It’s been awhile since the last “Links” post, so there are more items than usual.
Science Fiction
The People’s Space Odyssey: 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Another article that makes me feel better about my inability to be terse in reviews. This is over 60,000 words. But it really is a great and overlooked movie. (I like it more than the author of the article, even, though I couldn’t write 60Kwds on it.)
Planetary Collisions and their Consequences [Centauri Dreams]. So, in addition to the billion or trillion other factors, it also helps to be a planet of just such a size and to get hit by another planet of just such a size (and, really, at just such a time), and then, voila!, life on Earth. Must happen everywhere, all the time.
Featured Futures Mk. II is over nine months old but the regular posting has only been going on for the first six months of this year. That quickly came to mean posting every Monday with book reviews and every Friday with birthday story reviews, while only posting one or two Wednesdays a month with “Links” posts.
I’m 90% certain this will crash and burn but I’m going to try to keep doing all that and post something every Wednesday with, say, extra book reviews and a monthly discussion of whatever TV shows and movies I’ve seen. We’ll see.
Campbell and Wilhelm | Adventures Fantastic / Keith Laumer Sends a Message | Futures Past and Present . Despite often covering the same birthday authors, I think this is the first time Featured Futures and Adventures Fantastic/Futures Past and Present have covered the same story as happens here with Campbell’s “Forgetfulness.” Without drawing the connection between them that I drew by covering “The Mile-Long Spaceship,” this post also discusses Wilhelm and some of her other stories. The other post discusses Laumer but I don’t know that Laumer has “fallen into neglect.” These days, with ebooks and most any used book you want to find available at various internet sellers, it’s hard to gauge interest and, either way, everyone goes through spells. After having a lot of work available up to 2012/13 or so, he did have a lull but with Worlds of the Imperium (Dover, 2017), Three by Laumer (Gollancz, 2017), Bolo (Phoenix Pick, 2019), Rogue Bolo (Phoenix Pick, 2020), and even Keith Laumer’s Retief (Library & Archives Canada, 2020), he has five physical books in four years, which beats most living authors. But it is important to emphasize that Laumer was more than just Retief and Bolo, however wonderful those are, and this post does that. (My reviews of stories by these authors were in “Birthday Reviews: Campbell, Haldeman, Laumer, Wilhelm“.)
Destination Moon: A 70th Anniversary Appreciation. My blog has been kindly described as having “intensely detailed analysis” but is terse compared to this guest post on Centauri Dreams. (Warning for the spoiler-averse: the section “The Film” goes through the whole plot but, even if you skip that, there are four other sections to explore.)
Titan is drifting away from Saturn 100 times faster than we thought | Space. Assuming this rate is constant and you get your threescore and ten, Titan will be, not 2.8 inches, but 25 feet further away. When you consider that the current difference in just the periapsis and apoapsis of Titan is over 100,000 miles, it seems less dramatic, but it’s still interesting. (You never want to be necessarily off by two orders of magnitude in anything.)
The Retrenchment Syndrome | Foreign Affairs. This is a very important article which argues against a naive, pacifist foreign policy. It argues that “[r]etrenchers do not acknowledge that U.S. withdrawal often leaves a vacuum that enemies and adversaries are eager to fill” and, more specifically, that “[d]isengagement from competitions overseas would cede influence to others, such as the Chinese Communist Party, which is already redoubling efforts to promote its authoritarian model.” The article isn’t perfect (the line that the 2019 Syrian withdrawal “complicated” things is comical understatement, though it at least calls it out for the mistake it was) but it’s very good and timely.
Three by Wellman | Adventures Fantastic. I reviewed “O Ugly Bird” for Wellman’s birthday. Here are reviews of three more Wellman stories at Adventures Fantastic.
Seen on a posting board: “We accidentally blew up all the monkeys in the lab today… all that’s left are Rhesus pieces.” (No animals were harmed in the making of this joke.)
