Teorija i praksa

[PTY]

A-ha! 
(... ali avaj, nisu za panel cimnuli niti jednu ril mekoj facu...  )

Is there any subject science fiction hasn't turned its eyes (or feelers, or antennae) to? Maybe not, but with the passage of time, habits change, mores change, worldviews change, new writers come to the fore bringing new questions, or new ways of asking old questions. There is always a flavor of the month, a subgenre favored by media or by writer's movements now and then (cyberpunks and steampunks promptly come to mind, but we can also think of the New Weird and New Space Opera, to name just very, very few). On the other end of the spectrum, however, there are always delicate subjects, things that don't give themselves easily to scrutiny, for a variety of reasons.

Bearing this in mind, we asked this week's panelists...
Q: What are, in your opinion, the themes and subjects which science fiction never have delved into properly but should have? (sex, politics, religion, sports may be part of this list – or not) Is there an author or story in particular which you feel has treated said subject in the right way and could be an example to be followed among new writers? 

[Gaff]

"Science Fiction" and Literature – or Thoughts on Delany and the Plurality of Interprative Processes

by Chris, King of Elfland's 2nd Cousin.

One of Delany's core points ([size=-1]which he highlights in essay after essay[/size]) is that readers of science fiction apply a different set of skills to reading science fiction texts than readers of mundane fiction apply to the reading of mundane texts.
...
...
And for the past two generations, pop culture has increasingly been adopting the devices and concommitant interprative techniques native to science fiction. Whether it is Star Wars, any of the successive incarnations of Star Trek, the science fictional music of Rush ... , or the near-universal and growing interest in super-heroes doesn't matter: the net result is that as a society our imaginative vocabulary is increasing.
When Delany first wrote "Science Fiction and 'Literature'", he included an example sentence: "Then her world exploded." Back in 1979, a relatively limited population might have had the cultural vocabulary to interpret that sentence plurally as metaphor and/or literal event. But since then, at least two generations (and soon three) have grown up having seen Alderaan scattered across the stars. Don't believe me? Check out this three year old exclaiming how "They blowed up Princess Leia's planet!" Our parents and grandparents do not necessarily have the same interpretative facility, as their formative cultural touchstones were perforce different.

http://elflands2ndcousin.com/2012/08/15/science-fiction-and-literature-or-thoughts-on-delany-and-the-plurality-of-interprative-processes/

[Gaff]

Bruce Bethke: The Secret Symbiosis

iliti, esej o uticaju Adamsovog Vodiča na informacione tehnologije (sa Smart Pop Books).

http://www.smartpopbooks.com/the-secret-symbiosis/

[Father Jape]

Ha, to je onaj lik što je prvi upotrebio "cyberpunk". 

[PTY]

This week we asked about Revisions. I've come across a couple of examples lately of authors reissuing books with significant changes from the initial publication, or changing it relatively late in the initial publication process. With the rise of ebooks, the potential for rolling revisions to books is a very real possibility.

We asked this week's panelists the following:

Q: As a reader and as a writer, how do you feel about the practice of revising books after they have been published (or at least have reached the ARC stage)? How much revision goes into your writing process? (How clean are your drafts)?

This is what they had to say...

[PTY]

MIND MELD: Non-Anglo Presence in the Hugo Awards – Is it Possible?
  By Fabio Fernandes |   


This year's Hugo award ceremony was a very interesting one, regarding gender and ethnicity. Most of the winners were women (congratulations to E. Lily Yu for the Campbell, and Maurine Starkey, Ursula Vernon, Lynne M. Thomas, Seanan McGuire, Elizabeth Bear, Catherynne M. Valente, Liza Groen Trombi, Kirsten Gong-Wong, Betsy Wollheim, Sheila Williams, Charlie Jane Anders, Kij Johnson and Jo Walton) and the Short Story winner, Ken Liu, is of Asian extraction, so maybe we can safely say the fandom has finally reached a point where writers are finally being voted for the sheer quality of their work instead of their sex or their color? Even if it's too early to tell, things are seemingly going in the right direction regarding this matter – but there are still many things to assess. One of them is the virtually invisible presence of non-Anglo writers in the Hugo Awards (also in other Awards, but hey, this is Hugo week, so let's talk Hugo as a symbol of all the other awards in Anglosphere).


We asked this week's panelists...

Q: Do you think the Hugo Awards nominations are underrepresented by non-Anglo writers? Do you think it's something to care about? If you care, what do you think could be done to change the current state of affairs?

    Here's what they said:

[PTY]

MIND MELD: Directions Speculative Fiction Hasn't Taken

Speculative fiction is always experimenting with new writing styles and creating new sub-genres. Some of the newish ones deal with shiny vampires, the inevitbale response to that, and steampunk. But there may be other areas speculative fiction hasn't explored yet.
Q: In your opinion, is there a direction, or directions, you are surprised speculative fiction hasn't taken yet?

[PTY]

 
Fantasy novels based on a roleplaying game? You betcha. There's no shortage of book series that suck money from devoted fans tie in to popular gaming franchises, such as the novels that accompany World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Warhammer 40k, and, of course, Dungeons & Dragons. Paizo's Pathfinder Roleplaying Game introduces the world of Golarion which, as many fantasy worlds are, is full of monsters, magic, dungeons, piles of treasure, plenty of traps, and–most importantly–an endless stream of "adventurers" who got conned into believing that the best way to make a living is to throw themselves headlong into danger and pray they come out the other side with all their wiggly bits intact. With Pathfinder Tales, Paizo has unleashed a growing variety of authors on the reality they've created to see what stories they can conjure.

So how do game dynamics and rule books translate into novel-length plot and characters?

