This week, we delve more into William’s past, wax philosophical about electronics, discuss authors we don’t actually know, and crap on modern science fiction. Enjoy!
QUESTIONS:
Dear Tony & William, Mac or PC? –Craig
What are your feelings about Kurt Vonnegut? — Anon
Assertion: The sci-fi of my childhood had something it wanted to say. Today’s sci-fi just wants to look pretty. Discuss. Love, The Producer
LINKS:
This is the video Tony mentioned in this episode.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Have you seen Nebraska or Blue Jasmine (movies not people)? If so, your thoughts?
No, but they are both on my list, actually. I’ve especially heard really good stuff about Blue Jasmine. I’m not, as a rule, a Woody Allen fan… but every once in awhile he comes through with a masterpiece, and it sounds like this might be one.
Heinlein — some of his stuff is great, and then sometimes his attitudes about women really make me go, ewwww…
I find a lot of the most interesting sci-fi (in the kind of genre of speculation about society) more recently has been speculative about gender. I’d recommend Eleanor Arnason’s “A Woman of the Iron People.”
Ursula Le Guinn–I think you probably know? (Might have been mentioned in another podcast or on the forum?)
People who either aren’t writing anymore or aren’t with us: Joanna Russ (“The Female Man” and “The Adventures of Alyx.” James Tiptree (Alice Sheldon). There’s an award for best speculative fiction about gender every year named for Alice Sheldon (The Tiptree Award) and there are short story collections of the winners and nominees. There are also good short story collections under the titles “Women of Wonder.”
I literally mentioned Ursula LeGuin within 30 seconds of the end of the recording. š
oops my computer posted that before I was done.
Octavia Butler is another excellent SF writer who just passed away recently. “Blood child” is a great short story about master-slave relationships, gender, and family.
From Golden Age SF, there’s C.L. Moore–who’s probably known more for fantasy with the Jirel of Joiry series, but she also wrote with a Western style hero called Northwest Smith who is very Han Solo-like, including the way he looks on the jacket cover.
And not SF, but very good speculative fiction–“The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing” which is about a slave boy raised by followers of transcendentalism in an effort to discover the intellectual capability of Africans.
On a pretty different note–was just reading an article about why “Adventure Time” is the best sci-fi on TV and I’d have to agree with that. The world-building is so dense that it’s hard to explain but one description of the setting is that it’s in very distant future after an apocalypse, and that the apocalypse led to the return of magic which is mixed in with all kinds of mutation because of the “Mushroom War.” The main characters are a boy and his dog/brother. The dog is both sentient and able to transform his body. The boy was raised by the dog’s family as the dog’s brother. They primarily live in a kingdom populated by candy-people who have all been constructed by Princess Bubblegum–the ruler and Frankenstein-like scientist. There’s also a teen-girl vampire, Marceline, who feeds off the color red, and a tragic character–the Ice-King–who has gone mad from wearing a crown of power (which he was forced to do to protect the young Marceline immediately after the War).
Happened upon excerpts of a graduation speech by Vonnegut this morning (in a subscription I get). It’s great, though I wish they’d just print the speech and not interrupt it with commentary:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/04/17/if-this-isnt-nice-what-is-kurt-vonnegut-commencement/
And the same magazine had a good article on Asimov:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/04/07/isaac-asimov-bill-moyers-education-science-religion/
I love Scrawny Claus!!! I’m so sad he doesn’t visit my current workplace.
And when I sign “Love” it’s for the Hat, you doofuses. š
Chiming in quickly but yes I’m still here, just listening mostly when I’m on the tube these days and by the time I get to being able to post on the blog I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.
Glad you’re still with us, Craig! š
Ready? I guess so.
Is William’s microphone a drunk? Is that why it’s falls down all the time?
Hi Ezzie!
Sarcasm is the modern man’s version of wit.
William’s Game: What is your game anyway and if you’re on your game are you winning it?
Yeah, it really was a nice day out.
Tony: International Pen Thief. It’s got a bit of a ring to it.
William: Don’t worry about saying uninteresting things; Tony does it all the time. :p
Briar Rose: Tech problems? Anything we can do to help?
All art is based on a form of mental illness.
Skyrim (on PC) has other forms of exploits that are quite amazing and the great thing about playing on the PC are all the add-ons you can install for it.
Mac vs. PC: Like William, I prefer the lower upfront cost and at times kind of enjoy learning to troubleshoot a PC myself. I’ve also gone one step further and proudly run Linux as my main OS. In any case, smartphones & tablets are totally eating away people’s need/desire for laptop/desktop computing.
We have Sears to thank for Scrawny Claus? AWESOME. And while Scrawny Claus was slightly sketchy; he wasn’t child-molesting/axe-murdering sketchy.
Kurt Vonnegut: I read Cat’s Cradle, but didn’t care for it all that much and don’t really know anything about him.
William Gibson: I’ve read a few of his and some of his books are quite good but some are really meh.
George Lucas: Yup, Tony’s got it right.
Speculative Fiction: I’m not sure that there’s less really good spec-fic out there these days, so much as there’s so much crap you have to dig through to find the good stuff.