incontrovertibly something
Hey, Rachel Maddow: I agree with you that those things should never have been on your show in the first place, but goddamn do I love your smack-down afterwards.
I wanted to write about my love of space and science and sci-fi and why they are completely and forever linked for me on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but, um, I didn't. However, I now get to link this, which is, well, a collection of dorky, dorky Stephen Colbert clips on the subject. (Him talking to Garrett Reisman while Reisman is in "omg space!" remains one of my very very favourite things ever.)
And today I finished Mary Doria Russell's book The Sparrow. While I'm going to do my usual reviewy thing and talk about it more at the end of the month, I'm also going to talk about it now, because among other things, it's about exactly that yearning, soaring desire for the stars that I associate with my love of science and science fiction. In the book, she goes into the parallel that feeling has with spirituality, with feeling close to God, and that really rang true for me. Space is as close as I get to religion, and the idea of stepping onto another planet, seeing other galaxies, that we as human beings can use our brains and our muscles and work together to literally break free of our planet and head out into the universe... that's incredible to me. We did that.
And okay, science fiction doesn't always do that brilliantly (this letter to sci-fi fandom is, I think, a little harsh but probably largely true). But it tries. It is - or at least I want it to be - the artistic home of people who look at the world today, think about the future, and want more. Who want to beam down onto another planet, see that final frontier, and cross it. Who think that maybe if we meet aliens, we'll learn from them, even if it's just about ourselves and who we are and that other ways of being are possible.
It's a genre of crazy aliens and enjoying the possibilities of the imagination. It's about having that crazy, hopeful idea and going with it, because maybe with enough effort it will come true. It's about potential, in a self-descriptive kind of way that no other genre really is. Sometimes, says sci-fi, [a] doesn't just lead to [b], it goes all the way to [z]. And it doesn't really matter, in the end, whether [z] is a good thing or a bad thing or, more typically, a mixture of both - it's about the journey, about trying to see just that tiniest bit of what the future might hold. Maybe.
It's possible I'm ridiculously sentimental about this stuff. But I can't believe that a genre producing something like The Sparrow can possibly belong to conservative-nutjob libertarian white dudes, even if they are there too. I really, really can't.
In entirely unrelated news, I apparently actually do have tendonitis. Damn tendons. Who needs them anyway.
I wanted to write about my love of space and science and sci-fi and why they are completely and forever linked for me on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but, um, I didn't. However, I now get to link this, which is, well, a collection of dorky, dorky Stephen Colbert clips on the subject. (Him talking to Garrett Reisman while Reisman is in "omg space!" remains one of my very very favourite things ever.)
And today I finished Mary Doria Russell's book The Sparrow. While I'm going to do my usual reviewy thing and talk about it more at the end of the month, I'm also going to talk about it now, because among other things, it's about exactly that yearning, soaring desire for the stars that I associate with my love of science and science fiction. In the book, she goes into the parallel that feeling has with spirituality, with feeling close to God, and that really rang true for me. Space is as close as I get to religion, and the idea of stepping onto another planet, seeing other galaxies, that we as human beings can use our brains and our muscles and work together to literally break free of our planet and head out into the universe... that's incredible to me. We did that.
And okay, science fiction doesn't always do that brilliantly (this letter to sci-fi fandom is, I think, a little harsh but probably largely true). But it tries. It is - or at least I want it to be - the artistic home of people who look at the world today, think about the future, and want more. Who want to beam down onto another planet, see that final frontier, and cross it. Who think that maybe if we meet aliens, we'll learn from them, even if it's just about ourselves and who we are and that other ways of being are possible.
It's a genre of crazy aliens and enjoying the possibilities of the imagination. It's about having that crazy, hopeful idea and going with it, because maybe with enough effort it will come true. It's about potential, in a self-descriptive kind of way that no other genre really is. Sometimes, says sci-fi, [a] doesn't just lead to [b], it goes all the way to [z]. And it doesn't really matter, in the end, whether [z] is a good thing or a bad thing or, more typically, a mixture of both - it's about the journey, about trying to see just that tiniest bit of what the future might hold. Maybe.
It's possible I'm ridiculously sentimental about this stuff. But I can't believe that a genre producing something like The Sparrow can possibly belong to conservative-nutjob libertarian white dudes, even if they are there too. I really, really can't.
In entirely unrelated news, I apparently actually do have tendonitis. Damn tendons. Who needs them anyway.