Pretty durn well, actually. So strap on those boots, grab your walking stick, and prepare to journey through three such literary concoctions from the Pathfinder Tales library. Oh, and you might want to make sure your first aid kit is freshly stocked with healing potions. Just in case.

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/09/oh-the-places-youll-go-and-likely-die-tales-from-the-pathfinder-rp-game/#more-62039

[PTY]

In episode 156 of the SF Signal Podcast, Patrick Hester gathers a group of SFSignal folks to discuss: Are optimistic SF stories gone forever?


We've discussed this before, but, I still wonder – with so much dystopian and apocalyptic future sf out there, is the idea of a positive future gone forever? Is this just a trend? Will we see the cycle come back around to positive futures again? Soon?



This week's panel:

   
• Derek Johnson
• Stina Leicht
• Jamie Todd Rubin
• Jaym Gates
• Justin Landon
• Patrick Hester

Download The SF Signal Podcast (Episode 156)

[PTY]

Science Fiction and the Futurist

While science fiction is not always either an accurate predictor or creator of the future, some books lend themselves particularly well to exploration of possible futures.  As someone who is both a futurist and a science fiction writer, I often delight in the careful and well-researched futures that show up as setting and story in modern SF.  I'm going to explore three books that do this well.  One is freshly out from a major publisher, anther is a bit older, and a third is a self-published collection of stories that appeared in Analog.

Read the rest of this entry

[PTY]

What happens when society begins to fracture—not along political fault lines, but through seismic shifts in technology compounded by corporate malfeasance? What happens when incompetent governments stumble in the chaos, and disillusioned citizens give their loyalty to their employers instead? In the upheaval, will rampant libertarianism bleed into anarchy?
Is this the future? Can this be our future?

Dystopia is, of course, the foundation of cyberpunk. This neglected stepson of science fiction is often misunderstood by mainstream readers, tangentially recognized as "like that Blade Runner movie." Yet it still has a certain resonance with contemporary culture. Take a step back from the Earth and turn an eye at our civilization. What do you see? A world where mobs of people line up for the latest iGadget, yet ignore the fact that the individuals making them live in poverty. Where civility in politics has degenerated to men and women pointing fingers at one another like children in a school yard. Where money flows in the wrong direction, making the rich richer, while the poor get yesterday's leftover Spam.

This is progress?

Jeff LaSala Looks at Your Cyberpunk Future

[scallop]

Napisano je dobro napisano, ali nema blage veze sa sajberpankom.

[PTY]

This week, just in time for Halloween, we asked our distinguished panelists about Gothic and Urban Fantasy...

The theme of this year's World Fantasy Convention is "Northern Gothic and Urban Fantasy". The thesis is that Urban Fantasy represents the new Gothic; castles and haunted locations have been replaced by the Modern City.
Q: How do you see the intersection between Gothic Horror and modern Urban Fantasy? How connected are these two genres in your mind?This is what they had to say...

MIND MELD: The Intersection Between Gothic Horror and Urban Fantasy

[PTY]

Like discussions of genre and relevance, there is a perennial resurgence in the discussion of criticism in the field of fantastic literature. In fact, it seems to arise whenever a particularly sharp review or post makes the rounds. The recent flurry of writing about the "exhaustion" of SF comes right to mind, but the question about how we should examine and debate literature is asked constantly. Fans, authors, and others in the field frequently inquire as to the proper nature of criticism, its bounds, and its utility to the field.

I think all of these questions fail to see what criticism often is, and what it can do.

Jonathan McCalmont's notion of criticism, as encapsulated above, is also for me the core of criticism. While criticism can be enlightening, startling, or intricately analytical, those are the results of critical discourse,  of the pursuit of examining a text or texts and creating a reflection of it, that conceptual edifice. It is the act of a critic, but not just one who "judges" a work, but one who takes it apart and sees that values and ornamentations lie within. The work of literary criticism has been one of judgement, but particularly in relation to SF it has been more a pursuit of the word's core meaning, "'to separate, decide.'" Critics decode, analyze, and present their vision of the material to readers. That vision, as McCalmont also notes, is an art itself.

This gets lost in the broader idea of the critic as one who renders judgement and determines what is good or bad. Certainly value judgements arise in criticism because of its intense subjective qualities, but this should be expected rather than be cause for alarm. Criticism emphasizes some meanings of a text, explores some connections, and look for ways to envision the text with a different, particular set of eyes. Critics often uses theories and approaches designed to unpack the possible meanings woven into a text and look for implicit notions and associations within and between the representations created by reading the text. The point is that critics are readers who engage a text to understand its multitude of messages and use those to weave a response to the text that may highlight its positive and negative qualities but that also accentuates the concerns and insights of the critic his/herself.

We come back time and time again to the question of what a critic is "supposed" to do. This question arose in Mark Lawrence's recent diatribe against what he calls the "hammer" approach to critique; he takes to task "intellectual criticism" of fantasy works that are too preoccupied with "societal deconstruction." As he puts it:

"There is a mentality that expects (nay demands) that each SFF book is a tightly wrapped social commentary, a distorting mirror of our society crafted with the sole point of making socio-political points, usually to educate the unwashed masses through parable in the business of how society should be."

His concern is that this approach misses other opportunities in the text. "it seems to me that the critiques that try to reach beyond the plot in genre critting are looking for social messages rather than for the 'open questions asked about the human animal' that literary fiction poses." He contrasts philosophical critiques ("existential stuff") with examining "the transitory business of social structure" with the former being less of a blunt tool of analysis than the latter.

