of a future that sucks more than the present, there's little place for humor.
A lot of SciFi is serious; humor often doesn't work well in a serious story.
A lot of SciFi is abysmally bad. While there's lots of humor here, it's almost always accidental, heavy-handed, childish, or some combination of the three.
Given these tendencies, I can understand why you might think that humor and SciFi don't mix: you've probably never seen it done, or done well.
If you're interested in well-written SciFi that is chock full of humor, try anythjng by Iain M. Banks. But be careful! His humor is usually very subtle. I read four of his Culture novels before it finally began to dawn on me just how incredibly witty he was being.
I also remember Larry Niven putting some decent humor in a lot of his stuff, if Banks is a little too much for you.
If you don't like humor in your SciFi, I recommend C. J. Cherryh, who writes some of the most beautiful prose I've ever seen, but is always deadly serious. I have yet to read a story by her that was even remotely comic. Nevertheless, her plotting and characterizations are superior to just about every other major player I've read.
That's because no one needs to. While we may disagree on the worst of the movies, and the relative merits of the movies, we all agree that this, at least, goes without saying: II was the best, by far.
The first movie has always been my second choice, though, which makes me pretty unique in these parts.
Re:If we're going round recommending authors...
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 2
If you want classical period detectives, try Agatha Christie's Miss Marple.
Christie is good, but Dorothy Sayers' period detectives make Miss Marple look like Terry Jones in drag, complaining about British health care.
Again, Christie is good, but only until you find Sayers.
Maybe it's supposed to be a commentary on the series itself, and the temptation it offers to viewers: "Step into the light, sit down and fill your head with visions of an exciting, adventure-filled utopia, where advanced technology and old-fashioned human ingenuity always triumph over barbaric violence, where the captain always beds the hot alien chicks, and nothing goes wrong that can't be fixed in the background and forgotten by next week." But I still can't figure out what they'd be trying to say with such a metaphor.
Whatever. There's more shitty SciFi published in book form every year than in film form. Sure, there's also more good SciFi published every year in book than movie form, but it's still like looking for a needle in a haystack. With movies, there's less needles, but the haystack is a lot smaller.
How about thanking Hitler for taking power in January 1933, thus compelling Einstein not to return to Germany?
With blatant disregard for Godwin's Law, I'll bite: Why on earth would I want to thank Hitler for that? If he hadn't started his genocidal campaign, Einstein would have been free to exercise his great intellect in Germany, remaining intimately connected to the thriving and lively European physics community. Hitler's bigotry and warmongering shattered this community, drove some of the best minds in Physics to the ends of the earth, disrupted their communication with each other... and that's not the worst of it:
What if we'd all been at peace when the power of the atom was first realized and harnessed? With no urgent need to build a superweapon, might we not have progressed calmly into a world of ubiquitous, safe nuclear power? No hysteria, no Cold War, no Hiroshima or Nagasaki... No, Hitler didn't do us any favors by driving Einstein out of Germany.
On another note, the U.S. today is no healthier than Nazi Germany under Hitler? What tipped you off? Was it the genocidal death camps scattered across our heartland?
Einstein's most important results had no research investment funding it whatsoever.
Didn't Einstein receive a Nobel Prize for his demonstration of the particle-like qualities of light? I'd say that qualifies as one of his "most important results", wouldn't you?
And weren't those results based on actual empirical experiments, using actual lab equipment to observe and manipulate light? Where did this equipment come from? Who paid for it?
The problem is, that before eBooks, you couldn't "loan" your copy of the book to 10,000 of your friends on Kazaa.
And things were better before eBooks and Kazaa how?
Also, are things better now that we have made a dramatic leap in information transfer technology, but are restricted from using the new tech because it makes the old tech (and everybody who profited from the old tech) obsolete?
See, I might even accept the restrictions on use of new tech--If it were part of a well-reasoned, long-term plan to phase in the new tech without destabilizing the economy, spiking the unemployment rate, or creating a whole new area of ethical/legal conundrums that we haven't really had any time to think about or address.
Since that's obviously not the reason the old tech is being preserved (nor will it ever be, probably), I say fuck it: release the hounds and go for broke.
I mean, I KNOW Nokia sells phones, etc., what's the point?
As near as I can tell, the point is to make it so that whenever you hear, see, or think "phone", you immediately and exclusively follow it up with "Nokia". The possibility that other people sell phones, much less the names of their companies, should never cross your mind.
