Sorry, I wasn't sure whether your request was really about a specific novel, as opposed to a snarky comment about "Do you remember the one where $SETTING with $STOCK_DETAIL_1 and $STOCK_DETAIL_2 and $STANDARD_CHARACTERS does $X", similar to the fantasy version "An elf and a dwarf walk into a bar, a fight ensues, and they end up helping $YoungAdultProtagonist go on a Quest."
At the larger bookstores around here, F&SF gets a lot of shelf space as well, though it's subject to the usual Sturgeon's Law and the "Volume 1 of a 5-part-series is no longer on the shelf" problems. And robots, aliens and medieval-world elves have been getting pushed aside by vampires, zombies, and modern-urban-fantasy-world elves, but on the other hand, some of those zombies and elves are written by people like href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seanan_McGuire">Mira Grant and Seanan McGuire, so there's still awesomeness to be found. And while there's new work coming out from Steven Brust, apparently his publishers think that they can get us all to buy it in trade paperback instead of smaller, cheaper mass-market paper.
Most sci-fi movies that get made by Hollywood may be just recycled other-genre films, because that's the kind of movie Hollywood knows how to make, and you could say the same kinds of things about spy movies. But Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is literature, and James Bond isn't. (I'll leave categorization of Little Drummer Girl up to the reader, along with arguments about whether Casablanca belongs in the same genre.) And much of Hitchcock gets taken seriously, though certainly not all.
I was too young to watch 2001 with the drugs that it really needed, but it was a great movie. But Planet of the Apes was popular and had some good content, and lots of people at least remember the title of Ice Station Zebra even if we're vague about what it was about.
A friend of mine rates Bullitt as a 6 - it's mostly a 4, but a 9 for the car chase down the hilly parts of Mission Street in San Francisco. And while I never actually saw The Thomas Crown Affair, the music is still an effective earworm.
Red Dwarf would often parody things from other science fiction over the years. For instance, the Star Trek "Keptin, there's a Massive Energy Field Ahead" gets turned into Cat saying "Whoa! Swirly Thing Alert!", and the crew throwing themselves across the set a few times.
And Late For Dinner (a low-key Mel Gibson movie) dealt with the cryonics in a low-budget-DIY-Frankenstein style rather than trying to use high-tech-looking special effects, and it really worked well. It was basically saying "the cryonics thing is a tool to let us create the story, and we're going to focus on the story itself."
Then of course there's early Dr. Who, where they'd be using big paper-mache rocks because they didn't have the budget to make them out of real Styrofoam(tm) the way Star Trek did.
The reason hard sci-fi tends to have less mass appeal is that the authors often care more about their rockets and robots than about their characters, especially some of the military-style scifi that obsesses about the 4-dimensional BFG-9000 that the 2-dimensional protagonist is using against the 1-dimensional Bad Guys. (That's not to say that other genres of sci-fi don't have similar problems, it's just yet another restatement of "Sturgeon was an optimist".)
On the other hand, it can work just fine with big-screen summer blockbuster movie treatments - somebody's got to hand Michael Bey a plot to fill in the spaces between explosions. Or with anime, whether it's just giant-mecha-robots-in-space or shows that do a better job with mood and character. (For instance, I really like some of the episodes of Cowboy Bebop, with nice moody noir stuff, and find others to be pretty boring.)
There's good hard sci-fi out there that could be made into movies, mostly at the novella or short story length. The question is whether it can compete for funding with formulaic romantic comedies, teenage gross-out pictures, and the rest of the stuff that's going to make money but not get nominated for Oscars. Not many movies are aimed at the huge LOTR or Avatar scale, and some of the movies that think they're artistic enough to aim for Oscars are more like Solaris. Too bad Moon vanished from theaters before I got to see it.
Gollum worked not only because of the CGI-postproduction-over-motion-capture covering Serkis's motions, or because of the work Serkis did on how Gollum would move, but more importantly because of Serkis's voice work and his understanding of the character filled with desire and madness.
I hadn't seen the Firefly TV show, because my cable company wasn't carrying the Skiffy Channel on analog cable on my side of town that year, and I haven't watched much of it on DVD because there's some stupid copy protection thing that either doesn't like the DVD player in my Tivo or the built-in VCR in my TV or something.
