Author: photog

When I Was Your Age Television Was Called Books

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When I was a kid, I was a science fiction fanatic.  I went to the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and pored over the shelves.  I read everything they had and then I went to the next closest library and found what they had that was different.  And so on and so forth.  Until I reached the main branch; “Grand Army Plaza.”  And then there was no more.  So, all that was left until a new book made its way to the shelves was the monthly edition of Analog; the science fiction magazine where new stuff was to be found.  Sometimes there was a novel serialization by some well-known author like Heinlein or Frederik Pohl or Joe Haldeman or Gordon Dickson.  But more often there were short stories by anyone and everyone.  Not all of them were great or even good but they were still fun to read.  I had my own subscription for a number of years.  Then I found Camera Girl and I had too much to do with work and school to read anything but textbooks.  But I still saw the Analog covers at the local magazine rack down by the local El stop of the NYC subway.

But once I left New York, I confess I completely lost track of Analog.  I guess I just assumed that it (and its competitors; Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) were still out there chugging along even without me.

Turns out I was wrong.  Apparently, they’re all dead or dying.  The market for short science fiction has completely dried up.  Even the anthologies that used to collect these stories and sell them as books have stopped making money.

I guess none of this is surprising to folks who understand how the mass marketing of entertainment has changed.  I guess it only makes sense that the same generations that refuse to buy music and refuse to buy movies would also refuse to buy books and magazines.

Apparently, what they will buy are video games.  Now that reminds me of an old joke from an old movie.  There’s a scene at the beginning of the movie “The Princess Bride” where the grandfather played by Peter Falk is trying to read a story to his grandson who is playing a video game and objecting that instead of a book he wants to watch television so Falk says, “When I was your age television was called books!”

So, I’m at least two generations too late to imagine Americans reading short stories.  Now isn’t that amazing.  Or is it just paying for books that’s obsolete?  I think it must be the latter.  I understand there are free websites where authors provide their stories to consumers and they support these writers somewhat indirectly through Patreon or other means.  I guess this could be the new economy.  It seems as improbable as the world of the “Matrix” where human beings acting as bio-batteries power the cyber world they dream through.

Maybe I’d better find one of these sites and see if I can get these penniless zoomers to read my stuff.  I think I might see if I can play this three-penny opera thing that’s growing up in this brave new world.

Those Damn Gutians

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I was reading an old edition of H. G. Wells’ “The Outline of History” today.  The book is over a century old but in surprisingly good shape.  Well, anyway, Wells speculates that the pattern of nomadic herdsmen invading and conquering settled farming communities goes all the way back to Mesopotamia and the Semitic tribes raiding the Sumerian cities.

From what I remember the Sumerians are believed to be the first farmers.  And that goes back at least six thousand years ago.  That brings us all the way back to the neolithic.  So, for our whole history as “civilized” creatures we have been battling against the steppe barbarians just to keep the food that we grew ourselves.

And that brings to mind the movie “Seven Samurai” where the farmers pay samurai to fight off the bandits instead of handing over their harvest.  The problem is that bandits and samurai are almost indistinguishable depending on the circumstances.  If you think about it whether you give your tithe to the church and your “rent” to Charlemagne or have it stolen by the Vikings must have been a relative distinction.  Now, of course, the king didn’t burn your house, rape your wife and take you all as slaves (speaking by and large) but he did make it awfully difficult to get through a long cold winter.

So maybe we’ve come a long way here in the good old U S of A.  But consider.  Suppose you have a small retail store in Brooklyn NY and for the last five years every day several street criminals shoplift several hundred dollars’ worth of your stock from your shelves.  And the police have even stopped arresting these crooks because the George Soros backed District Attorney won’t prosecute them and won’t keep them behind bars for even a day.  In what sense are you any better off than a Sumerian farmer or a French peasant in Charlemagne’s day?  On paper you have the backing of the United States military, nuclear ICBMs and the New York State penal code in all its multi-volume grandeur.  But in a very real way you’re actually worse off than those ancient examples.

At least the Sumerian and French peasants were allowed to try and resist their marauders.  If they could organize around a local king or nobleman, they might successfully fight off their attackers.  But in Brooklyn if you took up arms (metaphorically of course, guns are strictly forbidden) and arrested the perps yourself, you’d probably be prosecuted by that same District Attorney for any and every bogus charge he could make up.  And God forbid the thieves were injured during the arrest.  You’d never see the light of day again.

We are reaching a point where the breakdown of civilization in parts of our country will make it impossible for people in the other parts of the country to do business with them.  The risk to life and limb and the losses in capital will make it impossible for people in the safer parts of the country to imagine walking into these death traps.  In fact, it’s already happening.  Chain stores like Rite-Aid and CVS are quickly closing down their branches in places like Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, and Oakland, California and New York City.  This will further degrade the environment of these places and hasten the day when anyone with any sense runs away from these hellholes.

I’ll close with the thoughts of the ancient Sumerians when discussing the marauders who afflicted their civilization:

“The Gutians, people who do not know permanent settlement, with human feelings but the instincts of a dog, body shape like that of a monkey, Enlil sent them from the mountains, like locusts they are covering the entire land.”

