Here’s a little more Neal Stephenson, this time discussing his new (soon forthcoming) book. And it’s set on another planet — yay! Too bad it’s gonna take me a year or two to get around to it…
Month: September 2008
“Low Quality Foreigners” and Mockery Thereof
Right, so if you’ve been around the Korean expat blogosphere at all, you’ll have seen this image: Okay, so yes, this is a cartoon about a “low quality foreigner,” a creature which has been a bugbear in several different communities in Korea, not all of them Korean. Yes, mostly it’s Koreans who’re talking about it in terms of “low quality foreigners,” because that’s how the term gets translated and that’s the kind of terms Korean media would use to say what Westerners living here would call “total f*cking losers who don’t belong here.” But before I get into that, I …
“Dhuluma No More” in the Current Asimov’s SF…
“Dhuluma No More” is the second story I’ve published in Asimov’s SF so far: it’s in the October/November double issue which should now be on newsstands, if I have my information. Here’s the advance notice of the issue, and the Table of Contents for the issue. As usual, I won’t be seeing the issue for a while, but a few of the things in it look interesting to me, according to this review of the issue. I’m curious especially to see what my Clarion West instructor Ian R. MacLeod did with his alt-history of the Sepoy Mutiny set in England …
Dhuluma No More
“Dhuluma No More” is the second story I’ve published in Asimov’s SF so far, and if I have my information right, it’s on newsstands now. (The Fictionwise eMagazine edition is up as well.) The advance notice of its forthcoming publication (in the September 2008 issue of Asimov’s) read, the acclaimed Gord Sellar returns with “Dhuluma No More,” a counterpoint to Robert Reed’s novella from the perspective of a desperate African terrorist in an uncertain future … which surely got me feeling wary: in a literary armwrestle between myself and Reed, I would not be betting on myself. It’s nice to …
Crouching Tiger, Hidden… Jedi?
Maybe I’m late for the picnic, but I got a kick out of this: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqqmEGmDUi0] I’m really tempted to do up some fake, badly-translated about the racist Jedi who excluded applicants from the Space Blossom Peach Planet, fearing the encroachment of the Yellow Army into their ranks, and caused this whole mess, causing the Chinese to take the Imperial contract bid on the Death Star. (They skimped on the security plating, though, in their giant space factory. You just have to shoot this heat vent at the right angle and…) I found the video, by chance, here.
Woah!
Left Flank linked to the excellent opinion piece on the state of Korean society by a Korean correspondent who spent almost five years abroad, titled “Koreans Need to Learn Life Skills.” She spells it out, asking essentially what kind of adults do you get in a society where children are shuffled between cram schools and have no childhood? A society with poor time-management skills, poor creativity, inflexibility when it comes to adapting to the massive changes that are doubtless ahead of us in this already future-shocked century, and… well, go read it. As I’ve said before, Lime is a fan …
Yay For Vanilla
I decided the other day to install some kind of forum software for my students’ use, and I was looking for someone free, easy, and somewhat configurable. Given that I’ve never installed a forum, or maintained a board, I was a little nervous about how setting it up, but I went off and downloaded a copy of Vanilla and spent about five minutes setting it up, about half an hour grabbing some extensions and prepackaged themes and styles for it, and about ten minutes setting up those, and now I have a functional discussion board on my website. (Not this …
What is the Sound of a Tail Wagging a Dog?
Last night, Lime and I watched a film I’d requested last semester for my Anglophone Popular Culture course, Wag the Dog (1997), and a couple of things hit me. See, the thing is, all this watching Korean SF movies and thinking in terms of the Korean adaptation of foreign genres or narratives to a Korean context has impacted how I watch American and other foreign films now, and I was asking myself how or even whether Wag the Dog could be retold in a Korean context. I haven’t seen many political films here, I’ll admit; The Host (2006) doesn’t feature …
The Brilliance Abounds!
On this post ranting about Deepak Chopra, I got a comment which I decided not to publish and mock, because I’d rather excerpt the crap in a post and mock in a more public venue. You might want to read the Chopra post, but then again, if you know me from this blog, I’m sure you can guess what I had to say, and the comment is pretty tangential, so you don’t absolutely need to read the post. The comment, sitting there in my Comments Awaiting Moderation box in all its glory (like a flaming paper bag of turds), went …