Alan Watts through the South Park guys. Via Andrew Sullivan
Much better.
Here’s why…
Too bad about the ordering. “Fucking dick-bomb” would be a great addition to the vocabulary of invective.
What if I say dick cheney? Does that up my dick count, as well?
I’d better say fucking again, or it won’t come first any more. As it were.
UPDATED:
“dick cheney” doesn’t alter the count! You could presumably all day about what a dick Cheney is and still have a G rating. Hmm.
On the other hand, two more fuckings and two more dicks turn the bomb into a gun.
Betcha never expected to read that sentence.
I’ve only got one so far:
My friend Pyegar recommended this to me. A history teacher and textbook author, James Loewen was frustrated by the way that history textbooks cloud the real stories in American history. The book reexamines a number of personages, events, or sequences in history, the stories we all think we know, in the light cast by primary historical sources. How important was disease in the early colonization of the Americas? Why did my mother learn a different version of the Civil War and Reconstruction growing up in Louisiana from the one I learned in in the suburbs of DC? What shadows does the largely revered Wilson presidency cast on us to this day? How nasty was Columbus, anyway? Pretty nasty. Beyond a doubt the worst human being we celebrate with a holiday, even if you include all of the Presidents in Presidents’ Day.
It’s a very judicious, careful, open-handed book, not a shrieker. It’s not another People’s History of the United States, which I found so one-sided that I trusted it less the more I read.
I have to say that this book changed the way I think about nearly everything.
What other books are so good and so important that everyone should read them?
[inspired by the unknown searcher who came to my site from the Google query, "human-shark hybrid walking the earth"]
Episode I: Wal-mart doesn’t understand me
I needed some AA batteries for my radar detector. I could go to CostCo or Home Depot if I wanted a package of fifty, but I didn’t want a package of fifty, so I went to Wal-mart. Also, Wal-mart’s parking lot was a right turn from my office, which meant I wouldn’t have to wait for a traffic light. I have to keep moving or I get short of breath.
“Welcome to Wal-mart. Can I help you find anything today?” It was this guy my dad’s age or older, just inside the door, wearing a little apron. He was polite and seemed harmless, but I was feeling a little peckish, so I ate him. That caused a bit of a ruckus. People screamed and ran away, which is really stupid because it totally sets off my pursuit reflexes. I would have chased them down and eaten them, too, but I remembered what I had come in for. AA batteries, for my radar detector. I’m a human-shark hybrid, but that doesn’t mean I have to act like a shark all the time. I have some self-control. Plus I wasn’t all that hungry anymore.
Over at DeepGenre, David Louis Edelman muses thoughtfully on whether hard science fiction is itself at risk because our current times are already so SFnal.
So maybe that’s the problem with science fiction these days. We’re losing market share because we’re losing our capacity for wonderment at the future.
The question of why SF is losing print market share while it’s doing pretty well on TV and film is very interesting - see Jason Stoddard’s thoughts on the subject, for one, or my own, for that matter. I can sympathize with some of David’s sentiments; after all, at the moment, I’m blogging over free wireless in a cheap hotel on a Tablet PC that’s three years old. I’m in a small town in New Jersey (exit 5) for a wedding. The future is here, and it’s completely small-M mundane. Wireless internet is everywhere, but Trent the Uncatchable isn’t a gengineered interplanetary hacker revolutionary –he’s some dude who blogs about playing Farcry.
By the way, The Long Run is absolutely the greatest cyberspace-hacking-revolt-against-the-UN novel you’ve never read.
David’s commenters have hit some of the obvious responses to David’s argument. Is he talking about science or technology? If we lose our wonderment at science and technology, does that mean we can’t still write compelling commercial fiction about human interactions? However, David’s post sent me on an interesting chain of thought.
I think that it’s relatively rare in fiction to come across characters who spend any amount of time reading, in any genre whatsoever. Entertainments about people consuming entertainment being somewhat difficult to make entertaining, as it were. It’s really unusual in SF&F to find characters absorbing entertainment, though, because SF&F protagonists are uniformly heroic. With very few exceptions, SF&F heroes are unique, or uniquely important, in the scope of world. They’re the fulcrum of what’s happening not just in the story, but in the whole world. Let’s look at the last ten Hugo-winning, novels, for instance.
2006, Spin, Robert Charles Wilson. Main character is intimately connected with people who are running much of the world, does things that almost nobody else does.
2005, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susannah Clarke. Main characters are the only wizards in the world.
2004, Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold. Main character is selected by gods as demon-removal agent.
2003, Hominids, Robert J. Sawyer. Haven’t read it. According to the Pub Weekly summary on Amazon, it’s about a Neanderthal physicist who crosses between timelines and…. nuff said.
