In which Heinlein helps out a friend, new Trek turns 25, the future isn’t what it used to be, skeptics see a chupacabra, Star Wars characters can’t read, and Frank Turner is brutally honest about John Lennon’s worst famous song.<\/p>\n
————<\/p>\n
AVC: You come from a punk background. That seems to fit in with the anti-nationalism, anti-corporate, and anti-religious messages of \u201cImagine,\u201d no? FT: Yes, but that\u2019s one of the things that\u2019s so fucking annoying about it. Compared to, say, \u201cThe Times They Are A-Changin\u2019,\u201d or indeed anything by Crass or The Clash or Propagandhi, it\u2019s so utterly vacuous. It\u2019s a Hallmark card set to music. There\u2019s a pretty high dose of hypocrisy in here as well. For a man who had a dedicated, refrigerated room in his New York penthouse apartment for storing his fur-coat collection to sing \u201cImagine no possessions\u201d takes a fair amount of chutzpah. I mean, I have no problem with the man collecting fur coats. Whatever floats your boat. But there\u2019s a certain strain of material disdain that can only result from being really fucking rich, which is intensely patronizing.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
Not once in any Star Wars movie does someone pick up a book or newspaper, magazine, literary journal, or chapbook handmade by an aspiring Jawa poet. If something is read by someone in Star Wars, it\u2019s almost certainly off of a screen (and even then, maybe being translated by a droid), and it\u2019s definitely not for entertainment purposes. As early as the 1990s-era expanded Star Wars books and comic books, we\u2019re introduced to ancient Jedi \u201ctexts\u201d called holocrons, which are basically talking holographic video recordings. Just how long has the Star Wars universe been reliant on fancy technology to transfer information as opposed to the written word? Is it possible that a good number of people in Star Wars are completely illiterate?<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
Travis is a native of New Hampshire. He likes to show me, as I\u2019ve only lived in New Hampshire 17 years, some of the back roads and byways of the state. One evening we were taking a very rural shortcut when the headlights fell upon a creature. It crossed the road in front of the car, Travis had slammed on the brakes, and we just sat there for a moment. \u201cDid you see what I just saw?\u201d Travis exclaimed. I took a breath and think I answered something like \u201cYeah, if you think we just saw a chupacabra.\u201d At this point, we just started to laugh. The last people that need to see a mysterious creature crossing the road late at night are leaders of the local skeptic group.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
William Gibson\u2019s Neuromancer is perhaps the closest thing to a Nostradamus that fiction has produced. And it feels like it\u2019s getting truer every day. Think about that for a minute. Of all the realities in speculative fiction since the beginning, the ones that look most authentic in the here and now are the ones that remained more mundane \u2014 bound up in the struggles we have today posited a century hither. What does that say about science fiction\u2019s success? Science fiction as a genre requires one thing, and one thing only. It requires the story to engage with the future. Not merely be set in the future, or use some form of technology to accomplish a goal, rather it must engage with that future in way that is reflective of both now and then. If a story\u2019s science fictional, or fantastic, elements can be removed and the story remains largely unchanged then it cannot be science fiction.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
Captain Kirk’s Enterprise was a ship of phaser-happy explorers always pressing onward toward the next undiscovered planet on which they could stage a fistfight; in comparison, Captain Picard’s Enterprise is a calm, sleek vessel of end-of-history galactic administration \u2014 a kind of faster-than-light embassy, complete with chamber music concerts. There’s very little fighting; there’s a great deal of personal growth and trade-pact negotiation. Many, many episodes turn on the decidedly nonstandard TV plot of something has gone wrong with a diplomat.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
The letter that Robert Heinlein sent in response to Theodore Sturgeon suffering writer’s block, containing 26 “Sturgeon-ish” story ideas.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In which Heinlein helps out a friend, new Trek turns 25, the future isn’t what it used to be, skeptics see a chupacabra, Star Wars characters can’t read, and Frank Turner is brutally honest about John Lennon’s worst famous song. ———— British folksinger Frank Turner on why he hates John Lennon\u2019s \u201cImagine\u201d | Music |… Continue reading Links for 2012-10-05<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links_dump","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}