Here’s another audio file on YouTube of Leonard Nimoy reading one of Heinlein’s short story. You know, Heinlein’s poem is pretty good. Better than anything i could write.
Category: Science Fiction / Fantasy
Heinlein’s Short Stories – Gentlemen Be Seated
Today I was rooting around on YouTube and found this audio version of one of Heinlein’s short stories from “The Green Hills of Earth” collection; “Gentlemen, Be Seated.”
I haven’t read that story in fifty years. Unsurprisingly it’s still a good story. Nimoy’s voice sounds very un-Spock-like. I think he does a very decent job.
My Thoughts on the New Movie, “Civil War”
I have not gone to see the new movie “Civil War.” And unless something comes out to convince me otherwise, I won’t be. I watched a bunch of video reviews by people who went to the early IMAX screening. And based on these reviews I understood that the director wanted the audiences to feel that the movie is drawing no comparison between the existing political sides in the United States and the fictional factions that are at war in the movie.
The director wants the audience to think that the movie is about the unstoppable desire of the four journalists to document the war and also about the horrors that would break out in the event of an American Civil War. So that doesn’t sound like a partisan set-up waiting to mug unsuspecting conservatives after they plunk down their hard-earned movie money. But the more I thought about the details of the movie the less convinced I was that this was an even-handed film.
I think the first “tell” I found was the fact that in the movie the dictatorial three term president had disbanded the FBI. Now everyone knows that the FBI is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Obama/Clinton/Biden crime cartel. And that Donald Trump has called for the FBI to be purged and possibly closed down. To me this is the clearest sign that the rogue authoritarian president is meant to be Trump.
The second sign that the civil war is being presented as a battle between the Left and the Right is the scene where a “white” militiaman is pointedly asking the non-white journalist what kind of an American he is. The implication is that at least one of the seceding entities is made up of white nationalists murdering non-whites.
But for me the thing that makes it most likely that I won’t enjoy this movie is the choice of protagonists. The heroes of this drama are intrepid journalists. These pillars of democracy are there to present the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help them CNN. After all, when might we have seen journalists reporting from a war zone with less than the complete truth? Hmmm. Oh, I remember, the fiery, but mostly peaceful George Floyd riots when half of America’s cities were looted and burned. Yeah, that was it! Why wouldn’t I buy into a movie where these paragons of objectivity were the heroes?
Based on the reviews and the statements made by the cast and director they are putting this forward as a completely neutral film. Well, of course they are. Alienating the half of the country that enjoys action movies is a recipe for box office failure for a movie like this. But I’m extremely tired of paying for movies that portray me as what’s wrong with this country. I’ll let someone else pay for that.
And it’s a shame I won’t be going. From what I’ve read and seen, the war sequences are pretty exciting. And they do blow up Washington DC pretty convincingly, which sounds like fun. Maybe I’ll wait until it’s streaming for free or I can rent it from the public library. Oh, and one last thing. The guy who plays the evil president doesn’t look like him but he sounds exactly like Mike Pence. I’m okay if the Western Alliance takes old Mike away for high crimes and misdemeanors. That I’d be okay with.
Cthulhu Attempts to Swallow the Sun and Fails Badly
The First Selectman was miffed about something. Maybe his shadow appeared a little too portly or his reflection in a dank lake was a little too unflattering. Whatever it was he attempted to swallow Earth’s star. Luckily he’s not the Elder God he used to be. All he got was a nasty burn around his mouth tentacles, a case of butthurt and a dose of reality.
I collected this shot at the moment of maximum effort.
Metallic Crystals, Imagination and the Persistence of Memory
In July 1971 I had finished up my freshman year in high school. And I was a poor kid who used the Brooklyn Public Library as my main source of books. So each month I would trek to my local branch and take out the latest (or the closest to latest) issue of Analog Science Fiction magazine. In that month’s edition, there was an illustration on the back page of what was a photograph of what was purported to be a futuristic city that was being eroded by unimaginable eons of time as it lay dead under a dying red star at the end of the universe.
Actually, it was a scanning electron microscope photo of lead-tin telluride crystals.