But even without having seen the TV show, the movie still rocked. Sure, maybe I missed some context, emotional back-story, and in-jokes, and there's less complete world-building shown in the movie than in the TV, but I do read science fiction, and the skills for reading it carry over into watching movies. And enough of the theater audience had seen the show that there may have been some extra cues. And, well, Nathan Fillion, and Summer Glau!
And it means that when I'm watching Castle, I at least get most of the in-jokes about Castle speaking Mandarin because of a TV show that he used to watch and having a space cowboy Halloween costume that his daughter rolls her eyes about.
Be careful with splitting pills - that's fine if you're taking the short-acting stuff, but most extended-release pills dump all their contents at once if you do that. (OTOH, the extended-release seems to have been harder to get, if I read the article right.)
Yes, there are issues with ADHD drugs being overprescribed when the issues is kids acting like kids instead of well-behaved robots (especially boys), but kids are more likely to get Ritalin; Adderall users are more likely to be college students or young working adults.
Sure, pissing off hippies is safer than pissing off biker gangs who sell meth ("There's no weed left? Bummer, man! Let's go to the park and see if anybody else has any.")
But pissing off ADHD medication users is pretty safe, because they get unfocused, and you can distract them ("SQUIRREL!!"), or have the school administrators classify them as Bad Kids. Adderall's a bit safer to do that with than Ritalin, because it's more likely to be used by college students or working adults, so you won't have soccer moms complaining to their congresscritters when they can't get their kids' meds.
But back when it was just the War On Cold Medicine, I remember when I could no longer find Sudafed in bottles of 100, only in blister packs. It's a lot more trouble for me to open then when I've got a bad sinus headache, but an angry meth addict is probably just fine to punch all those little pills out of the blister packs.
Libertarians think education should be a locally managed service, responsive to parents, not a Federal one. And go ask your liberal friends how much they like No Child Left Behind, which is what happens when one central government pushes the same policies on everybody.
Important regulatory agency? Nonsense. The FDA's an important regulatory agency, though even they get accused of causing more deaths by delaying permission for some heart attack medicines than they've saved by blocking bad drugs like thalidomide or impure drugs from random-manufacturer.
The DEA's a Political Correctness Morality Enforcement Agency, and the regulatory functions are there because using the police and the military haven't been enough to get everybody to obey them so they're also beating up drug manufacturers and prosecuting doctors for providing adequate pain management for real patients.
What did they do before Adderall? They flunked out of college, or used drugs that weren't as effective for them, like tobacco and caffeine. Or for a few decades, they used other amphetamines, such as Benzedrine. I remember when you could get nasal decongestant inhalers that were Benzedrine-based, and Sudafed was introduced as a substitute for them, like we're now getting Phenylephrine instead of Sudafed.
It's not just a central planning problem, like having the Agriculture Department subsidizing ethanol production or the CDC guessing wrong about what kind of flu vaccine we need some years. It's mostly a political correctness problem, with the DEA trying to interfere with people using a popular type of drug (as a followon to their War on Cold Medicine that makes us have to use fake sudafed instead of the real stuff.)
What? You're one of those Republicans who thinks "Political Correctness" is a only _Liberal_ problem? Wrong...
Oh, of course the images can be stored - the machines wouldn't be very useful for prosecuting unsuccessful underwear-bombers if they couldn't. But at least most people won't have bored underpaid security guards looking at them unless they're actually carrying something (as opposed to, say, London CCTVs, which are mainly used to follow attractive women.)
Sorry if your stick figure looks like shrinkage, though:-) But yes, it's ridiculous.
Yup. I'm entirely against censorship - but being against censorship doesn't mean I think that books I dislike automatically deserve awards, either. (There's a lot of interesting ideas in that book, but a lot of unnecessarily offensive material, and at least for me it sufficiently detracts from the good parts that I wouldn't recommend it to anybody, and I'm definitely not going to read it again. Your choice whether you want to, but this is a book I'd classify as hours of unsatisfying unpleasantness with little payoff, as opposed to a "not written well enough to waste your time on" rating.)
You don't even need to hijack DNS or mess with the tablet OS - just have the access point route all the traffic to your content server instead of the real public internet. (Of course, you need Wifi-only tablets:-) You could probably serve the whole thing from a PogoPlug or equivalent, or alternatively use a small PC with a Wifi card as the server/WAP.
Texas could easily issue a court order demanding that Google do that - all the plaintiff would have to do is assert that Islam is their intellectual property, and it should be no problem fitting in with the traditional court behaviour down there. A patent would be more likely to succeed, but those have to be registered, and expire after 20 years, but he could argue that those cartoons of The Prophet are derivative works and he'd be riding the Disney-powered gravy train of perpetual copyright protection.
