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"Once we had our data, we divided it up into works set in the Near Future (0-50 years from the time the work came out), Middle Future (51-500 years from the time the work came out) and Far Future (501+ years from the time the work came out)."
"Battle Royale and The Hunger Games are young adult novels in which governments force teenagers to kill each other. Comparing these books to classic works by William Golding and Robert Sheckley suggests that, while becoming more skeptical about governments, we've become more trusting about our own nature."
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At the close of the Korean War, it came naturally to Sheckley and Golding to portray people as the problem and government as the solution – Takami and Collins, writing in our times, begin with the reverse assumption, and to make this comparison is to sense how far, in the intervening decades, the pendulum of consensus has swung from Hobbes towards Rousseau. Books like Battle Royale ↑ and The Hunger Games ↑ would have seemed too subversive of adult authority to have been published or perhaps even conceived in the 1950s – but does this mean we have become less naïve, or just that we have become naïve in a different way?
"It's as a response to that cultural void that science fiction becomes genuinely interesting. In the midst of an ever accelerating technological revolution, science fiction has emerged as the literature best able to articulate the relentless pace of social change. And as that technological revolution has spread outward from the western world, so the symbols and archetypes of science fiction have become a shared language for understanding the new world we are entering."
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The geek culture that made Marvel comics part of its mythology has, like all other cultures, been repurposed by capitalism as a way of selling products to the mass market. And with an estimated 25% of under-34s self-identifying with the geek demographic, it's arguable that geek culture is really just a response to a lack of culture, a generation who have grown up alienated from any sense of cultural belonging, and are left clinging on to Hollywood product
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There may only be a small wave of translated SF reaching the anglophone world today, but the internet is quickly unleashing much more. I'm only beginning to scratch the surface myself. Who are the other international SF authors we should all be reading today?
"After I recommended that the major publishers drop mandatory DRM from their ebook products, I realized that my essay had elided a bunch of steps in my thinking, and needed to reconsider some points. Then I realized that it's not a simple, straightforward argument to make. Consequently, I ended up writing another essay, although I've tried to summarize my conclusions below. "
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1. The rapid current pace of change in the electronic publishing sector is driven by the consumer electronics and internet industry. It's impossible to make long term publishing plans (3-10 years) without understanding these other industries and the priorities of their players. It is important to note that the CE industry relies on selling consumers new gadgets every 1-3 years. And it is through their gadgets that readers experience the books we sell them. Where is the CE industry taking us?
2. Dropping DRM across all of Macmillans products will not have immediate, global, positive effects on revenue in the same way that introducing the agency model did ...
3. However, relaxing the requirement for DRM across some of Macmillans brands will have very positive public relations consequences among certain customer demographics, notably genre readers who buy large numbers of books (and who, while a minority in absolute numbers, are a disproportionate source of support for the midlist).
4. Longer term, removing the requirement for DRM will lower the barrier to entry in ebook retail, allowing smaller retailers (such as Powells) to compete effectively with the current major incumbents. This will encourage diversity in the retail sector, force the current incumbents to interoperate with other supply sources (or face an exodus of consumers), and undermine the tendency towards oligopoly. This will, in the long term, undermine the leverage the large vendors currently have in negotiating discount terms with publishers while improving the state of midlist sales.
"I came to utopia by accident, having painted myself into a corner with an idea for a trilogy: three science fiction novels consisting of an after-the-fall novel, a dystopia and a utopia, all set in the same place, and about the same distance into the future. The idea came to me in 1972, and I didn’t know how to write a novel then, so the plan needed brooding on. Some sixteen years later, the time came for the utopia. I had written the after-the-fall novel, The Wild Shore, and the dystopia, The Gold Coast. The utopia was the only one left."
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I had also come to feel that many people, and especially many of my leftist colleagues, thought of science as merely the instrument of power — as the most active and effective wing of capitalism. This now struck me as wrong. To me it seemed that we actually exist in a situation that can better be described as ‘science versus capitalism’: a world in which smaller progressive concepts such as environmentalism, environmental justice, social justice, democracy itself — all these were going to be defeated together, unless they were aligned with the one great power that might yet still successfully oppose a completely capitalist future, which was science. I was thinking with a very broad brush at this point, almost mythologically you might say, but it struck me as an interesting story to tell, a new story with some possible analytic value. So I wrote the Science in the Capital trilogy with these thoughts in mind.