Lawrence's call to diversify critical approaches is one I can get behind; the critical history of fantastic literature has often been one of polemical or proselytizing criticism that tried to focus more on those themes of philosophy and the spirit of man (and often only man) and the values of SFF as a way to examine the human condition from a different angle. More recently (in roughly the last 40 years or so) that trend has been interrupted by an array of often academically-trained critics engaging the literature with the theories and tools of literary criticism. Some of those tools are, indeed, deconstructive, and some do examine the social worth of a text, but to condense all articulations of gender, race, and other representations to something called "societal deconstruction" does not adequately look at "what we really are."

Lawrence separates philosophy from identity and makes it eternal and catholic while gender, etc., are situational and fleeting and hold "far less meaning for me." That is certainly clear from reading Prince of Thorns, and is why some readers love the book and others find it problematic. But this is not just a proposal for diversity, because for Lawrence "societal deconstruction" misses "[t]he deeper themes in much good fantasy" and is actually a petty sort of criticism. As he asserts at the end of his piece, "I do realise of course that the very first and most predictable response would be to turn all those devices upon my own work and parade it as lacking in all other regards too," which implies that such criticism is about tearing down stories and their deeper meanings. "Societal deconstruction" is used to denigrate authors rather than uncovering the greater philosophical implications of their works. The solution is for the critics to use other, gentler tools that uncover what's really going on in a work rather than focusing on ephemera like identity.

This argument rests heavily on the idea that criticism is a service, not an art, and that it is supposed to support literature rather than examine the range of meanings that emerge from texts and that relate to the world around us. Criticism is supposed to distill essential issues of philosophical merit and elevate the text. But that is not what criticism is about, why it is performed. Criticism is precisely the articulations of one's concerns discovered in a text or texts and the distillation and presentation of issues of concern to the critic. Critics are positioned readers who fashion their interpretations of and observations about the workings of a text into their own formulation. Critics serve themselves, and present their findings to others to engender responses and to exchange perspectives. Critics create their conceptual edifices to show them off to other readers hoping to stimulate discussion and to get other readers to look at texts from another viewpoint.

Critics examine literature by creating frames around their subject and superimposing their own picture on what the text is doing. Sometimes they clarify aspects of the text, sometimes they twist them to see if they will hold a new shape. They plumb texts for unobvious meanings, link representations to the world outside of the text, re-envision what the text seems to be doing, and uncover quandaries, inconsistencies, and revelations that course through the read words.  That crashing into the text tries to set off a reaction that reaches out to the reader and dares them to look at the text anew, to find new appreciations or complications, to see the text through another's eyes and expand, or question, their experience of it.


http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/11/achieving-critical-mass-some-thoughts-on-the-art-and-use-of-fantastic-criticism/#more-65548

[PTY]

Horror, Hybrids and Contagion: Why the Messiness of Genres is a Good Thing

We all know the easy distinctions that people tend to make, when reaching for the quick-and-dirty, between science fiction, fantasy and horror. The latter two deploy the supernatural and the impossible. The former makes use of, if not the possible, at least the plausible. Put another way, science fiction is the literature (and cinema) of the rational, while fantasy and horror are the art of the irrational.

But I am more than a tad guilty of setting up a straw man here, for it is just as true that we all know the exceptions and the complexities that render this distinction dubious at best. For example, in Danse Macabre, Stephen King writes that "Alien...is a horror movie even though it is more firmly grounded in scientific projection than Star Wars." Now, this is true, but it is also guilty of some of the same kind of error as the initial assertion. The problem is this: to claim Alien as either science fiction or horror is a mistake. It is both. The two forms are not incompatible, and this is the point I want to make about the easy distinction in the previous paragraph: not that there are so many exceptions as to make this distinction untenable, but rather that we should be careful about how and whether we make the distinction at all, at least as far as the standing of horror is concerned. We are not dealing with overlapping genres, because, as I have stated elsewhere (most recently in the Urban Fantasy Mind Meld), horror is not a genre. It can make use of the conventions of any number of actual genres, including science fiction, and we recognize it, I would argue, when we confront a work whose primary purpose is to cause fear in its audience.


Read the rest of this entry

[PTY]

(najzad malo i o stvarno retkoj zverci - optimisticnom SFu: )


You hear new stories every day: humans are ruining the planet. If we don't do something now, we'll certainly destroy the world for our children. Dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction is wildly popular, and for good reason! These scenarios, while bleak, are also exciting and offer the opportunities for lots of what-ifs. However, in the spirit of optimism, I wanted to explore some future scenarios that offer hope and a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel.

We asked this week's panelists...Q: It's not unusual to hear negative things about what the future might bring for the Earth and humankind, and dystopian narrative certainly makes for entertaining futuristic sci-fi scenarios (environmental disaster, overuse of technology, etc). In the spirit of optimism and hope, what are a few of your far future scenarios that speak to the possible positive aspects of our evolving relationship with our world?

Here's what they said...

[Irena Adler]

Da li je neko možda čitao Neala Ashera (Polity universe)? Iz opisa a i njegovog teksta na linku gore čini mi se da bi moglo da mi bude zanimljivo.

[Melkor]

Samo pricu-dve i stekao sa isti utisak, moglo bi biti zanimljivo. Ali onda me uplasi ziva vaga pa odustanem iako ga uredno nosam na tabletu. Ista stvar i za Peter F. Hamiltona.

[Irena Adler]

Videću da spakujem nešto od toga u mobilni pa možda i dođe na red.

[PTY]

Najtoplije vam preporucujem Africa Zero, tu ziva vaga ne moze cak ni mene da strecne a cini mi se kao veoma reprezentativna proza.