You have to be clear about the Supreme Court's rulings on saying "under God" - they say it can only be required if it's being done non-religiously (i.e. in pretty direct violation of the commandment about not taking God's name in vain), and kids are allowed to opt out (you can thank the Jehovah's Witnesses for that - they didn't want their kids forced to worship flags or the state.) And the money says "In God We Trust", because "Trust me, it's real silver, and we're keeping enough gold in Ft. Knox" would be about as believable as "We've got a bridge in Brooklyn we can sell you!"
The weird thing is that it's the religious people who think that both of these mockeries of religion are good things. (And these days, NYC might very well sell your corporation the naming rights to the Brooklyn Bridge.)
In the original book, and the Marlon Brando movie, the ugly American was a good guy, helping the farmers in the fictitious southeast Asian country he was working in improve life in their villages. It was the military and government folks back at the embassy who were getting us into the Vietnam war.
The Xray scanners have serious risks that the manufacturers and the TSA keep evading any honest discussion about, particularly because the radiation concentrates on your skin rather than being evenly distributed. The terahertz radar scanners don't have that problem - they're not cranking enough power to cook your skin. A number of European governments have decided to use the terahertz ones and rip out any Xray models because of this.
They're still naked porno scanners that the Aussies are putting in to suck up to the Americans, but you'll have to fire your own politicians. And at least the stick-figure displays aren't as offensive as the originals.
I was fine with the dystopian energy-crisis food-shortage spy-novel paranoid stuff - it was creative, and some of it was well-written, and I wasn't bothered by the cartoon-physics use of genetically engineered elephants to wind fancy springs that seems to annoy a lot of engineers. But the genetically-engineered-women-just-deserve-sex-slavery-and-killing theme that makes up about half the book was really vile. I found it far more squicky and offensive than when a bad imitation Conan the Barbarian character rapes his conquests, and IMHO that part was almost as badly written.
I didn't see how it rated a Hugo award, in spite of the creativity and the complexity of the plot.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I wasn't sure whether your request was really about a specific novel, as opposed to a snarky comment about "Do you remember the one where $SETTING with $STOCK_DETAIL_1 and $STOCK_DETAIL_2 and $STANDARD_CHARACTERS does $X", similar to the fantasy version "An elf and a dwarf walk into a bar, a fight ensues, and they end up helping $YoungAdultProtagonist go on a Quest."
At the larger bookstores around here, F&SF gets a lot of shelf space as well, though it's subject to the usual Sturgeon's Law and the "Volume 1 of a 5-part-series is no longer on the shelf" problems. And robots, aliens and medieval-world elves have been getting pushed aside by vampires, zombies, and modern-urban-fantasy-world elves, but on the other hand, some of those zombies and elves are written by people like href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seanan_McGuire">Mira Grant and Seanan McGuire, so there's still awesomeness to be found. And while there's new work coming out from Steven Brust, apparently his publishers think that they can get us all to buy it in trade paperback instead of smaller, cheaper mass-market paper.
Most sci-fi movies that get made by Hollywood may be just recycled other-genre films, because that's the kind of movie Hollywood knows how to make, and you could say the same kinds of things about spy movies. But Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is literature, and James Bond isn't. (I'll leave categorization of Little Drummer Girl up to the reader, along with arguments about whether Casablanca belongs in the same genre.) And much of Hitchcock gets taken seriously, though certainly not all.
No, I won't get off your lawn.
I was too young to watch 2001 with the drugs that it really needed, but it was a great movie. But Planet of the Apes was popular and had some good content, and lots of people at least remember the title of Ice Station Zebra even if we're vague about what it was about.
A friend of mine rates Bullitt as a 6 - it's mostly a 4, but a 9 for the car chase down the hilly parts of Mission Street in San Francisco. And while I never actually saw The Thomas Crown Affair, the music is still an effective earworm.
Red Dwarf would often parody things from other science fiction over the years. For instance, the Star Trek "Keptin, there's a Massive Energy Field Ahead" gets turned into Cat saying "Whoa! Swirly Thing Alert!", and the crew throwing themselves across the set a few times.
And Late For Dinner (a low-key Mel Gibson movie) dealt with the cryonics in a low-budget-DIY-Frankenstein style rather than trying to use high-tech-looking special effects, and it really worked well. It was basically saying "the cryonics thing is a tool to let us create the story, and we're going to focus on the story itself."