THE SKINNER: Where do I Start? IMO, you can never go wrong with written order (Gridlinked, etc.) because that’s how it had to make sense in the first place. (Although I’d read a couple of Asher stories, Gridlinked is where I started in terms of books, although – in retrospect – it’s good but not the best. Certainly good enough, obviously.) However, it’s not usually wrong to start in internal order either (Prador Moon) because that’s how it’s been retrofitted to work. Also, Prador Moon is short and relatively self-contained, so it’s not a huge investment, and I think it’s a total freaking blast. (I’ve fallen way behind but, so far, it and The Line of Polity are my favorites, but the latter is the second of the main Cormac five, so not a good starting place.) Also, aside from the brevity – and Asher’s not as long-winded as many New Space Opera people, anyway – it’s sort of quintessential Asher. If you like it, you like Asher. If you don’t, you may well not like Asher (though maybe you still would like Cowl or Ownerspace or maybe even the longer, more connected narrative of the main Cormac/Dragon books could grab you). Whether you go internal, external, random, or other, the link takes you to the current state of things.
Flogging Babel: “She Saved Us From World War Three”. I’m not going to pay any $20 for a pamphlet which seems to go out of its way to be minimal, but the Dozois/Tiptree connection is interesting and this post from Michael Swanwick touches on it.
Science
Graphic from “Each of these ‘tiny’ threads of blazing-hot plasma on the sun is 125 miles wide | Space”
Into the Magellanics. Nice blend of science fact and fiction here from Centauri Dreams.
Our sun is a weirdly ‘quiet’ star — and that’s lucky for all of us | Space. I’m not sure I’m following how the sun is “quiet” if its much like the vast majority of other similar stars – seems more like there are some oddly “noisy,” distantly “clockable” stars – but, still, interesting and another instance of perspective as the first thought I had about 9,000 years, which is emphasized immediately in the article, is that it’s a mere moment.
Other
Sports
I don’t ordinarily do this sort of stuff but I just… I don’t know. On dallascowboys.com some of the staff writers answer some of the readers’ questions in a “Mailbag” and we have this absolutely stunning gem:
Q: What major differences will there be between Mike McCarthy’s offensive style and what we have seen from Jason Garrett’s offense?
A: …Hopefully, with three Pro Bowl-caliber receivers in the lineup, McCarthy helps the Cowboys get away from that 1995, ground-and-pound mentality.
Hopefully, the writer knows we have Pro Bowlers in the backfield, too. And knows what happened for the LAST time off the 1995 season. We had a Pro Bowler (to say the least) in the backfield then, too. I think I’d like a whole hell of a lot of “that 1995, ground-and-pound mentality,” myself (which Garrett was not exactly committed to, himself). It may not be nice to say, but it’s honest to say, that Mailbag answer is the stupidest damned thing I’ve heard in a long time and, what with current events, I’ve heard a lot of stupid stuff lately.
Super Bowl XXX: Dallas 27, Pittsburgh 17
Sorry. Extremely frustrated Cowboys fan. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.
Four amazing astronomical discoveries from ancient Greece | Space. This is equally science and history but this history section has fewer links. 😉 Combining any sort of science and history is good but it’s hard to get much better than combining astronomy and Greece.
Falling behind, and I can no longer say “hello in there,” so I have to say goodbye to both John and to David in this post. (I don’t know that anyone ever plays these songs I embed in these posts but, if not, you’re missing a hell of a song this time.)
THE SKINNER: The Ever-Expanding Polity. Some things still aren’t sufficiently contextualized for the new reader but this is a good intro to Asher’s ~19 volumes in multiple sub-series which make up the super-series.
Decameron Project is creating communities and writing stories | Patreon. James Cambias has a story for this project which aims to exchange short stories for money for relief of the Italians hit by this modern plague. When linking to a post at The History Blog (which was also about The Decameron) in the last links post, I said I wasn’t going to talk about this much here, but I think this is a reasonable exception.
I normally post a book review or the like every Monday and post this sort of thing on some Wednesdays and was planning to do this one this Wednesday but I ironically haven’t been able to do much reading lately and this is ready to go, so here it is.
Our Gateways Into Fantasy – The Fantasy Inn. I found out about this thanks to .matthew. on a posting board. If anyone wanted to do such a thing for science fiction, I would be very interested and appreciative.
The History Blog » Tiny new bird dinosaur found in amber. I guess the skull strength indicates that it’s not immature? Because that’s the first explanation for the size that occurs to me, but that isn’t addressed. Still several weird attributes aside from that, though.
The History Blog » #UffiziDecameron. I have done and will do my best to avoid the current event aspect of this, since I think there’s enough out there if you want it and some might welcome a reprieve but, since I’d also thought about the wonderful Decameron and there are nice, upbeat things about this article, I thought I’d share this one.