[PTY]

Nerd DeNardo u punom sjaju :


How Space Travel Almost Killed Science Fiction



Within the science fiction community, people mark their calendars not with the cycle of seasons, but with a handful of rotating, perennial discussions that usually ignite mailing lists and blogs. One of the most heated of these arguments is whether "science fiction is dying." There are some who believe it to be undoubtedly true, others who believe it to be ridiculous, and still others who are so tired of the subject constantly rearing its ugly head, that to even give it utterance evokes a disgusted eye roll. Some of the more seasoned fans of science fiction have reason to be skeptical of the claim: this same discussion has been going on for decades (which itself is evidence of the truthfulness of the claim). There was even a point in the late 1950s where the advent of the space program was being blamed for the demise of science fiction.

Here's why.

Continue reading 

[PTY]

In this video, N.K. Jemisin talks about the impact and significance of Octavia E. Butler's classic science fiction novel Dawn, the first novel of the Xenogenesis trilogy (also known as Lilith's Brood, which also is comprised of Adulthood Rites and Imago), which was first published 25 years ago.
In case you haven't read it, here's what it's about:

Lilith Iyapo has just lost her husband and son when atomic fire consumes Earth—the last stage of the planet's final war. Hundreds of years later Lilith awakes, deep in the hold of a massive alien spacecraft piloted by the Oankali—who arrived just in time to save humanity from extinction. They have kept Lilith and other survivors asleep for centuries, as they learned whatever they could about Earth. Now it is time for Lilith to lead them back to her home world, but life among the Oankali on the newly resettled planet will be nothing like it was before.
The Oankali survive by genetically merging with primitive civilizations—whether their new hosts like it or not. For the first time since the nuclear holocaust, Earth will be inhabited. Grass will grow, animals will run, and people will learn to survive the planet's untamed wilderness. But their children will not be human. Not exactly.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler including rare images from the author's estate.

>Celebrating Dawn by Octavia Butler

[PTY]

 
No Bark and No BiteWhat Science Fiction Leaves Out of the Future #4by Gary Westfahl

After one discusses how science fiction futures appear to omit such major aspects of life as the profession of journalism, concern for the future, and the pursuit of pleasure, analyzing the typical pets of the genre might seem a descent into the trivial. On the other hand, people can be passionate indeed about the animals they love, and venturing to suggest that science fiction prefers one favorite pet in its futures while disdaining another may arouse more furor than anything else I have written during a career often marked by controversies. Further, I do not approach this topic without bias because, as a lifelong cat-lover and lifelong dog-hater, I most definitely, so to speak, have a dog in this race. Still, with as much objectivity as I can muster, I wish to argue that dogs represent another conspicuous omission in the futures of science fiction.

In our past and our present, humans have enjoyed the company of both cats and dogs as household companions, in roughly equivalent numbers: according to one recent survey, there are now more cats than dogs in our houses, but more of our houses have dogs (since cat owners are more likely to have more than one cat). Yet, in examining science fiction visions of tomorrow, we encounter a strange dichotomy. Cats are virtually ubiquitous: they are central figures in Robert A. Heinlein stories like "Ordeal in Space" (1948) and The Door into Summer (1957); travel in spaceships in Arthur C. Clarke's "The Haunted Spacesuit" (1958), Gordon R. Dickson's Mission to Universe (1965), the film Alien (1979), and the series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994); are intelligent aliens in the Star Trek episode "Assignment Earth" (1968) and the film The Cat from Outer Space (1978); and employ enhanced powers to function as heroes in Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon" (1956) and Andre Norton's The Zero Stone (1968). There are also numerous stories about humanoid cats or catlike aliens, including the infamous film Cat Women of the Moon (1953), Smith's "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" (1962), and Fritz Leiber's The Wanderer (1964). And it is not only in literature and film that one frequently finds cats: as anyone who has walked through the art show at a science fiction convention can testify, science-fictional or fantastic cats are a regular theme in the paintings, sketches, and sculptures on display. Indeed, cats are so common in the genre that there was actually a panel at the 2008 Los Angeles Science Fiction Convention on the topic of "Are There Too Many Cats in Science Fiction?"

Dogs, in contrast, appear to be relatively rare in the science fiction futures of all media, with few examples coming to mind. As one piece of evidence, I found that a Google search for the exact phrase "cats in science fiction" yielded 368 hits, while a similar search for "dogs in science fiction" yielded only seven. Could the reason be simply that most members of the science fiction community, like myself, tend to like cats better than dogs? Or is there some logical reason for this curious imbalance in the genre's predictions?

One must begin by acknowledging that there is one type of science fiction future in which dogs remain prominent: prophecies of either a forced or voluntary return to a pre-technological existence. After all, before the development of modern civilization, dogs were unquestionably valuable companions: in a world of constant danger, it was useful for vulnerable humans to have animal companions with superior hearing who could alert their masters to the approach of predators or enemies and, when people were attacked, a loyal dog could be an effective ally in fighting off assailants. Thus, in pessimistic science fiction stories depicting futures in which our advanced civilization has been destroyed or abandoned—like George R. Stewart's Earth Abides (1949), Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" (1969), or the film I Am Legend (2006)—it is not surprising to find that dogs remain important friends to humanity; in one such story, Clifford D. Simak's City (1952), intelligent dogs have even replaced humans as the rulers of a pastoral future world where cats are curiously absent. Similarly, one would naturally expect to find dogs on Earthlike planets or space habitats where human settlers are leading a rustic lifestyle; for example, an adorable dog named Nixie plays a central role in Heinlein's "Tenderfoot in Space" (1958), as he accompanies his young master and his family when they emigrate to Earth's newest frontier, the jungles of Venus.

However, a majority of science fiction stories envision futures distinguished by ongoing scientific advances, on Earth and on other worlds, and in such environments, as is already the case today, dogs might be regarded as nothing more than obsolete technology: we now have burglar alarms to detect intruders, and we now have mace and pepper spray to ward off assailants. Nobody in a futuristic society is going to need a dog around the house as much as their ancestors did.