Then of course there's early Dr. Who, where they'd be using big paper-mache rocks because they didn't have the budget to make them out of real Styrofoam(tm) the way Star Trek did.
The reason hard sci-fi tends to have less mass appeal is that the authors often care more about their rockets and robots than about their characters, especially some of the military-style scifi that obsesses about the 4-dimensional BFG-9000 that the 2-dimensional protagonist is using against the 1-dimensional Bad Guys. (That's not to say that other genres of sci-fi don't have similar problems, it's just yet another restatement of "Sturgeon was an optimist".)
On the other hand, it can work just fine with big-screen summer blockbuster movie treatments - somebody's got to hand Michael Bey a plot to fill in the spaces between explosions. Or with anime, whether it's just giant-mecha-robots-in-space or shows that do a better job with mood and character. (For instance, I really like some of the episodes of Cowboy Bebop, with nice moody noir stuff, and find others to be pretty boring.)
There's good hard sci-fi out there that could be made into movies, mostly at the novella or short story length. The question is whether it can compete for funding with formulaic romantic comedies, teenage gross-out pictures, and the rest of the stuff that's going to make money but not get nominated for Oscars. Not many movies are aimed at the huge LOTR or Avatar scale, and some of the movies that think they're artistic enough to aim for Oscars are more like Solaris. Too bad Moon vanished from theaters before I got to see it.
Gollum worked not only because of the CGI-postproduction-over-motion-capture covering Serkis's motions, or because of the work Serkis did on how Gollum would move, but more importantly because of Serkis's voice work and his understanding of the character filled with desire and madness.
I hadn't seen the Firefly TV show, because my cable company wasn't carrying the Skiffy Channel on analog cable on my side of town that year, and I haven't watched much of it on DVD because there's some stupid copy protection thing that either doesn't like the DVD player in my Tivo or the built-in VCR in my TV or something.
But even without having seen the TV show, the movie still rocked. Sure, maybe I missed some context, emotional back-story, and in-jokes, and there's less complete world-building shown in the movie than in the TV, but I do read science fiction, and the skills for reading it carry over into watching movies. And enough of the theater audience had seen the show that there may have been some extra cues. And, well, Nathan Fillion, and Summer Glau!
And it means that when I'm watching Castle, I at least get most of the in-jokes about Castle speaking Mandarin because of a TV show that he used to watch and having a space cowboy Halloween costume that his daughter rolls her eyes about.
Be careful with splitting pills - that's fine if you're taking the short-acting stuff, but most extended-release pills dump all their contents at once if you do that. (OTOH, the extended-release seems to have been harder to get, if I read the article right.)
Yes, there are issues with ADHD drugs being overprescribed when the issues is kids acting like kids instead of well-behaved robots (especially boys), but kids are more likely to get Ritalin; Adderall users are more likely to be college students or young working adults.
Sure, pissing off hippies is safer than pissing off biker gangs who sell meth ("There's no weed left? Bummer, man! Let's go to the park and see if anybody else has any.")
But pissing off ADHD medication users is pretty safe, because they get unfocused, and you can distract them ("SQUIRREL!!"), or have the school administrators classify them as Bad Kids. Adderall's a bit safer to do that with than Ritalin, because it's more likely to be used by college students or working adults, so you won't have soccer moms complaining to their congresscritters when they can't get their kids' meds.
But back when it was just the War On Cold Medicine, I remember when I could no longer find Sudafed in bottles of 100, only in blister packs. It's a lot more trouble for me to open then when I've got a bad sinus headache, but an angry meth addict is probably just fine to punch all those little pills out of the blister packs.
Libertarians think education should be a locally managed service, responsive to parents, not a Federal one. And go ask your liberal friends how much they like No Child Left Behind, which is what happens when one central government pushes the same policies on everybody.
Important regulatory agency? Nonsense. The FDA's an important regulatory agency, though even they get accused of causing more deaths by delaying permission for some heart attack medicines than they've saved by blocking bad drugs like thalidomide or impure drugs from random-manufacturer.
The DEA's a Political Correctness Morality Enforcement Agency, and the regulatory functions are there because using the police and the military haven't been enough to get everybody to obey them so they're also beating up drug manufacturers and prosecuting doctors for providing adequate pain management for real patients.
