Bla, etc.
15 August 1998
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Bla, etc.
15 August 1998
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Just finished Standing Wave by Howard Hendrix, a sequel to Lightpaths, which I reread first once I realized that was the case. And oh gosh, what an example of what can go wrong with science fiction. The entire book is false conversation after false conversation, with some "emotion" and "character" and "action" bits thrown in here and there to keep up the illusion that this is a story. Rather than a set up to explain and prove the author's confused philosophy.
Which at bottom is that same old Yoda stuff. "Radiant beings are we!" I mean, God forbid (er, so to speak) that life is just made of dumb stuff. No, no, we are an entelechical infinite dynamical system that both imposes itself upon the plenum and is in turn imposed upon in a mode-locking entrainment of portal experiences into that wordless other, which anyways Neolithic man knew way more about than we are discovering, just ask the Australian aborigines. Here, man, eat this mushroom, you'll understand everything! Or something like that.
Look, it's not that there was a philosophical background to the story that bugged me, or that the course of the plot explained - and was driven by - scientific speculation. (Well. "Scientific".) That's much of what distinguishes science fiction from other work. But it's got to flow from the story, not take the place of one. The reader should be left to work out the implications. Don't whap me over the head with your polysyllabic umbrella. Jeez.
I want to lock this guy and Tom Clancy in a room together. And then run away very fast.
In other news, there is no news. There's a Bugs Bunny festival playing at the Castro this week, I think Private Ryan might get left in Europe for a while yet. Imagine, a time in America when cartoons were made for adults. Now everything has to be made nicely safe and stupid - "Think of the children!" Fluoridation, by damn - Ripper was right!
Many people - ones that I know and the ones I read here in Soapbox Space - seem to be awfully cranky this month. Don't know what I think about that. It's a kind of comfort to imagine that it's all sunspots or something external like that. But I also start thinking about feedback. You know, you step on someone's toe, and five degrees of separation later, a lady blows her husband's head off. Damn this sounds awfully familiar. Forgive me if I'm repeating myself.
Do you know how tempted I was just then to cut & paste that entire paragraph three times? Sure you do. The Editor Temptation. Get thee behind me, Satan, I was here first! And take your bad jokes with you.
Well, wait, not all your bad jokes... I have to have something to say tomorrow, after all.
Now, beer. And I'll have you know, I am not just not shaving because I'm lazy. It's a symbolic gesture of my support for the preservation of individual consciousness against the mass-hypermedial recameralization in order to serve the social-ontological programs of the patriarchy. So there.
Willfully blind self-indulgent nebbish or amusingly quirky old coot? And how bout that local sports team? Discuss among yourselves.
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All names are fake, most places are real, the
author is definitely
unreliable but it's all in good fun. Yep.
© 1998-1999 Lighthouse for the Deaf. All rights reserved and stuff. The motto at the top of the page is a graffito I saw on Brunswick Street in Melbourne. | ||||
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