But it sort of reminds me of the bismuth crystals that I used for today’s photo of the day.
I wonder if the anonymous author of that blurb was John Campbell. But I can understand his imaginative description. It is apt.
Funny how these things stick with you. Wow, that’s almost 53 years ago.
The Future History of the People’s Revolt
Writing my sniper story has been an interesting project. I’ve recently realized that it provides me with a way to escape from the repressive environment that we find ourselves in. I can imagine a world where people find a way to escape from the Left’s stranglehold on our lives. Science fiction was often described as escapist fiction; an escape from the real world. Dreaming of a trip to the Moon or Mars was a highly enjoyable pastime. I remember as a kid going to the library and taking out the Heinlein juveniles one by one and wishing there were a hundred instead of a dozen or so. I guess it’s human to dream about a richer or more exciting or a better world.
And when I was a kid, we then got the Apollo program and we really did go to the Moon. Well, maybe we actually will revolt from the Left. After all, it’s been done. The Soviet Union fell. Communism or Wokeism or whatever anti-freedom regime we find ourselves under is no godlike entity. It’s just people who crave control over others to enrich themselves. Surely such an enterprise can be swept away if it ceases to provide the population with a reason to keep it going.
So, I don’t flatter myself that whatever MacGuffin I invent to carry my story forward; whether it be nuclear powered drilling equipment or fusion reactors or giant lasers; has any special rationale for really coming true. But that’s not really important. Just as the terra-forming capability that Heinlein’s stories are based on, is completely fictitious and the Earthlike conditions on his Mars and Venus stories are completely erroneous does nothing to ruin the enjoyment that these stories afforded and still allows a fan of these stories to imagine that actual planetary exploration is an exciting and worthwhile human endeavor. After all, a manned mission to Mars is something being seriously discussed and planned.
So, I plan to write a series of stories in a fictitious future where a band of plucky heroes upset and upend the oligarchs who currently run our world and make a fight out of regaining their freedom. As with Heinlein’s Future History, not all of the stories may be aligned with each other. I can always cover up my mistakes by pleading alternate realities in the “multiverse.” Sure, why not? If Marvel can have multiple spidermen then why can’t I play fast and loose with the future?
Now I’m not doing anything that isn’t already out in the world. In about two weeks a movie is opening up called “Civil War.” And this movie has the United States broken into warring factions and a ground assault on the White House. So, my stories will be well within the mainstream. The only difference is that probably this movie and any other movies or “best sellers” that come out will cast the Left as the heroes and the Right as the awful traitors. Well, that’s alright. To each his own I always say.
So, thanks, to Uncle Bob Heinlein for his inspiration. I’m officially in the future prediction business. But in the words of L. Sprague de Camp “It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.” So, I better learn to be vague.
Guest Contributor – Xavier – 23MAR2024 – Genre vs Literature
This post raises two important and related questions. One is the question of genre fiction versus fiction/literature or entertainment versus literature. The other, how technology impacts this balance.
On the first point I think the best guide for the use of imagination in narrative fiction or really any literature is could it be real. That is, literature always fabricates events, but only events that could be real, at least to the viewer. This may seem overly restrictive, but even if we look at even the most fantastic events in literature, they are literature precisely because they are convincing. The narrative is not just believable, but super believable, as the clumsy moniker of surrealism suggests. The reader has to have a reason to suspend disbelief and that reason has to be both compelling and convincing.
This is why Macbeth can include incanting witches and Hamlet a ghost. Same for Dickens, Joyce, etc. We don’t mind Old Hamlet showing up every night to drive the action. His presence is utterly real to mind of any son that lost a father to murder. That reality may be the reality of a dream or some subconscious memory acting on a son’s emotions, but it plays as real almost universally.
The second question relating to our kids watching stories inside game applications like Minecraft and its relation to literature and media has a very direct precedent in movies. As soon as movies got past the novelty stage when they were sequestered in menageries they looked to literature to augment the spectacle. I can be argued that screenplays almost never satisfactorily translate literature, not even drama where the analogy seems direct.