What did they do before Adderall? They flunked out of college, or used drugs that weren't as effective for them, like tobacco and caffeine. Or for a few decades, they used other amphetamines, such as Benzedrine. I remember when you could get nasal decongestant inhalers that were Benzedrine-based, and Sudafed was introduced as a substitute for them, like we're now getting Phenylephrine instead of Sudafed.
It's not just a central planning problem, like having the Agriculture Department subsidizing ethanol production or the CDC guessing wrong about what kind of flu vaccine we need some years. It's mostly a political correctness problem, with the DEA trying to interfere with people using a popular type of drug (as a followon to their War on Cold Medicine that makes us have to use fake sudafed instead of the real stuff.)
What? You're one of those Republicans who thinks "Political Correctness" is a only _Liberal_ problem? Wrong...
Oh, of course the images can be stored - the machines wouldn't be very useful for prosecuting unsuccessful underwear-bombers if they couldn't. But at least most people won't have bored underpaid security guards looking at them unless they're actually carrying something (as opposed to, say, London CCTVs, which are mainly used to follow attractive women.)
Sorry if your stick figure looks like shrinkage, though :-) But yes, it's ridiculous.
Yup. I'm entirely against censorship - but being against censorship doesn't mean I think that books I dislike automatically deserve awards, either. (There's a lot of interesting ideas in that book, but a lot of unnecessarily offensive material, and at least for me it sufficiently detracts from the good parts that I wouldn't recommend it to anybody, and I'm definitely not going to read it again. Your choice whether you want to, but this is a book I'd classify as hours of unsatisfying unpleasantness with little payoff, as opposed to a "not written well enough to waste your time on" rating.)
You don't even need to hijack DNS or mess with the tablet OS - just have the access point route all the traffic to your content server instead of the real public internet. (Of course, you need Wifi-only tablets :-) You could probably serve the whole thing from a PogoPlug or equivalent, or alternatively use a small PC with a Wifi card as the server/WAP.
They're the same color as trolls.
Texas could easily issue a court order demanding that Google do that - all the plaintiff would have to do is assert that Islam is their intellectual property, and it should be no problem fitting in with the traditional court behaviour down there. A patent would be more likely to succeed, but those have to be registered, and expire after 20 years, but he could argue that those cartoons of The Prophet are derivative works and he'd be riding the Disney-powered gravy train of perpetual copyright protection.
You have to be clear about the Supreme Court's rulings on saying "under God" - they say it can only be required if it's being done non-religiously (i.e. in pretty direct violation of the commandment about not taking God's name in vain), and kids are allowed to opt out (you can thank the Jehovah's Witnesses for that - they didn't want their kids forced to worship flags or the state.) And the money says "In God We Trust", because "Trust me, it's real silver, and we're keeping enough gold in Ft. Knox" would be about as believable as "We've got a bridge in Brooklyn we can sell you!"
The weird thing is that it's the religious people who think that both of these mockeries of religion are good things. (And these days, NYC might very well sell your corporation the naming rights to the Brooklyn Bridge.)
Or go ask Brother Guy, who's the Pope's astronomer. He mainly does planetary research, and occasionally speaks at science fiction conventions.
In the original book, and the Marlon Brando movie, the ugly American was a good guy, helping the farmers in the fictitious southeast Asian country he was working in improve life in their villages. It was the military and government folks back at the embassy who were getting us into the Vietnam war.
The Xray scanners have serious risks that the manufacturers and the TSA keep evading any honest discussion about, particularly because the radiation concentrates on your skin rather than being evenly distributed. The terahertz radar scanners don't have that problem - they're not cranking enough power to cook your skin. A number of European governments have decided to use the terahertz ones and rip out any Xray models because of this.
They're still naked porno scanners that the Aussies are putting in to suck up to the Americans, but you'll have to fire your own politicians. And at least the stick-figure displays aren't as offensive as the originals.
Martinique!
I was fine with the dystopian energy-crisis food-shortage spy-novel paranoid stuff - it was creative, and some of it was well-written, and I wasn't bothered by the cartoon-physics use of genetically engineered elephants to wind fancy springs that seems to annoy a lot of engineers. But the genetically-engineered-women-just-deserve-sex-slavery-and-killing theme that makes up about half the book was really vile. I found it far more squicky and offensive than when a bad imitation Conan the Barbarian character rapes his conquests, and IMHO that part was almost as badly written.
I didn't see how it rated a Hugo award, in spite of the creativity and the complexity of the plot.