Well, apparently some things never change.

Real Hate

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More than a hundred Americans lose their lives in a weather catastrophe.  And what is the reaction of some of their fellow Americans:

Now this a female pediatrician.  If you were to guess what profession and which sex would score highest in empathy for children, I’d assume she’d be near the top of the list.  But in her case empathy is very clearly a politically dependent emotion.  Twenty-seven children wiped off the face of the Earth by a raging flood in her home state is merely a good way to score political points on a man thousands of miles away in Washington.  Well, it’s a remarkable insight into the humanity of these Democrat activists.

Here are some more reactions from Democrats in Texas:

I guess it’s some consolation that the pediatrician’s employer terminated her for this horrifically cruel and psychotic crowing over the deaths of children.  But it does provide a reference point when considering how we stand as “fellow citizens.”  You watch these videos and you are hearing the true feelings of these people.  If our children die then we are getting what we deserve.  When those two Minnesotan law-makers were attacked by a psychotic man no one was saying “they got what they deserved.”  No normal person would be stupid enough to say something like that.  Displaying your inhumanity like that is reserved for psychopaths who have no empathy and don’t even know how to fake it.  Normal people understand that regardless of differences on political policy we all have human feelings and wishing evil on children based on ideology is a sickness.

But here are people totally comfortable doing it.  One of them was actually a political leader in Houston at one time.  Now I make an exception for Rosie O’Donnell.  She is a well-documented imbecile and allowance has to be made for those who have been afflicted in this way.  But anyone of somewhat normal intelligence (and a medical doctor should fit that description) who wishes ill on innocent children should be shunned as a pariah.

Of late the Left has been rallying their psychopaths.  Antifa and especially the transgender core of antifa have been taking to the streets armed now with guns and knives.  They’ve decided they can come directly against ICE and other law enforcement agents.  Luckily, they are ill-equipped to be shock-troops and in the last few days a bunch have been arrested for attempted murder and one of them got himself killed when opening fire on peace officers.

But apparently not all of the psychopaths are armed with guns and knives.  Some, as shown above, are armed with hate of a particularly disgusting sort.  Laughing at the death of someone else’s children is so callous, so subhuman, that it deserves a special recognition.  And as it stands, there is one.  Dante identified the seventh level of hell for that kind of cruelty and specifically for those violent against their neighbors they were submersed according to their level of guilt in a river of boiling blood.  Well, that sounds about right.  Mocking the pain of a parent who has lost a child should be recognized with something awful.  Let’s hope Dante had the details right.

Lost Histories

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Lots of fantasy and science fiction authors have used the rediscovered history theme.  I think maybe Robert Howard used it for Conan and maybe some of his other sword and sorcery stuff.  Tolkien sort of used it for the Lord of the Rings.  The Red Book of Westmarch is supposed to be the source from which he wrote his books.

So, the conceit is usually a scholar is searching through old manuscripts and suddenly finds stories that somehow no one has ever read before.  I guess maybe a case could be made that an existing manuscript might have a palimpsest layer that couldn’t previously be seen or read and now because of advances in sensing techniques it can.

But usually, this kind of text underneath text is limited to at most a few pages of written language.  But as anyone who has been a religious reader of this site knows, the Roman papyri from the ruins of Herculaneum are slowly and painfully being deciphered using a form of x-ray tomography.  These charred and unopenable papyrus scrolls are being read right through the other layers of charred plant material by an artificial intelligence that can scan the three-dimensional surface of the scroll in its rolled up and damaged condition.

Currently the progress is glacially slow.  And this is even though a million-dollar prize has been announced for the tech genius who can take the scans and turn it into text.  Currently the part of the library being examined contains the works of an obscure stoic philosopher which has extremely limited popular appeal.  But there have been claims made that the total library was an extensive collection of Graeco-Roman literature and history.

If this turns out to be true and the scanning technology becomes robust, there may be many lost masterpieces of ancient writing to be found.  Lost plays by Sophocles and histories of ancient peoples like the Etruscans.  Every classical scholar has a wish list of what would be wonderful to recover.

But what comes to my mind is what a perfect place to find some lost history with fantasy or science fiction elements.  Now exactly what they would be is something that will require careful thought.  As I said there have been a lot of stories somewhat in this vein.  The trick would be to allow this history to tie into the present day in some way.  There could be detailed information of something that’s been buried and could be retrieved.  Or maybe it’s something that’s hidden in plain sight and possibly still operating in the present day.

So, this is the vaguest of outlines and needs lots of thought but while I was out watering the vegetable patch and photographing half-grown preying mantids it occurred to me.  And since I never have an undocumented thought, lo and behold; here it is.  It occurs to me I’ve never written a horror story.  Mostly I just make fun of H.P. Lovecraft but a two-thousand-year-old Etruscan demon might be something I could get interested in.  And since we know next to nothing about the Etruscans, I could make up anything I wanted and no one could definitively call me out on any of it.  What could be lazier?