Of course, one can argue with equal force that cats represent obsolete technology as well, since today, we also have other ways to rid our households of rodents and other small pests, the traditional function of cats. Yet, cats can readily justify their continuing presence in our homes, not only because they, like dogs, can still be lovable friends, but also because they have proven to be remarkably adaptable to our modern, cramped, urban styles of living. Cats are happy to stay indoors all of the time, to spend most of their time sleeping in some comfortable location, and to use litter boxes when they have to relieve themselves. For such reasons, it made perfect sense for Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation to have a pet cat on board the Enterprise—such an animal would be no trouble at all on a starship.
In contrast, dogs regularly wish to go outdoors and, if kept indoors too long, they can become rambunctious and destructive, running around rooms, knocking over furniture, chewing on shoes, and so on. For dog-owners on Earth, now and in the future, this problem can be solved by the daily chore of walking the dog. Yet, dogs accompanying humans who venture into space would instantly die if they went outside of their spaceships or their outposts on airless planets. Moreover, even if one could keep a dog happy in a spaceship or on the Moon by giving it a special spacesuit to wear for outdoor excursions, there remains the indelicate reason why dogs always have to go outdoors, a sort of business that cannot be taken care of while wearing a spacesuit in a vacuum. True, systems for eliminating waste could be built into doggy spacesuits, as they are now built into human spacesuits, but what about those times when dogs are indoors and their needs are urgent? It seems that dog-owners in space would be obliged either to force their dogs to wear spacesuits all of the time, or to routinely deal with unpleasant messes on board.

Thus, when you are cataloging all of the innumerable mistakes that doomed the television series Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005), do not forget to include the bizarre decision to have Captain Archer bring a dog along on board his starship Enterprise. Indeed, if it seems that the crew of this series never quite bonded the ways that other Star Trek crews bonded, if these characters never seem quite as comfortable carrying out their duties as the characters from the other series, consider the fact that these crew members are living and working in a starship that must have been permeated with the faint-but-constant odor of dog poop.

All right, you say, we can certainly posit that scientists of the future will come up with some convenient, unobtrusive method to solve this particular problem, but the excretory habits of dogs represent only one aspect of a broader issue. Whatever other characteristics we wish to observe in our future worlds, there is an almost-universal desire for a future that will be clean—indeed, almost antiseptically clean. As I have noted elsewhere, the buildings of today that most resemble the buildings of science fiction futures are hospitals, where everything is always spic-and-span; in the towering skyscrapers and starships of tomorrow, we never observe spider webs, smudges, or piles of clutter. This is another reason why cats can so easily fit into the future, for they are obsessed with being clean, and indeed, may devote hours every day to meticulously licking and grooming themselves.

However, whatever else one might say in defense of dogs, it must be conceded that they are not by nature clean. In addition to the random manner in which they dispose of their waste products, dogs are never disinclined to get dirty, and never do anything to keep themselves clean. One of the ordeals of dog ownership is the need to regularly give the dog a bath, a task that, given the dog's persistent refusal to cooperate, may not get any easier with advanced technology. Thus, in visions of an immaculate future ranging from Things to Come (1936) to Gattaca (1997), it is almost impossible to imagine dogs running freely down their corridors; they would be fiercely incongruous in such pristine settings. However, a cat lying on a shelf somewhere and observing passers-by would not seem out of place.

Writers and filmmakers have other motives for excluding dogs from their future worlds. In years to come, we like to imagine, humans will be more mature, more sedate, more like our parents, and conspicuous displays of emotion will be frowned upon. And cats represent the epitome of cool, always determined to observe strange events with no sign of a reaction save for widened eyes. When their masters come home after a long absence, cats typically will first ignore them, then casually stride over near them and present themselves for a little petting. Given their constant air of calm and worldly wisdom, it is hardly surprising that the ancient Egyptians chose to worship cats, for they truly comport themselves like superior beings.

While cats are always under control, however, dogs are always out of control, reacting in a wildly-physical manner to any provocations; when their owners come home, they run madly toward them, panting with joy, and may even knock them over with the exuberance of their welcome. While cats always act like adults, in other words, dogs always act like children, and no sane person could ever contemplate worshiping a dog. Such creatures that perpetually display immature behavior, then, would inevitably seem inappropriate in the setting of an advanced future world. Consider another example, the briefly-glimpsed future world of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), wherein our descendants sit calmly on thrones, listening to the world-transforming music of the Wyld Stallyns; one can readily envision a cat sleeping in one of their laps, but a dog that runs up and yaps at the heels of Bill and Ted would utterly spoil the mood.

In sum, I would argue, when writers are crafting their future worlds, they find it easy to include cats, since these animals would appear to epitomize the predicted future of the human race—indoors, clean, and sedate. Conversely, since they see dogs as epitomizing humanity's outdoor, dirty, and rambunctious past, they think of them only when developing futures that resemble early, pre-industrial societies. To answer the question that those panelists at Loscon wrestled with: no, there are not too many cats in science fiction, because it is reasonable to assume that cats will become our principal companions in the future, accompanying humans as they construct and inhabit the soaring metropolises of the future, and as they travel in spaceships to explore and colonize other worlds.
Interestingly, there are clear signs that scientists on the frontiers of technology share this attitude and are working hard to better prepare cats for their future role as humanity's best friends. To address the main reason why people today do not have cats—because they are terribly allergic to them—a company has developed and is now selling allergen-free cats; they are rather pricey at present, but are sure to become more affordable in the years to come. To increase their value as the perfect home decorations, some South Korean scientists announced a few years ago that they had bioengineered a fluorescent cat that attractively glows in the dark. And to maintain continuity in their relationships with animals that unfortunately rarely live more than fifteen or twenty years, people now can also pay large sums of money to have their cats cloned, so that they can effectively enjoy the company of the same cat throughout their lives.