The only thing that saves us is that every phone manufacturer is trying to do the same thing. Instead of simply thinking "Phone==Nokia", we end up thinking "Phone==[Nokia|Samsung|Ericsson]". We have recently evolved to the point where we treat this welter of conflicting, competing memes as mere background noise, no more meaningful than the hum of the air conditioner, or the cars on the street. All this means, of course, is that we no longer have conscious control of the memes that drive us. The first company to figure out how to properly exploit the memes in our subconscious will undoubtedly take over the world.
Then it will restructure itself under the name "Umbrella Corp.", invest heavily in biochemical warfare technology, and unleash Milla Jovovich and a horde of zombies on Raccoon City.
With insurance fraud, the insurance companies raise the rates to make up for the money lost.
Exactly! Wake me up when the record industry figures out how much money they've lost due to piracy.
Actually, on second thought, don't wake me up. Wait until the record industry can map CD prices directly to actuarial tables that clearly show how much of each CD's selling price goes to cover the losses due to piracy. Once they figure out what those losses are, of course.
Arbitrarily raising CD prices, and then claiming it's to recover money they aren't even sure they had to begin with, isn't really the same thing at all.
The record industry has consistently failed to show two things:
First, that "piracy" has reduced their profits.
Second that they would actually lower prices as their production costs went down.
The counter-counter-argument is that if music were easier to test before purchase, and if price gouging wasn't so rampant and obscene, nobody would be motivated to pirate in the first place.
The record industry treats its customers like idiots, and it criminalizes those who don't act like idiots.
"Work" is just something you do. "Paid" is about giving value to someone else and receiving equal value in return. Everybody likes "paid", but you could practice jumping across the English Channel for the next ten years, and while we'd all agree that it was "work", you might have difficulty convincing anyone that you "deserve to be paid" for it.
Just because I can't measure the loss directly doesn't mean it doesn't occur. The truth is that we don't know, but just because we don't know does not mean loss does not occur.
If we can't tell that something has been lost, then it hasn't really been lost, has it? Especially if we couldn't tell if we even had it in the first place.
All the measurements we do have suggest that music revenue is increasing, except in certain well-explained instances (e.g., singles, cassettes, &c.), or for obvious and traditional reasons (e.g., decline in quality, increased pandering of insipid products to the lowest common denominator, &c.)
The record companies claim to be missing something, but they don't know where they were keeping it, they don't know how much of it was taken, and they don't even know if they had it to begin with. Try taking that to the bank:
"I heard there was some embezzlement here last year, and I think I may have lost some money from an account. No, I don't know how much money I may have lost. No, I don't know how much money was in the account to begin with. No, I don't know the account number. No, I'm not even sure that I even have an account here. I just heard that there was some embezzlement, and I'd like to get my money back--assuming I lost any money to begin with... would you mind just writing me a check for, say, $10,000? It's the least you could do, after allowing embezzlement to occur in your bank."
Well that's true, but once you learn that free will isn't truly free (since it's preordained)...
I wasn't aware that a theory of total determinism had been proven.
Grey areas abound.
If human behavior (and, in fact, all phenomena) truly is deterministic, then there should be no gray areas at all. Our reactions to pedophiles and murderers are predetermined. We may think there's gray areas, but we don't have any choice about how we judge them. I don't "have to" accept anything--in fact, I can't accept or reject anything. All I can do is manifest phenomena.
Also, the probabilistic effects that we observe at a subatomic level do not prove that the mind (or the universe) is probabilistic at its core.
Of course not. But new discoveries in one field often influence the direction of new thought in other fields. Newtonian physics is deterministic, and so a deterministic model of consciousness at least mirrors observed physical phenomena. Quantum physics is probabilistic--and now we're talking about the fundamental stuff the universe is made of! Would this knowledge (that at its most basic level, reality is proabilistic) have influenced Nietzche's theories on human cognition? Or Laplace's? Or mine?
The effects are equally well explained by hidden variables that we cannot measure.
True, but proposing hypothetical, unprovable variables does no more to prove that cognition is deterministic, than Schroedinger's wave equations do to prove that it's probabilistic. At least the wave equations can be tested in the lab.
