Narnia for Atheists?
A few hours ago a friend sent me mail about Philip Pullman's fantasy series His Dark Materials. One of the novels in this series was recently made into a movie called The Golden Compass. Apparently there is some controversy over this series, which I have not read and only heard about recently, that the books are propaganda for atheism posing as genre literature.
As an atheist, I don't quite see what the problem is. Isn't that what C.S. Lewis did with for Christianity with his Narnia series? If His Dark Materials becomes the atheist's Narnia, fair is fair.
A long parenthetical comment follows:
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Posted by Pace Arko at 1:04 AM on November 2, 2007 | Comments (4)
Web comics
Some interesting science fiction web comics I came across recently:
- Bohemian Drive: In a post-human future, two obsolete robots go on a road trip through the Solar System. Hijinx and soul searching ensue.
- The Spiders: In an alternate history, President Gore's Department of Defense wages war in Afghanistan. Mind control weapons and utterly ubiquitous servaillence drones are everywhere. Weird things begin to happen. Trust me, this comic depicts a world only seconds away from our future. It's terribly sad that this comic has been dormant for four years. I gave him money, because Patrick S. Farley, whether he knows it or not, is a kick-ass science fiction writer.
- Gone with the Blastwave: Think of life after Doctor Strangelove, think of Catch 22, think of Red versus Blue, in a bleak, ruined cityscape after a nuclear war, surviving soldiers get progressively more detached and absurd.
- Node: What psychotherapy will probably be like in the near future.
Posted by Pace Arko at 11:36 PM on July 30, 2007 | Comments (2)
Education Stinks
Preface
Ever since Vinge's innovation feedback loop idea was introduced to me nearly twenty years ago, I've always been very interested in searching for and understanding the damping mechanisms for it. I had a feeling that Vinge and especially Kurzweil have oversimplified. This was something that I suspected vaguely for quite some time but Bob Seidensticker's book gave me the coherent rebuttal that I was looking for.
This will be the first of a series of essays where I try to examine each of Seidensticker's points in turn.
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Posted by Pace Arko at 10:47 AM on August 25, 2006
I was kinda hoping for Wells
Yes, I took one of those silly tests that tell you, after a bunch of misleading questions, what kind of thing or person you're most like. In this case it was science fiction writers. What science fiction writer did this test think I was most like?
Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs): A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.
If you've always wondered, I guess you can take the test too.
Posted by Pace Arko at 9:25 PM on July 6, 2005
Science fiction is very nearly dead
This might be news to some people, but science fiction, one of the major literary forms of the XX century, is dead. I say this a former, rabid fan of hard SF. SF really has nowhere left to go. Why? Because the future is going to get very, very, very weird and there's not really a lot we can do about it. I mean the future is going to get incomprehensibily weird, weird beyond the human ken, and this is hard to write stories about.
Posted by Pace Arko at 11:51 PM on September 15, 2003
Recommended Books
Mr. Farlops begs thee to read Perdido Street Station and The Scar by China Mieville.
Posted by Pace Arko at 5:09 PM on January 23, 2003
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul
Douglas Adams died of a heart attack on Friday, May the 11th. He was 49.
First Joey Ramone and now this. My generation's icons are getting whacked and it makes me feel old and mortal.
Kinda ticked there wasn't more press about it in the States, considering how influential he was to nerd subculture. Those who've read his work can see the obvious parallels between the Guide (The ultimate PDA.) and the Internet. He was 23 years ahead of his time. Maybe there where others that scooped him but they weren't nearly as funny.
Of course Marvin wouldn't be surprised by any of this.
Posted by Pace Arko at 6:24 PM on May 12, 2001