In contrast, I am not aware of any parallel efforts to develop scientifically-improved dogs—say, dogs that would use a litter box or dogs with an added instinctive desire to keep themselves clean—probably because practical-minded scientists, in light of all of the issues I have raised, suspect that there would be in the future little profit to be made from such projects. Indeed, the major focus of the current research I have heard about is not to improve dogs, but rather to replace dogs—with robot dogs, which can provide needed companionship without the liabilities of biological dogs, since they do not have to go to the bathroom, and since they can be turned off whenever their activities would be problematic. Common enough in science fiction as to be satirized in Woody Allen's Sleeper (1975), robot dogs of several varieties can now be purchased and are becoming better and better at emulating the real things. (I believe they are especially popular in Japan.) Yet, I know of no efforts to build robot cats—probably because, I would argue, scientists recognize that cats will fit right in to our futures, so that no artificial substitutes will be required. Thus, the evidence could not be clearer that the scientific community, by and large, has reached the same conclusion as science fiction—that cats are better suited than dogs to be integral members of the human households of the future.



I trust it is clear that I am not calling upon people to abandon their dogs, and I am not predicting that dogs will become less common in the future. People have long demonstrated a willingness to cling to customs and beliefs that most would regard as relics of the past, such as tattoos and astrology, and many people will probably still want to have dogs even while inhabiting the sorts of futuristic environments where, I have maintained, dogs would be incongruous. All I am asserting is that, when science fiction writers build future worlds with advanced technology, they characteristically sense that dogs would not really belong there, for the reasons outlined above, and hence tend to omit them from their stories. Whether people will ever respond to their deductions in the real-life decisions they make about household pets is another question altogether, and one I am not qualified to answer.
As a final thought: if science fiction writers have indeed taken sides in the ancient debate between cats and dogs, one might fault them for a failure of imagination since they so rarely consider another alternative: the emergence of a new sort of pet that might, in some situations, be even more appealing than a cat or dog. These could include an existing animal newly popularized as a pet—like the bush baby requested by Heywood R. Floyd's daughter in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); a bioengineered modification of a terrestrial species—like the mutated cockroaches that serve as space pets in Bruce Sterling's "Spider Rose" (1982); or an alien creature introduced into human company—like the Martian "flat cats" in Heinlein's The Rolling Stones (1952) and their cousins, the tribbles, in David Gerrold's Star Trek episode, "The Trouble with Tribbles" (1967). The relative paucity of such examples, and the ubiquity of cats, indicates that science fiction writers, even while creating bizarre new future worlds, can also be stubbornly traditional in their ways of thinking, forever devoted to old friends and unwilling to transfer their affections to new friends. And in this respect, they ironically resemble dogs more than cats.


http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10639

[PTY]

Annoyed With The History of Science Fiction
Jonathan McCalmont's Criticism


0.    Ways of Seeing, Modes of Blindness
There are many ways of seeing a text and every one of them is as valid and beautiful as the last. Some people read a novel and lose themselves in the minds of its characters. Others approach the very same novel and respond only to the themes woven around the characters and buried in the plot. There are many ways of seeing a text and yet some are more popular than others.
One of the most popular ways of approaching a text is from a historical perspective that traces both the streams of influence that went into the creation of the text and the river of influence that flows out towards the next generation of works. Critics working in the field of science fiction are particularly fond of this approach as it allows them to step back from the text and make sweeping statements such as the one put forward by Gary Westfahl in a recent essay for Locus Online:

The science fiction section may have only a few books by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, or even Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, and there may be few signs of their influence on other writers. But the works of Robert A. Heinlein are still occupying a considerable amount of shelf space, and the evidence of his broad impact on the genre is undeniable.

Even though I often write about films in historical terms, I must admit that the historical approach to writing about science fiction leaves me completely cold. My objection to the historical approach is two-fold:

Firstly, I believe that science fiction must either speak to the world as it is today or remain forever silent. I think that talking about science fiction in purely historical terms reduces contemporary works to little more than genetic vehicles, means of transforming influence past into influence future with little regard for either the vehicle itself or the world that gave birth to it.

Secondly, I believe that the historical approach to science fiction lacks the critical apparatus required to support the sweeping claims made by people who use this approach. Far from being a rigorous analysis of historical fact, the historical approach to genre writing is all too often little more than a hotbed of empty phrases, unexamined assumptions and received wisdom.



http://ruthlessculture.com/2012/11/28/annoyed-with-the-history-of-science-fiction/

[PTY]

Free Online References for Science Fiction & Fantasy Readers

[PTY]

Flawed forecasting – when science fiction gets it wrong

(...)

Although it's fun to see predictions come true, I am in fact fascinated by examples where SF get things completely off, where obsolescence creeps into an otherwise futuristic setting and pops your suspended disbelief like a soap bubble. It tells you as much about contemporary life and attitudes of the author as it does about our futures. The otherwise gritty realism in the film Until The End of The World, in which the characters communicate in payphones with video screens, seemed amazingly high-tech when I saw it first in 1991. I even remember thinking that the payphones being grotty and clapped out was a nice touch– somehow much more realistic than any glittering, silvery Jetson's-style affair.  But now, when payphones are extinct, the entire concept seems misjudged. Yes, we have video messaging, but nobody makes calls from public boxes anymore – we have our mobile communication devices. Gene Roddenberry got it right, but not Wim Wenders.