I believe literature doesn’t translate well because movies, like radio, video and now video games, are essentially entertainment media mixed with mass communication. It is not novel to say that the commercial dimension of these media plays a much greater role than they do in traditional art forms, which were mostly centered around patrons.
Some radio dramas, such as those produced by there Mercury Players, seem to approach the experience of attending a play. So maybe these mass media/entertainment forms can become like literature if they survive long enough to establish the required conventions to seem real. But movies and radio were quickly supplanted by TV and now video games. So perhaps the balance for literature requires a limit of commerce and reliance on technology, as these certainly are not timeless.
Most traditional “critics” would say that the need to seem “real” is undermined, rather than supported, by technical or futuristic artifacts. They don’t make good literature impossible, but they raise the bar to get an audience to suspend disbelief and to tell the underlying story that the reader wants. This is why genre fiction is such good fodder for farce. If the story doesn’t need these obstacles, it’s probably better off without them. But if the fun in writing with them can overcome their drag, the story could soar even with rockets. They’re just a heavy narrative load to bear.
What Should Science Fiction Be About?
There is an endless debate about whether science fiction should be literature or genre fiction. By that I mean should the story be about the humanity of the characters or about the rocket ships and ray guns. Now this is an artificial dichotomy. Even in the pulpiest of space operas, the humanity of the protagonists, even the humanity of the non-humans is always a factor. But when the story basically becomes “Pride and Prejudice” with only a stray rocket ship thrown in as a fig leaf then we’ve stepped over the line to lit-sf.
A hundred years ago the pulp market said science fiction was about the rocket ships. And that school of thought dominated during the first half of the twentieth century. Sometime in the 1960s literary science fiction began. I’m sure its roots go further back and it as yet was only the beginnings of what it would become, but the earlier dominance of space opera and pulp type stories began to give ground to more sophisticated writing styles and psychological and sociological considerations in the stories. Women authors and progressives began to address social justice issues.
Sixty years later the pendulum has probably swung as far in the direction of literary science fiction as it can go. Almost every science fiction publisher employs editors who probably wouldn’t allow a story published that ignored the social justice pieties that define the acceptable mindset of this editorial class. And these approved stories have not been wildly successful. In fact trad publishing is in pretty bad shape. But with the advent of self-publishing the possibility exists for other types of stories to begin circulating again.
But the question still needs to be asked what are the relative sizes of the markets for “literary sf versus stories about rocket ships. My guess is that if the right kind of rocket ship stories were available, they would garner at least half the market. I think it’s the case that many of the boys that currently spend most of their time playing video games would be the market for this kind of science fiction. Currently from what I’ve heard they read a kind of fan fiction that involves stories taking place in the “universe” of the games they like playing. I assume they aren’t attracted to the literary sf but I could see them being attracted to more adventurous types of stories and these would fit more in line with the kind of pulp/space opera stories that used to make up science fiction.
Of course, it can be done backwards where writers of pulp sf could go to work producing this fan fiction to an already existing game universe. But to me this seems restrictive. Having to limit your creative directions according to a video game seems sophomoric.
But in reality, there are markets for all different kinds of stories. The odd thing is that the traditional publishers and even Amazon act as gatekeepers to limit the types of stories that receive publicity and support. In effect their limiting their own profits for ideological reasons. So, this is the takeaway for authors. In order to get seen you have to tailor your work to fit the gatekeepers’ requirements or you have to market your work to an audience that doesn’t know you’re there.
Well marketing is a serious business and based on what I’ve read cracking the Amazon algorithm is not for the faint of heart. But still, I think trying to find an audience for your book is preferable to writing a book you don’t like in order to get an editor to approve it.
So, a marketing I will go.
The Ride of the Rohirrim
Peter Jackson’s cinematic recreation of Tolkien’s Ride of the Rohirrim doesn’t capture every detail of Tolkien’s text accurately. But it’s damn close. And it is a stirring visual spectacle that may be the highlight of the whole movie trilogy. Kudos to Jackson.
Theodred’s Funeral Threnody by Eowyn
So, a small scene from the Lord of the Rings movie.
I thought this was well done and very effective. Apparently it’s Anglo-Saxon or old English and the actress chanted it very convincingly.