Ursula K. Le Guin reviews José Saramago’s Seeing. Must check this guy out.
Category: BOOKS & AUTHORS
The Asia Pages: In Defense of the White Boy
Jodi’s recent banning from some kind of alleged racist message board is discussed at great length in her post (and the comments appended to it) titled In Defense of the White Boy. I’m not going to get into my opinions of the specific case, but just say that I’ve been frustrated with the kind of thinking that runs behind this. Young guys, mostly, who like to think themselves political, strong, militant, and so they get all vocal about racial issues without thinking, without reasoning, without seeing that what they themselves have adopted is racism. I think people have a right …
Writing Science Fiction During the Third World War
The sorta-dead The Infinite Matrix has Eleanor Arnason’s great speech/essay on the subject. Worth a read, and look around there while you’re there.
James Morrow | Interviews | SCI FI Weekly
James Morrow on Intelligent Design: Intelligent design theory is technically a different beast from creationism, because its advocates do allow that natural selective pressures may have shaped the destiny of the primordial—supposedly exogenous—organic molecules. The apostles of ID do not automatically dismiss the possibility of the modern horse emerging from the eohippus through evolution. They would even argue that the intelligent designer is not ipso facto the creator-god of Christian revelation, though it’s obvious they’re sponsoring him for the job. For my money, the whole enterprise should not be called intelligent design theory but rather IDIOT—Intelligent Design Implicit Onto-Theology. ID …
오예, 베이비!
The title of this post is “Oh Yeah Baby!” written in Korean. It’s something I once taught some kids at one of those camps I used to work every summer and winter in Jeonju. Hearing tons of kids laughing and teasing one another on the bus and then following up with, “오예, 베이비!” — in fact they were saying it in English but with the cutest little accents — brought me such joy. It’s a happiness comparable to what I feel right now, having just heard that it’s very likely I will, in fact, be able to attend the Clarion …
Race and SF
During my review of the film Primer, I discussed an essay by Pam Noles and noted that I would get back to her central topic soon — after all, I was riffing on her issues about the underrepresentation of nonwhite people in science fiction and fantasy literature and media, but riffing in a very odd way. (You can read the Primer review if you want to know more.) It’s taken me a while to get back to the issue, but now I’m ready to say something about it. The first word that comes to my mind, as a white male …
Yellow Dust Fever
Today was the worst Yellow-Dust-From-China day I’ve seen yet. The whole city was smoggy, to a degree comparable to the smoggiest I saw in Gurgaon — which was shocking at the time — and everyone I saw responded to it. The people climbing the stairs at my station, on the way home, dragged their feet as if they were fifty years older than they really were. It was awful. Lime advised me to go to a pharmacy and get a face mask for my trips outside, and of course, like a dope, I said it wasn’t for me. I mean, …
VS Naipaul Interview
This interview I found worth reading. Via A Glimpse of the World.
For You Fellow Aspirants
You may not see anything new here but it’s worth looking at Robert Sawyer’s Letter to Beginning Writers just the same.
Urville, France and Other Imagined Places
Apparently I missed out on the attention that was lavished upon this film about am autistic artist who has created an imaginary city in France. (That link is to a video page. I’m partly posting it so I get a chance to see it on my other PC; it’s not loading well on the laptop so I’ll try at the office.) I found the link on Maureen McHugh’s blog, but apparently boingboing also had a post about it. It triggered for Maureen a post on worldbuilding, which is interesting. I haven’t actually gone on a binge of mapping and worldbuilding …