An even more glaring bubble-pop happened when I was watching Blade Runner (The Director's Cut) the other day. I could forgive Rick Deckard slouching against a wall reading his (paper) newspaper – it somehow worked in the retro ghettoized futurescape of LA's Chinatown. But the smoking! Indoors! In your place of employment! It seems clear by the costumes and hairstyles that Ridley Scott was going for a 1940s noir look, but in 1982 he utterly failed to foresee that particular cultural revolution, which is now so entrenched that watching the characters puff away, especially in the high-tech office spaces of the Tyrell Corporation, seems more alien than little green men on the moon.
(...)

[PTY]

Neologisms, Pseudowords, & The Pleasures of Deviant Language in Fantastika


"All fantastic genres make some use of fictive neology. Heroic fantasy invents words to evoke the archaic origins of its worlds. Phantasmagoric satire delights in wordplay that simultaneously masks and insinuates the objects of its derision. Gothic and supernatural tales invoke esoteric and folkloric terms to create the sense of a concealed or forgotten past. SF is distinct, in that its fictive neologies connote newness and innovation vis-à-vis the historical present of the reader's culture. They are fictive signa novi, signs of the new." – Istvan Csiscery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, p. 13)

[Gaff]

Putujući Edinburški Književni Festival stigao do Красноярск-a.


A evo kako su Čajna i ekipa govorili u Edinburgh-u:



CHINA MIEVILLE -- Will the novel remain writers' favourite narrative form?

[Irena Adler]

Langdon Winner: Why are there so few genuine utopias in science fiction cinema?

Ceo program kursa o kome piše je ovde.

[scallop]

Utopija u sebi ne nosi dramu i to je sve šta o tome treba znati.

[Gaff]

Langdon Winner: Why are there so few genuine utopias in science fiction cinema?

Učinilo mi se da sam negde (na drugom mestu) već čitao ovaj tekst. Ili mi se učinilo ili nije isti tekst samo veoma sličan. Solidno.

Evo jedan sličan, Hunter Liguore: Bracing for a Brave New World. Nikako da ga nađem. Bio je na sajtu Periheliona. Doduše može da se pročita iz guglovog keša.

[Irena Adler]

@scallop
U utopiji kao takvoj nema drame i s tim bih mogla da se složim. Ali bih takođe mogla i da zamislim scenario u kome je, recimo, utopija ugrožena pa treba da se odbrani. Hoću reći, potpuno mi je zamislivo da neko o tome pravi film. Samo što neće, jer (i čini mi se da je to ključni razlog) generalno nismo više u stanju da utopiju shvatimo ozbiljno, to jest bez nekog ironičnog odmaka (koji, mora se priznati, ponekad proizvodi superfenomenalne priče poput Šeklijeve "Savršene planete").

@Gaff
Hvala, zanimljiv je ovaj tekst, a i saznala sam šta je tektologija.

[mirkiekishka]

Ovde mi trenutno najpogodnije da napisem, ako nekog zanima, Zoran Paunovic trenutno na kanalu studio b govori o engleskoj knjizevnosti.

[PTY]

Springer's Science/SF Initiative



Springer, a leading science publisher, is seeking titles for a new series that will explore the "narrow frontier" between science and science fiction —

A unique new book series.In many respects the intellectual challenges of discovering new science and creating plausible new fictional worlds are two sides of the same coin. They both demand an understanding of the way the world is and, based on this, an ability to imagine how it might be.

The characteristics Springer's looking for are books that:>

   
• Indulge in science speculation – describing, in accessible manner, interesting, plausible yet unproven ideas
• Exploit science fiction for teaching purposes and as a means of promoting critical thinking
• Analyze the interplay of science and science fiction – throughout the history of the genre and looking ahead
• Publish essays on related topics, probably with a philosophical tenor
• Publish short works of fiction where (i) the scientific content is a major component and (ii) the text is supplemented by a substantial summary of the science underlying the plot

Gregory Benford is a member of the editorial and advisory board. I asked him what existing works might be considered examples of what Springer hopes to publish. Benford says:

They cited

Beyond Human that I did with Elisabeth Malartre, and Deep Time from 1999... plus some writings of Zebrowski and Asimov and Clarke's Profiles of the Future, much Dyson, Rees Our Final Hour, Time Travel by Gott, Nahin's Time Machines, a lot of Paul Davies — a wide range on the mutual inspirations of science and sf.
The Editorial and Advisory Board is loaded with prestigious scientists and writers.

Mark Alpert, author of Final Theory, The Omega Theory, and Extinction, is a contributing editor at Scientific American.

Philip Ball worked at Nature for over 20 years, first as an editor for physical sciences (for which his brief extended from biochemistry to quantum physics and materials science) and then as a Consultant Editor. His writings on science for the popular press have covered topical issues ranging from cosmology to the future of molecular biology. Ball's latest is Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything (Bodley Head, 2012)

Gregory Benford, in addition to being one of our most honored sf writers and the author of over 20 novels, is a professor of physics at UC Irvine. He conducts research in plasma turbulence theory and experiment, and in astrophysics. He has published over a hundred papers on topics including condensed matter, particle physics, plasmas and mathematical physics, and biological conservation.

Michael Brotherton, an astronomer on the faculty at University of Wyoming, studies the supermassive black holes in the centers of  galaxies. He is also the author of Star Dragon (2003) and Spider Star (2008), and founder of the NASA-funded Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers, which brings a dozen award-winning professional writers to Wyoming every summer.

Victor.Callaghan credits his love of "SciFi" for drawing him into "Science and Engineering and, ultimately, to teaching and researching in a university .... the best job in the world." Callaghan and his colleagues have made many contributions, a couple examples being the development of a novel real-time self-programming fuzzy-logic based genetic algorithm for robot control, and the development of the world's first network camera (NetCam – a spinoff of robotics work).

Amnon Eden is a computer scientist and the co-editor of a forthcoming collection of essays on the singularity hypothesis.