Sorry for the double reply. I just wanted to point out that I never said there were no logical limitations to human cognition, just that there were logical limitations in computer cognition that were not evident in human cognition. If computers are to be equivalent to humans in intelligence, these limitations need to be removed. The question was never about whether there are limitations on human cognition that keep us from being even more intelligent than we are.
Sorry, I should have said "a possible counter-argument". As far as a complex and subtle analysis to support this argument, you can find one here.
The core argument seems to go something like this: Human minds are capable of contemplating paradoxical self-reference and infinite recursion, without getting trapped in infinite loops. Godel has proven that no formal system can do these things. Computers use formal systems. Therefore, computers cannot contemplate paradoxical self-reference or infinite recursion, without becoming trapped in an infinite loop. Therefore, computers have logical limitations which are not evident in human cognition. Q.E.D.
But it is a very subtle and complex analysis, as you predicted, and I may have missed something important in my reading. You really should try it for yourself.
Re:There's a decent article....
on
New Mad Max Film
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· Score: 2
David Brin has an equally strong counter-argument. If you found the Brigh Lights Film Journal article thought-provoking, you may want to check his view out also. He's coherent, thoughtful, and heartfelt.
He has a few short essays on the subject, one of which will do nicely for starters:
http://www.kithrup.com/brin/starwarsarticle.html
The other essays are referenced and/or linked to from this one, so you should be able to find all the parts of his analysis if you're interested.
If that's true, then it really doesn't make sense to attribute Nietzche's conclusions to Nietzche, since they were also deterministic. The Universe figured it out, and Nietzche just manifested a phenomenon.
The counter-argument is that formal systems (such as modern computers) have logical limitations that are not evident in human cognition. Therefore, machines must either make the same leap in complexity such that their actual thought processes can no longer be mapped directly to the underlying formal system, or else remain forever inferior to natural intelligences.
It's also interesting to wonder if Nietzche knew about (or even could have known about) the discovery that nothing is deterministic at the subatomic level. Would he have persisted in his belief that intelligence was deterministic, or would he have theorized that it was probabilistic?
Slashdot Mirror
None of these are Science Fiction. They're all parodies of SciFi stories. The humor is central--story, characters, setting, &c... all just hooks on which to hang the jokes.
Except for Buckaroo Banzai, of course. That motherfucker had some serious science goin' on!
Any time you force humor, it's a bad thing. That's no more true for SciFi than any other genre.
A lot of SciFi is dystopian; because the author is working out a bleak picture of a future that sucks more than the present, there's little place for humor.
A lot of SciFi is serious; humor often doesn't work well in a serious story.
A lot of SciFi is abysmally bad. While there's lots of humor here, it's almost always accidental, heavy-handed, childish, or some combination of the three.
Given these tendencies, I can understand why you might think that humor and SciFi don't mix: you've probably never seen it done, or done well.
If you're interested in well-written SciFi that is chock full of humor, try anythjng by Iain M. Banks. But be careful! His humor is usually very subtle. I read four of his Culture novels before it finally began to dawn on me just how incredibly witty he was being.
I also remember Larry Niven putting some decent humor in a lot of his stuff, if Banks is a little too much for you.
If you don't like humor in your SciFi, I recommend C. J. Cherryh, who writes some of the most beautiful prose I've ever seen, but is always deadly serious. I have yet to read a story by her that was even remotely comic. Nevertheless, her plotting and characterizations are superior to just about every other major player I've read.
That's because no one needs to. While we may disagree on the worst of the movies, and the relative merits of the movies, we all agree that this, at least, goes without saying: II was the best, by far.
The first movie has always been my second choice, though, which makes me pretty unique in these parts.
Christie is good, but Dorothy Sayers' period detectives make Miss Marple look like Terry Jones in drag, complaining about British health care.
Again, Christie is good, but only until you find Sayers.
Maybe it's supposed to be a commentary on the series itself, and the temptation it offers to viewers: "Step into the light, sit down and fill your head with visions of an exciting, adventure-filled utopia, where advanced technology and old-fashioned human ingenuity always triumph over barbaric violence, where the captain always beds the hot alien chicks, and nothing goes wrong that can't be fixed in the background and forgotten by next week." But I still can't figure out what they'd be trying to say with such a metaphor.
Whatever. There's more shitty SciFi published in book form every year than in film form. Sure, there's also more good SciFi published every year in book than movie form, but it's still like looking for a needle in a haystack. With movies, there's less needles, but the haystack is a lot smaller.