2002, American Gods, Neil Gaiman. Protagonist buddies up with Odin for refighting of the war of the Gods. Simple little slice-of-life story, in other words.
2001, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling. Through luck, accidents of history and heredity, and a knack for being in the right place at the right time, main character is the main bulwark against the triumph of evil in the world. Nonetheless, a fair commercial success. 
2000, A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge. First trade mission to newly-discovered alien civilization uncovers solutions to the technical problems that have stagnated civilization in the galaxy for centuries. [Vinge is one of the great hard-SF authors like Reynolds and Stross whose works pose particularly formidable learning curves to people who don't read a whole lot of science and SF].
1999, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis. A time travel agent get mucked up in paradox-avoidance in the middle of a routine ancient-building-parts retrieval mission. So far, the least extraordinary protagonist in this list, but still - he’s a time-travel agent spending a lot of time avoiding world-ending paradox. Also, the only comedy, and gut-bustingly funny [possibly even funnier, though, is its inspiration, Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men and a Boat]. Is this the only Hugo-winning comedy ever? Topic for another post.
1998, Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman. Haven’t read it, again going from the summaries on Amazon, the protagonists save the solar system from… never mind. Heroes again.
1997, Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson. In the liberal’s answer to Moon is a Harsh Mistress, centuries-old Nobel-winning scientists synthesize new forms of government for the terraformed colony on Mars. Movers and shakers
1996, Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson. OK, the main character is basically a really, really good engineer, who does a little moonlighting for an important client. But the project winds up altering the political fabric of China and nearly, as a by-product, destroys the e-commerce infrastructure of the entire world.
SF&F novels embrace great and global themes. Some SF writers destroy the world in every single book - I’m thinking of Jack McDevitt and Stephen Baxter, right off the top of my head. The greatest SF novels also are moving portraits of human beings, as well; Wilson’s Spin may be the finest combination of character-driven story and hard SF I’ve ever read, and I’m a huge Kim Stanley Robinson fan.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with embracing great themes. War and Peace is about not just the defeat of Napolean, but the very nature of history itself. I think, though, that the dominance of truly heroic themes says something about SF and its traditional markets.
Going through the list of the last ten Pulitzer Prize winners (right here), I don’t see a single story that concerns global cataclysm, or characters who change nations. Not one. The Road shows characters in reaction to apocalypse. The Hours is an interesting case, since one of the characters is one of the century’s greatest novelists, and it’s a rare case of a novel in which the nature of fiction itself is important. The heroes of these stories are heroes only in an intimate, personal sense.
It’s not that non-SF books don’t destroy the world, or the country; Robert Ludlum risked the republic in every book he wrote. Thriller writers blow things up all the time, and their heroes always prevent worse from occurring. The difference is that the world of mainstream fiction does not value the huge drama as highly as does the world of SF. I think that the preoccupation with the larger scale may be the hallmark of genre fiction.
Ian McDonald’s River of Gods is a beautiful, passionate exploration of a future India that turns into a novel in which AI’s force zero-point physics to provide them a way off the planet. Was I the only one who found that conclusion frustrating and disappointing? Not because of its lack of resolution (which I’m OK with) but because a sensitive novel of people and cultures suddenly turned into one of physics?
Peter Watts’ Blindsight does more than any other SF novel I’ve read to explore the different consciousnesses of altered or impaired human brains - but does it in the context of an alien first contact. I’m tempted to compare it to The Corrections, a novel which probably goes further to explore the impact of Parkinson’s on consciousness than any other, but in the context of its impact on the self and on a family around one of its victims.
This contrast has to be important. The mainstream of fiction is blowing up families, and science fiction is blowing up the world. I think the principle holds out when we look at some of the more obvious SFnal works to gain mainstream acceptance, like Infinite Jest. Despite all its outrageous near-future satire, the real appeal of Infinite Jest lies in the touching dysfunctions of the Incandenza family and the pathos of Don Gately’s struggle to stay straight. And the fact that David Foster Wallace totally ownz0rs the English language, of course.
Interestingly enough, one of the major exceptions I would highlight is Infoquake, by one David Louis Edelson. Infoquake concerns the experiences of a young wizard brilliant military strategist madman entrepreneur who takes over the world starts a new company so he can take over the world make some money using alien technology skills he learned apprenticed to a mad genius his father. In order to succeed, he has to master alien technology a deadly martial art based on wheat germ marketing. And yet, there’s a compelling story and characters we can care about.
Maybe we’re trying to do too much.
Spotted dick is always funny.
These came up on a one-line e-mail about donating PC’s to schools.
And me, beyond a doubt the most foul-mouthed person I know.
Wait a minute, how did it miss this? It must look only at the current page.