Geoffrey Landis is a NASA scientist who works on Mars missions and developing advanced concepts and technology for future space missions. His sf has won two Best Short Story Hugos and a Nebula, and as a poet he has won a Rhysling Award.

Rudy Rucker is a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a computer science professor. He's the author of 30 published fiction and nonfiction books, including 2 Philip K. Dick Award winners.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch's researchs the interaction of microbes with their natural geological environment in an aqueous medium. He is interested in the presence of liquid-rich environments on other planets and moons inside and outside of our Solar System and how these environments can serve as a potential habitat for microbial life.

Rudy Vaas is editor of Beyond The Big Bang: Competing Scenarios for an Eternal Universe and cod-editor of The Arrows of Time: A Debate in Cosmology.

Ulrich Walter is a physicist/engineer and a former DFVLR astronaut and a professor of astronautics.

Stephen Webb has written on such cosmological subjects as If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life.

Summing up the project, Benford says: "I hope this can be a new vehicle for such approaches. Plainly as we accelerate into this turbulent century, facing unprecedented problems like climate change and the population/resource crunch (see The Windup Girl), we need all the thinking we can get."

http://file770.com/?p=11676&cpage=1#comment-116898

[Gaff]

Planet of the Apes franchise and religion

(via TheoFantastique)

[Gaff]

Junot Díaz - What we like to read and what we like to write?!


http://www.youtube.com/embed/X3vDbXwLg7g?start=6136&end=6483

[Gaff]

Krzysztof K. Kietzman: Constructs of Innocence in Selected Works of Cyberpunk Fiction (M.A. Thesis)

(via SF Signal)

[Melkor]

Realism, (Male) Rape, and Epic Fantasy

This post contains discussions of sexual violence, including anal rape and sexual mutilation.

[scallop]

Sad će ceo svet da navali sa proučavanjem ovog teorijskog rada. Engleski je čudo. Forum će par dana da cvate.

[Gaff]

Veronica Belmont, Daniel Wilson i John Scalzi o međusobnom uticaju džidža-bidža i naučne fantastike na Expand Endgadget panelu

via endgadget

[Nightflier]

http://www.irishtimes.com/the-new-future-of-sci-fi-1.1335557#.UVAEyJXDHYY.twitter

[Gaff]

Rumunska naučna fantastika

via Europa SF

[Gaff]

Filozofija i Matriks


Philosophy and the Matrix

[PTY]

Recently, a group of futurists predicted that artificial intelligence is a deadlier threat to humanity than any sort of natural disaster, nuclear war, or large objects falling from the sky. In an article by Ross Anderson at AeonMagazine.com, David Dewey, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute says, concerning the human brain and probability "If you had a machine that was designed specifically to make inferences about the world, instead of a machine like the human brain, you could make discoveries like that much faster." He stated that "An AI might want to do certain things with matter in order to achieve a goal, things like building giant computers, or other large-scale engineering projects. Those things might involve intermediary steps, like tearing apart the Earth to make huge solar panels." He also talked about how programming an AI with empathy wouldn't be easy, that the steps it might take to "maximize human happiness", for example, are not things that we might consider acceptable, but to an AI would seem exceedingly efficient.
Of course, this leads into much more complex discussion, and the possibilities with AI are vast and varied.

We asked this week's panelists...
Q: What is your take on the future of humans and AI? Is it positive, negative, both?

Here's what they said...

[Mme Chauchat]

Rumunska naučna fantastika

via Europa SF

The major authors of this period were: Sergiu Farcasan, Radu Nor, Ion Marin Stefan, Victor Kernbach, Ion Manzatu, Romulus Barbulescu and George Anania, Constantin Cublesan, Mircea Oprita and Vladimir Colin.

Legende Vamove zemlje!

[Irena Adler]

Sarah Wanenchak: Expanding the Sociological Imagination: Teaching Sociology with Speculative Fiction

[Gaff]

200+ eseja o Modernom Prometeju


via UPenn

[PTY]

bas se nekako prakticno poklopilo

The last time I wrote about escapism I was trying to get a better handle on the term and its implications. As a response to that column, Carl V. Anderson asked a very pertinent question about  the literary idea of escape: what are we escaping to? I've thought about this on and off but it wasn't until I read Foz Meadows' article at A Dribble of Inkwhy."

All too often the why is taken for granted as inseparable from the what of escapism, as if the motive for it was inherent and uncomplicated. Escapism is generally characterized and applied as common-sensically unproblematic and often caricatured as deviant or mesmerizing. Meadows' discussion strips away some of this sensibility and asks us to examine both why we invoke escapism as we do and just what various readers might be doing with it other than escaping from the everyday. The homogenizing application of the term deflects a consideration of why by giving it the appearance of being self-evident. Meadows asserts that it is not, and that if we want to grasp what escapism does, we need to move past binary formations and look at what readers are actually doing when they "escape" through a story.


The usual definition of escapism as a method for leaving one's reality behind (temporarily) is not even a useful starting point. Human beings constantly tell and re-tell the story of their actuality, while there are always factors that we cannot ignore or accommodate.  "Escaping" into literature is just one application of a universal human cognitive practice. At an essential level it is no different than losing oneself in a math problem or daydreaming or planning a vacation. We spend a great deal of our time engaged in imagining things that are not present; literary escapism is one variation of this activity. What makes it distinctive is what we engage with and how we construct our distraction from the immanent world. The fact of departure is meaningless; where are we headed with our imagination?

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013/05/escape-has-a-destination-but-its-never-far-away/#more-75993

[Gaff]

J. Jay Jones: Ko je bio Alice B. Sheldon iliti ko je bila James Tiptree, Jr.

via Amazing Stories

[zakk]

Tnx!