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Now the future is a kind of attenuating peninsula; as we move out on it, one side drops off to catastrophe; the other side, nowhere near as steep, moves down into various kinds of utopian futures. In other words, we have come to a moment of utopia or catastrophe; there is no middle ground, mediocrity will no longer succeed. So utopia is no longer a nice idea, but a survival necessity. This is a big change. We need to take action to start history on a path onto the side of the peninsula representing one kind of better future or another; the details of it don’t matter, survival without catastrophe is what matters. In essence the seven billion people we have, and the nine to ten billion people we’re likely to have, exist at the tip of an entire improvised complex of prostheses, which is our technology considered as one big system. We live out at the end of this towering complex, and it has to work successfully for us to survive; we are far past the natural carrying capacity of the planet in terms of our numbers. There is something amazing about the human capacity to walk this tightrope over the abyss without paralysing fear. We’re good at ignoring dangers; but now, on the attenuating peninsula, on the crazy tower of prostheses — however you envision it, it is a real historical moment of great danger, and we need to push hard for utopia as survival, because failure now is simply unacceptable to our descendants, if we have any.
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Review and commentary on R.A. Lafferty
"What fascinates me is the user interface by which the Plan is read and explored by "Speakers" -- the secret members/academics/bureaucrats of the Second Foundation. It is projected on the wall as a network of dense, interlocking equations by a device named the "Prime Radiant," and manipulated using a combination of gestural interface and thought control. Black equations were part of the original Seldon plan; red is used for those added by Speakers; blue is where unanticipated deviations from the plan have occurred."
"Hargus Molnar, Master Librarian, had a face that would have been at home in a gallery of military statues, among dead conquerors casting their permanent scowls down across the centuries. Lean and sinewy, with close-cropped gray hair and a dozen visible scars, he wore a use-seasoned suit of black leather and silvery mail. Etched on his cuirass was a stylized scroll, symbol of the Living Library, surmounted by the phrase Auvidestes, Gerani, Molokare. The words were Alaurin, the formal language of scholars, and they formed the motto of the Librarians:
RETRIEVE. RETURN. SURVIVE."
"One of the central problems with narrative nonfiction is that the best narratives aren’t messy and complicated, while nonfiction nearly always is. Daisey stepped way too far over the line when he started outright lying to his audience and to the producers of This American Life. But all of us in the narrative-nonfiction business (I’ve written such stuff myself) are faced at some point with a choice between telling the story and telling the whole truth, or the whole truth as best we understand it. Someone like Michael Lewis will concentrate with a laser focus on the story: what he writes is the truth, but it isn’t the whole truth. And when you have a storyteller like Mike Daisey who considers himself a monologist rather than a journalist, even outright lies can find their way in to the story very easily."
Philip K. Dick
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
Eds. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, November 2011. 944 pp.
_____. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
1964. Mariner, October 2011. 240 pp.
_____. Ubik
1969. Mariner, April 2012. 240 pp.
_____. VALIS
1981. Mariner, October 2011. 288 pp.
_____. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
1982. Mariner, October 2011. 256 pp.
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Dick’s convoluted sci-fi plots are best read allegorically in any case, and I think Three Stigmata and Ubik deserve to be seen as two of the starkest parables of the Marxian concept of reification ever written. The entropic settings of both novels are indistinguishable from our mundane world of consumer capitalism, where meaningful distinctions between people and objects have collapsed: Humans have become mere things to be drugged and manipulated, while artifacts have become efficacious, quasi-spiritual agents. The characters in both books routinely emit a debased jargon full of advertising slogans and empty journalese, all the while moving through an object-world that seems vitalized by the very powers they have lost. Yet there remains the possibility, however absurd, of a kind of salvation, of some transcendent message that can break through the reified crust and put the characters in touch with their essential selves. This invasive signal, emanating from a higher dimension, is usually cryptic and distorted by noise, and can often be confused with the welter of garbage surrounding it. As Dick would put it in VALIS, “the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum” — and this is how the first inklings of Dick’s later oracles vouchsafe themselves in his early work.
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