Ansible® 392, March 2020. In addition to the wonder that is Thog, this issue includes the sad news that Thog’s dad, contributor to the Encyclopedias of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and more, Paul Barnett/John Grant has died. The two “As Others See Us” installments are particularly interesting: “According to the statistics on display in Helen Taylor’s lavishly publicised new study [Why Women Read Fiction], women bought 76 percent of the general fiction sold in the UK in 2017 and blokes a paltry 24 percent. Even when it came to the classics, women were still ahead (52 to 48) and it was only when you reached questionable sub-genres such as horror (46/54) and sci-fi (25/75) that the guys really came into their own.” / “Anne Fadiman on Clifton Fadiman: ‘Our father’s library spanned the globe and three millennia, although it was particularly strong in English poetry and fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The only junk, relatively speaking, was science fiction…” And, of course, there’s much more.
Retro Science Fiction Reviews. Just found about this site which is currently reviewing 1944 science fiction and contains links to other 1944 reviews.
Science
Dimming Betelgeuse is now also bent out of shape, new images show | Astronomy.com. This is a generally interesting article but the astronomer notes that, from neutrinos and gravitational waves, we’ll know it’s blowing ahead of time and speculates oddly that people will be watching and “cheer” when it visibly supernovas. I mean, I get that it’s unlikely from the nature of things and probably impossible at the time, but it’s the principle of the thing: stellar destruction can equal the destruction of a sentient species and/or innumerable other lifeforms and untold other astronomical wonders in exchange for the wonder of the nova itself. The visible phenomenon would certainly be amazing and could be “enjoyed” on some level but not something, at least for me, to cheer. Would we appreciate the Zorklings cheering Sol going nova, whether or not we’d managed to become a multi-stellar or interstellar species before then? But maybe I’m just being dumb and raining on the parade.
Opinion | The Darkness Where the Future Should Be – The New York Times. This article is about how hard it is to envision positive futures when the present is so dark. The Golden Age of SF was created by the Greatest Generation when we were in the dregs of the Depression which made our recent “Great Recession” look like a boom and when Hitler was blitzkrieging Europe with an initially unbroken string of smashing successes. The casualties to humanity in those years numbered in the millions. And then we went to the Moon just like we had in SF. What’s the present time’s excuse? What’s our problem? Buck up and get back that “vision thing.” We may all die tomorrow and there is much in the world driving us that way, from the corporations to Russia to China to aspects of the United States, itself. Without vision, hope, ideals, and appreciation for what is good in us and those who came before us, we would be doomed. But, with creativity, we may get over the oppression, hate, fear, and unreason after all. Mars, here we come. And then, per aspera ad astra!
Ukraine’s fate will shape global security – and Americans should care – Atlantic Council. The only thing wrong with this article is the ludicrous understatement that we are “on the brink of a new Cold War” when Russia is already doing to us what they’re doing to Ukraine, adjusted for physical distance. We are in a war; we just don’t know it. (Two wars, actually.) The first step to solving a problem is to identify it.
RIP, Mike Resnick | Adventures Fantastic. I found this out from Dave Truesdale but this was the first place I saw it on the web. It’s sad and somewhat shocking news. I’ve had email conversations with him and found him to be a great guy as well as a great writer. I think I most enjoyed his Africa works such as Kirinyaga, Ivory, and the Galactic Comedy/Chronicles of Distant Worlds trilogy but I also enjoyed a lot of his other stories, the first big batch of which can be found in Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun?.
Compelling Science Fiction is back! Most readers of this blog know my feelings about the current state of short SF. Compelling has been an exception to that state, not because it mimics a particular era or has a particular political stance, but because it exemplifies the expression that “science fiction is a literature of ideas” and specifically does not omit “science” or “ideas.” So this is great news.
Growth in number of TV series ‘bananas,’ network boss says. (For odd values of ‘humor’.) And of all those shows, after dropping what I watched last season, I now watch, um, three minus three plus nothing is–let me do the math here. Nothing into nothin’. Carry the nothin’…
The Art of Darkness » Seen Online. Hieronymous Bob – I completely lost it. And I’ve always said what stimman4000 said, except not quite as funny. Lots of good stuff in this one.
Featured Futures 