Fantastic Worlds updates

[jordan179]

Reprinted, edited and slightly improved my old Livejournal articles "The Fear of Boundlessness: Explanation for the Mundane SF Movement" and "Historical Cycles and the Anachronism Argument as Applicable to Space Opera

Comments

[operations]

They call those, "nerds."

[polaris93]

At least nerds are competent and comfortable with electronics, and can deal with rapidly advancing technology and even envision a civilization far in advance of ours technologically. Not these idiots.

[marycatelli]

Hmm.

I like the essays but if I were looking for the second one I would have to scroll a long way to find it. Personally I prefer long stuff behind cuts.

[polaris93]

You have to wonder why these idiots so limit their visions of the future. It reminds one of the Neo-Skinnerians' dictum about what mind is: Whereas Skinner rather reasonably pointed out that you can't weigh or measure mind, but you can do so to behavior, and that psychology should therefore be the scientific study of behavior (I don't agree, but it's logical, after all), the Neo-Skinnerians decided that since you can't weigh or measure mind, it doesn't exist. (I asked the psych student who told me about this why the hell they'd drawn that conclusion. "Introspection?" he said, shrugging.)

You're right: these "Anything beyond Earth is only fantasy" types are frightened of space, frightened of infinity, frightened of eternity. This is called "ostrich behavior" -- unfairly, because ostriches are still with us, and they only put their heads into the sand to protect their eyes from windstorms. The millennia to come should select those tendencies out of the human gene-pool. Let's hope our species survive them to gloat.

[cutelildrow]

Blogspot is part of google's umbrella, IIRC.