With blatant disregard for Godwin's Law, I'll bite: Why on earth would I want to thank Hitler for that? If he hadn't started his genocidal campaign, Einstein would have been free to exercise his great intellect in Germany, remaining intimately connected to the thriving and lively European physics community. Hitler's bigotry and warmongering shattered this community, drove some of the best minds in Physics to the ends of the earth, disrupted their communication with each other... and that's not the worst of it:
What if we'd all been at peace when the power of the atom was first realized and harnessed? With no urgent need to build a superweapon, might we not have progressed calmly into a world of ubiquitous, safe nuclear power? No hysteria, no Cold War, no Hiroshima or Nagasaki... No, Hitler didn't do us any favors by driving Einstein out of Germany.
On another note, the U.S. today is no healthier than Nazi Germany under Hitler? What tipped you off? Was it the genocidal death camps scattered across our heartland?
Didn't Einstein receive a Nobel Prize for his demonstration of the particle-like qualities of light? I'd say that qualifies as one of his "most important results", wouldn't you?
And weren't those results based on actual empirical experiments, using actual lab equipment to observe and manipulate light? Where did this equipment come from? Who paid for it?
And things were better before eBooks and Kazaa how?
Also, are things better now that we have made a dramatic leap in information transfer technology, but are restricted from using the new tech because it makes the old tech (and everybody who profited from the old tech) obsolete?
See, I might even accept the restrictions on use of new tech--If it were part of a well-reasoned, long-term plan to phase in the new tech without destabilizing the economy, spiking the unemployment rate, or creating a whole new area of ethical/legal conundrums that we haven't really had any time to think about or address.
Since that's obviously not the reason the old tech is being preserved (nor will it ever be, probably), I say fuck it: release the hounds and go for broke.
As near as I can tell, the point is to make it so that whenever you hear, see, or think "phone", you immediately and exclusively follow it up with "Nokia". The possibility that other people sell phones, much less the names of their companies, should never cross your mind.
The only thing that saves us is that every phone manufacturer is trying to do the same thing. Instead of simply thinking "Phone==Nokia", we end up thinking "Phone==[Nokia|Samsung|Ericsson]". We have recently evolved to the point where we treat this welter of conflicting, competing memes as mere background noise, no more meaningful than the hum of the air conditioner, or the cars on the street. All this means, of course, is that we no longer have conscious control of the memes that drive us. The first company to figure out how to properly exploit the memes in our subconscious will undoubtedly take over the world.
Then it will restructure itself under the name "Umbrella Corp.", invest heavily in biochemical warfare technology, and unleash Milla Jovovich and a horde of zombies on Raccoon City.
Heh. They'd be easier to find if his show was any good to begin with :)
Exactly! Wake me up when the record industry figures out how much money they've lost due to piracy.
Actually, on second thought, don't wake me up. Wait until the record industry can map CD prices directly to actuarial tables that clearly show how much of each CD's selling price goes to cover the losses due to piracy. Once they figure out what those losses are, of course.
Arbitrarily raising CD prices, and then claiming it's to recover money they aren't even sure they had to begin with, isn't really the same thing at all.
The record industry has consistently failed to show two things:
First, that "piracy" has reduced their profits.
Second that they would actually lower prices as their production costs went down.
The counter-counter-argument is that if music were easier to test before purchase, and if price gouging wasn't so rampant and obscene, nobody would be motivated to pirate in the first place.
The record industry treats its customers like idiots, and it criminalizes those who don't act like idiots.
Nobody "deserves to be paid for their work".
"Work" is just something you do. "Paid" is about giving value to someone else and receiving equal value in return. Everybody likes "paid", but you could practice jumping across the English Channel for the next ten years, and while we'd all agree that it was "work", you might have difficulty convincing anyone that you "deserve to be paid" for it.
If we can't tell that something has been lost, then it hasn't really been lost, has it? Especially if we couldn't tell if we even had it in the first place.
All the measurements we do have suggest that music revenue is increasing, except in certain well-explained instances (e.g., singles, cassettes, &c.), or for obvious and traditional reasons (e.g., decline in quality, increased pandering of insipid products to the lowest common denominator, &c.)
