Some thoughts on modern-day literature

[tacit]

There will come a time
This life you live
Will catch up with you
And no one will be left
When honesty is blind
In ignorance exist the fallen.
We’re begging for the truth

I just returned from a trip to Chicago to visit dayo. The flight's a little over two hours, plus ancillary waiting-about at the airport after passing through the absurd farce we

Comments

[james_the_evil1]

You know, I have to disagree with you about Trek. One of the reasons Spock became the most popular character in TOS was because of the ongoing & ever developing story of the conflict between his human & Vulcan halves and what that said about humans. Plus episodes going back to the beginning with "Where No Man Has Gone Before" dealt entirely with "what does it MEAN to be human?"
I could go on & on about the subject.

As for Wars (the original trilogy not the idiotic new one), it is, as Campbell noted, the quintessential hero's journey story but doesn't delve deeply beyond the baseline of that premise.

[tacit]

Oh, I could go on for days about it, too

[james_the_evil1]

I would disagree with that analysis on several points & can point to episodes to back up my thinking. If you include the movies with the TOS cast it's even more clear.

The episode "A Private Little War" (which was itself a rumination on Vietnam) entirely belies your comment about Kirk not having to make profound moral choices cloaked in grey where people will die no matter what.

I can't think of the episode title, but the one on the planet with the plants that cause Spock to give in to his emotions brings up some of the ways in which those 2 sides and their diversions affect our choices.
Vulcans also aren't WITHOUT emotion, they CHOOSE to suppress them.

Like I said, I could go on here. :)

[ab3nd]

Even ST:TNG had some good episodes. I'm thinking of "Darmok" especially, since it had aliens in it that were actually a little bit alien, rather than just humans with funny foreheads.

I may have read too much Stanislaw Lem, though. That man had a real grasp on what "alien" means.

[nihilus]

I constantly suggest Banks to my transhumanist friends. He explores concepts of transhumanism, post-scarcity society and just indistinguishable from magic technology in a variety of contexts. I just reread Look to Windward recently after finishing Matter and wanting to reread all of the Culture books but not actually finding them all.

I find it ridiculous that speculative fiction like this is often dismissed. Oddly you'll get authors such as Kurt Vonnegut who are both science fiction and considered literature, but it seems that this is only the case because of other literary techniques used, not the subject matter itself.

[eisenfaust]

Thanks for the recommendation, I've been looking for a few books to read on my next break from school-related reading.

It really does dishearten me, the extent to which any 'genre' literature is disregarded. A lot of it is *trash* (and trust me, I've read plenty), but there are gems. Gibson's books are definitely on the list (though not all of them), as are a few of Neal Stephenson's works.

The real shame, though, is that it takes so much effort just to convince someone to *try* reading a good sci-fi book. I've been trying to get the GF to read Neuromancer for 5 years, and she's a modern lit major.

Out of curiosity, what's your take on the new Battlestar Galactica, if you've seen it?

[tacit]

I've seen the new BSG and I really quite like it; it's one of the best things on TV these days. I'm kind of surprised and impressed that something so interesting came out of the cheesy rubbish of the 70's show, but they got the tone of the new show exactly right; there's no realistic way to make a series about the genocide of the human race without it being dark.

sci fi

[anonymous]

was a treky way back, when young, find some of the best writing is sci fi, Arthur Clark is one of the greatest.

[peristaltor]

If you've read it, would this book read similarly to Pohl's Gateway?

[tacit]

I haven't read Gateway, though from reading the plot summary, it seems that the stories are very different.

Use of Weapons is set in The Culture, a huge and extremely technologically sophisticated, post-human, post-scarcity society where strong AI, effortless nanoscale assembly, and faster-than-light travel exist. The society is loosely organized and largely anarchistic, largely overseen by AIs that are thousands of times smarter than humans, and introverted to a great extent. Most humans in the Culture live on artificial Orbitals (think "ringworlds" on a larger scale) or on General Systems Vehicles, spaceships with populations in the tens or hundreds of millions

[peristaltor]

In Gateway, the character is also running from his past decisions, but not in a way that becomes apparent until the end. The setting does indeed seem very different, but it has a flashback Sound and Fury narrative feel to it, albeit with only one protagonist.

So far, I think it's the best thing I've read from Pohl. Heck, it's the only reason I read more than one Pohl.