If we speculate on who will be read 50 years down the road, I'm not so sure, but if you wanna talk about who should still be read, I vote for Gene Wolfe.
He's the least-read good writer that I personally am aware of. Check out "The Book of the New Sun" (4 volumes), "The Book of the Long Sun" (also 4 vols) and "The Book of the Short Sun".
I actually thought the movie was pretty clearly written with at least one sequel in mind. There's a reference to "Zion, the last human city", in the middle of the film, and when you get to the ending without having seen something that was so prominently named, that seems like the producers holding something in reserve for future films.
This argument always puts me in mind of a line from Emo Phillips:
"I used to think the human brain was the most fascinating thing in all the world. But then it occurred to me...look what's TELLING me that."
Re:America: the country without a past...
on
American Gods
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· Score: 1
Appropos to this point, Neil Gaiman has one of his characters in an earlier work say,"Europe has history...American has geography.".
The word "arcology" is often used in reference to Arcosante, a planned community somewhere in Arizona. The place was built several years ago, in the seventies IIRC, and would have been a financial disaster for all involved if it hadn't turned out to be a viable tourist trap.
Here's a good rule-of-thumb: does the story run to multiple volumes because the author believed that it should? Or because some marketing wonk believes that people will not read unfamiliar books? For a great example of a writer who runs to multi-volumes while at the same keeping a narrative under firm control, check out Gene Wolfe. He criminally under-appreciated.
Actually, I believe that candidates do not provide detailed platform statements or policy plans via the web (or any other medium) because we as a people lack the attention span necessary to listen, except when our emotional buttons are being pushed. Real example: a candidate for the office of "Registrar of Deeds" here in my hometown spent more time talking about his position on abortion, which he would never have any say about even if elected, than he did about anything actually related to position he was running for. Seems stupid, until you realize that be generating a lot of patently absurd controversy, he got face time on the local news every night for two weeks.
Somebody once characterized psychotherapy as always excaberating whatever problem that it tried to fix. Management methodologies are like that.
Say your company wants to solve a particular problem. If you determine that designing and building a good solution will take six months, but that a just-barely-adequate solution can be hammered out in two, Murphy's Law dictates that the user community will be willing to wait exactly seven weeks for a finished application.
Because there are virtually no companies with the self-discipline to wait as long as it takes to produce good software, most software sucks.
Management methodologies attempt to solve the problem of software sucking, but they do so by making further demands on the already limited time of the development staff AND their managers.
Worse, the language that is used to present, for example, the Quality Improvement Process, is very soft and mushy. It tends not to play very well to an audience of technically-oriented employees. They will fight the implementation every step of the way.
Having spewed out all of this criticism, however, I should also say that the professional techies of the world have done a singularly bad job of offering any alternative solutions. We've collectively come up with any number of design principles that are meant to enforce standards of quality on our software, but nobody follows those principles consistently. Show me a shop with five programmers and I'll find at least one person who never comments their code.
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He's the least-read good writer that I personally am aware of. Check out "The Book of the New Sun" (4 volumes), "The Book of the Long Sun" (also 4 vols) and "The Book of the Short Sun".
I actually thought the movie was pretty clearly written with at least one sequel in mind. There's a reference to "Zion, the last human city", in the middle of the film, and when you get to the ending without having seen something that was so prominently named, that seems like the producers holding something in reserve for future films.
This argument always puts me in mind of a line from Emo Phillips: "I used to think the human brain was the most fascinating thing in all the world. But then it occurred to me...look what's TELLING me that."
Appropos to this point, Neil Gaiman has one of his characters in an earlier work say,"Europe has history...American has geography.".
The word "arcology" is often used in reference to Arcosante, a planned community somewhere in Arizona. The place was built several years ago, in the seventies IIRC, and would have been a financial disaster for all involved if it hadn't turned out to be a viable tourist trap.
Here's a good rule-of-thumb: does the story run to multiple volumes because the author believed that it should? Or because some marketing wonk believes that people will not read unfamiliar books? For a great example of a writer who runs to multi-volumes while at the same keeping a narrative under firm control, check out Gene Wolfe. He criminally under-appreciated.
Actually, I believe that candidates do not provide detailed platform statements or policy plans via the web (or any other medium) because we as a people lack the attention span necessary to listen, except when our emotional buttons are being pushed. Real example: a candidate for the office of "Registrar of Deeds" here in my hometown spent more time talking about his position on abortion, which he would never have any say about even if elected, than he did about anything actually related to position he was running for. Seems stupid, until you realize that be generating a lot of patently absurd controversy, he got face time on the local news every night for two weeks.
Somebody once characterized psychotherapy as always excaberating whatever problem that it tried to fix. Management methodologies are like that. Say your company wants to solve a particular problem. If you determine that designing and building a good solution will take six months, but that a just-barely-adequate solution can be hammered out in two, Murphy's Law dictates that the user community will be willing to wait exactly seven weeks for a finished application. Because there are virtually no companies with the self-discipline to wait as long as it takes to produce good software, most software sucks. Management methodologies attempt to solve the problem of software sucking, but they do so by making further demands on the already limited time of the development staff AND their managers. Worse, the language that is used to present, for example, the Quality Improvement Process, is very soft and mushy. It tends not to play very well to an audience of technically-oriented employees. They will fight the implementation every step of the way. Having spewed out all of this criticism, however, I should also say that the professional techies of the world have done a singularly bad job of offering any alternative solutions. We've collectively come up with any number of design principles that are meant to enforce standards of quality on our software, but nobody follows those principles consistently. Show me a shop with five programmers and I'll find at least one person who never comments their code.