The record companies claim to be missing something, but they don't know where they were keeping it, they don't know how much of it was taken, and they don't even know if they had it to begin with. Try taking that to the bank:
"I heard there was some embezzlement here last year, and I think I may have lost some money from an account. No, I don't know how much money I may have lost. No, I don't know how much money was in the account to begin with. No, I don't know the account number. No, I'm not even sure that I even have an account here. I just heard that there was some embezzlement, and I'd like to get my money back--assuming I lost any money to begin with... would you mind just writing me a check for, say, $10,000? It's the least you could do, after allowing embezzlement to occur in your bank."
Thanks! Don't mind if I do!
Mmmm... Skylab made of C4... throw kilotons of conventional explosives half-way around the world...I'm confused.
First, you tell me that I'm mistaken. But then nothing else you say contradicts anything I said. If we agree, then how am I mistaken?
I wasn't aware that a theory of total determinism had been proven.
Grey areas abound.
If human behavior (and, in fact, all phenomena) truly is deterministic, then there should be no gray areas at all. Our reactions to pedophiles and murderers are predetermined. We may think there's gray areas, but we don't have any choice about how we judge them. I don't "have to" accept anything--in fact, I can't accept or reject anything. All I can do is manifest phenomena.
Also, the probabilistic effects that we observe at a subatomic level do not prove that the mind (or the universe) is probabilistic at its core.
Of course not. But new discoveries in one field often influence the direction of new thought in other fields. Newtonian physics is deterministic, and so a deterministic model of consciousness at least mirrors observed physical phenomena. Quantum physics is probabilistic--and now we're talking about the fundamental stuff the universe is made of! Would this knowledge (that at its most basic level, reality is proabilistic) have influenced Nietzche's theories on human cognition? Or Laplace's? Or mine?
The effects are equally well explained by hidden variables that we cannot measure.
True, but proposing hypothetical, unprovable variables does no more to prove that cognition is deterministic, than Schroedinger's wave equations do to prove that it's probabilistic. At least the wave equations can be tested in the lab.
Sorry for the double reply. I just wanted to point out that I never said there were no logical limitations to human cognition, just that there were logical limitations in computer cognition that were not evident in human cognition. If computers are to be equivalent to humans in intelligence, these limitations need to be removed. The question was never about whether there are limitations on human cognition that keep us from being even more intelligent than we are.
The core argument seems to go something like this: Human minds are capable of contemplating paradoxical self-reference and infinite recursion, without getting trapped in infinite loops. Godel has proven that no formal system can do these things. Computers use formal systems. Therefore, computers cannot contemplate paradoxical self-reference or infinite recursion, without becoming trapped in an infinite loop. Therefore, computers have logical limitations which are not evident in human cognition. Q.E.D.
But it is a very subtle and complex analysis, as you predicted, and I may have missed something important in my reading. You really should try it for yourself.
David Brin has an equally strong counter-argument. If you found the Brigh Lights Film Journal article thought-provoking, you may want to check his view out also. He's coherent, thoughtful, and heartfelt.
l
He has a few short essays on the subject, one of which will do nicely for starters:
http://www.kithrup.com/brin/starwarsarticle.htm
The other essays are referenced and/or linked to from this one, so you should be able to find all the parts of his analysis if you're interested.
Enjoy!
If that's true, then it really doesn't make sense to attribute Nietzche's conclusions to Nietzche, since they were also deterministic. The Universe figured it out, and Nietzche just manifested a phenomenon.
The counter-argument is that formal systems (such as modern computers) have logical limitations that are not evident in human cognition. Therefore, machines must either make the same leap in complexity such that their actual thought processes can no longer be mapped directly to the underlying formal system, or else remain forever inferior to natural intelligences.
It's also interesting to wonder if Nietzche knew about (or even could have known about) the discovery that nothing is deterministic at the subatomic level. Would he have persisted in his belief that intelligence was deterministic, or would he have theorized that it was probabilistic?
It's in your head, man. If you don't like the story, you don't have to believe in it.
Me? I prefer Brian Aldiss's Star Wars prequel plot, and my own history of the Butlerian Jihad.
Maybe some other idiots ineherited the rights to publish their versions for profit, but that doesn't mean their stories are the true ones.
Whatever that means. It's not like human and machine intelligences are anywhere near similar enough to make that kind of comparison.
Somehow I don't think the old 1. Buy all the dark fiber; 2. ???; 3. Profit! plan is going to work, no matter how much you spend on each ?.