-Hard cases make good news.
-News
thrives on novelty and therefore on exceptions. To treat news as
calling for a law is to fundamentally misunderstand that news-stuff is
contrary to law-stuff.
-We'd be closer to justice if we forbade any law to be passed in response to a news story.
-News
trains us to only treat the dramatic as serious or worthy of reverence.
Our "thoughts and prayers" must be directed at the screaming mother,
lone survivor, deluged city, or chaos seen from a helicopter. Systemic
problems must be either ignored or find a way to riot on film.
-Is there a grosser hypocrisy than the earnest somberness of the anchorman? I warn you: some of the images you're about to see are disturbing... our thoughts are with the families. Ohc'mon. You live for this! Your thoughts and prayers are for another one just like it next week!
+++
TOF is reminded that in response to earlier cries, we put armed police in the schools. Today we learn that armed police are not an answer.
Mr. Flynn, you're a science fiction expert, right? Tell me, is "To Your Scattered Bodies Go" by Philip Jose Farmer any good?
ReplyDeleteI read it many years ago and enjoyed it, although its premise was distinctly fantasy.
DeleteOk, I was looking to buy it and some of the reviews I read was that it is the worst winner of the hugo award for best novel.
Delete...Somehow I doubt Philip Jose Farmer is a more racist or more sexist writer than N. K. Jemisin, given she makes Hiroyuki "Springtime for Tojo—IN SPACE!" Morioka look like a sane person.
DeleteI haven't read enough of either to compare "sloppiness", though. Maybe the reviewers just really dislike psychedelia?
After reading up on Farmer, it seems to me that he wrote a lot in a style similar to the pulp fiction stories, so perhaps that explains why his writing could be taken as racist and misogynistic, considering that women and minorities weren't supposedly treated in high regard.
DeleteIn the era of pulp fiction, that is.
DeleteSo say the mythologizers of the Late Modern Age. But then they weren't there, were they?
DeleteEh, lot of pulp is pretty cringe-y in places. All the women in the Conan stories, with I think only two exceptions (Valeria and Bêlit), are rape-victims (though not victims of rape by Conan), solely to artificially fulfill the taboo-trope that forbade heroes in adventure-fiction "spoiling" virgins. Because hooking up with the mentally-broken victims of human trafficking is so much better. The treatment of blacks in "Shadows in Zamboula" and "The Vale of Lost Women" is like something out of Birth of a Nation.
DeleteAlways remember, the late-19th to mid-20th century was so bad, people not actually clinically psychotic fell for late-20th to early-21st century lunacy. ("How bad was early industrialism? So bad people mistook Karl Marx for an economist and historian.")
Another thing. Would any of you recommend the books of Poul Anderson? I have Tau Zero, but I've been reading that he's athl his best in creating believeable alien species and cultures. What do any of you think?
Delete*at
DeletePoul Anderson was one of the greatest SF writers of all time. I recommend his Time Patrol stories, esp. "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" and "Star of the Sea." other novels and stories that I liked were:
DeleteThe Enemy Stars
The High Crusade
After Doomsday
The Dancer from Atlantis
The Boat of a Million Years
"No Truce with Kings" (in Time and Stars)
"In Memoriam"
"Uncleftish Beholding" (both in All One Universe)
"In the House of Sorrows" (in What Might Have Been, vol. 1)
I haven't read much Anderson (couple of the Ensign Flandry stories, The Night Face), but I second the recommendation based on what I have read.
DeleteWhat about "The Star Fox" or "Fire Time?"
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ReplyDelete