Month: August 2010

The Lost Airbender

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So, I only started watching the animation a month or two ago, and only here and there. Nonetheless, I quite like it, and I think it’s for the same reason I’ve been enjoying The Muppet Show, as I mentioned recently. And this reason becomes even more apparent on watching the M. Night Shyamalan adaptation travesty, which I did the other night. I mean, even the creators of the series backed away carefully when asked what they thought of it. You know, that means it’s really bad. Well, it was. The funny thing is that I happen to agree with a …

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What Does Ray Think?

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I so wish I could see the look on Ray Bradbury’s face watching this (For the first time, I mean): F*ck Me, Ray Bradbury – watch more funny videos Oh yeah, Ray hates the Internets. Too bad. Still, wonder if maybe someone’s shown this to him. Weirdly, though, I’ve never really been into the man’s work. I did like the book set on Mars, and Fahrenheit 451 was better than a lot of stuff we read in school, but… I dunno. Maybe I wasn’t mature enough, or something? I suppose I should give him a try again someday. UPDATE: Hat …

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The Meteoric Rise and… Disappearance… of Patricia Anthony

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So, Patricia Anthony was one of the biggest rising stars of 90s SF, it seems. Rave reviews, blurbs as well as longer commentaries, and a strong oeuvre of books from the looks of it. I’ve just been getting into her again, or, well, that’s what I shall call it anyway. (I ordered what books of hers I didn’t have on hand, and have been reading Conscience of the Beagle — which is a weird experience because I read, I think, a third of it ten years or more ago, and remember bits, but only bits.) My attention turned to Anthony …

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Interviews

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Two interviews with me have recently been published in Korea, both of them quite long. They may be of interest to anyone curious about stuff like what it’s like to be an expat writing SF, my personal thoughts on Korean SF and the Korean SF scene, and so on. The first interview was conducted and translated by my friend Hong Insu, a translator (he did part of The Hard SF Renaissance) and prominent Korean SF fan, now missed by many (as he is in grad school in Arizona). The interview appears in a “mook” — apparently this is some kind …

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Film List… Thoughts, Anyone?

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So, I have just had a lit class dropped from my schedule and a film classes added, and while I cannot complain — the film class is an interesting opportunity, and a block of 3 hours which makes watching and discussing a film in a single go quite a lot easier — I am hurrying to put together a list of films we’ll be watching. It’s a mix of British and American films, through which students are supposed to be able to get a better handle on culture, history, and the commercial context of films. So far, my list includes …

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Time Travel, Historical Intervention, Ethics, and Human Nature

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Here’s a thought for those writing SF novels about time travel: The hackneyed plot is always one of those ethically dubious stories about someone deciding to get into the time machine and kill Hitler, or Pol Pot, or Mao, or whoever. They do so because they are supposedly moral relativists and believe that killing one psychopath is better than letting that psychopath lead a society into the mass murder sanctioned by governments led by psychopaths like Pol Pot, Mao, and Hitler. The moral absolutist, however — say, the traditional Catholic — would argue that killing Hitler, Mao, or Pol Pot …

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ER Horror… and Why I Think “Just Bear It” is so Toxic

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Miss Jiwaku needed to go to the ER the other night — no worries, she turned out surprisingly okay — but we saw people in pain, and the worst pain we saw was, indeed, emotional. There was a family in which the son had some kind of respiratory problem. He’d just had minor surgery and was recovering. His mom and younger brother had brought him in, and I can only guess that the father had been out with his buddies, drinking, because he seemed to show up all of a sudden and start shouting at people. Yes, shouting: it was …

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Chew on This…

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A teacher is a man who must talk for an hour. — Ezra Pound, in (I think it was) Guide to Kulchur. And he is, gender-exclusivity aside — plenty of women must talk for an hour too — quite right in this observation. The teacher must talk whether talking educates, or does not educate. The teacher is employed as one who “teaches” and there are all kinds of expectations that may make teaching a rather different endeavour from educating. Not that one should take Pound at his word all the time; he was a nut. But he also claims somewhere in …

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Inception and PKD

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After reviewing the book about PKD in my last post, I realized I’d said nothing about the film Inception, which I saw a few weeks ago. I’m going to come out and say what I think about the film, and what it means for cinematic SF, but save the spoilers (and much of my explanation) for the extended part of this post, so that those who wish can avoid the spoilers. (Note, if you’re reading on the RSS feed you might not have a cut. I’ll warn you.) So, what is Inception? It’s one of the most Phildickian films I’ve …

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