Moar SF

[petronia]

Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man: here is an idea if you want to be really evil to readers.

1. Make up an Advertising Jingle Of Doom.
2. Have your protagonist earworm himself with it as a block against psychic probes.
3. Repeat continuously for an entire novel.

What have we ever done to you Besterrrrr for this ppl gave you a Hugo

There is an Espers' Guild in this book! It's funny, when I first started to read about paranormal nonsense in the early 90s the word "esper" was used all the time, but nowadays it feels oddly deprecated (except in Japan). All the characters in Heroes are espers, but no one would call them that. Wikipedia actually attributes the term to Bester c. 1950 although if you click through you find that a citation has recently surfaced of E.E. Smith c. 1942. I like to think Suzumiya Haruhi based her idea of espers on Bester, though, because Itsuki's faction seems to deal with each other roughly like the Guild in The Demolished Man, and also because the idea of Itsuki thinking in C O N C R E T E P O E T R Y pleases me. XD Tension, apprehension, and dissension; sounds like a typical day at SOS-dan HQ.

Anyway this one reads even more weirdly like Ayn Rand than the last one. It was published earlier and in fact is basically to The Stars My Destination what The Fountainhead is to Atlas Shrugged scope-wise, except yanno. WITHOUT THE PESKY OBJECTIVISM.


Samuel R. Delany, "Aye, and Gomorrah": via dubdobdee's podcast here, and wayback'd here because it really doesn't work as well read out loud, as mentioned. XD; I took some mental notes while listening to the discussion but of course have lost the coherency. Stuff like:

• the "visitor from above" in the original Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah (of which I have always wanted to read a rewrite with "naturalistic" psychology, because it is such a deeply weird story as-is that it's almost not horrifying - everyone in the city wanted to rape the angel? Rly? Just to say hi? Like a SURPRISE BUTTSEX 4chan macro? Must've been one smokin' angel Bible sex is like WTFFFFF 80% of the time)
• according to later tradition [cit.? --ed] Gomorrah is where lesbians live, so obviously nothing is ever said about it. This joke has been made I would guess
• how every city is Sodom, or rather you can find a charmingly picturesque two-block-square Sodom in every city. In general Delany seems to like the Invisible Cities-but-with-more-sodomy approach (see below)
• conflation of SF fandom/interest with kink, which... I had thoughts on that I've forgotten, but that at any rate reads like a metafandom topic. Not gonna lie though, this story is about 1,000x funnier if you picture the characters as the cast of Gundam Wing. Like my instinctive reaction once I finally figured out the dodginess they were talking around was "but doesn't everybody... oh wait"

A few days after I read this story a columnist in the local anglophone paper suggested that - as Parisian pissoirs are called vespasiennes - the Montreal equivalent should be named camilliennes, in honour of Camillien Houde, the mayor who'd had them installed. This being OMG FRENCH LANGUAGE someone promptly wrote in grumpily claiming that "pissoir" is an anglicism and that the proper word is "pissotière". Which just for the record is incorrect, both synonyms are in the Larousse.



I tried to keep to my semi-chronological thing with Delany but somehow ended up whiling away a few library hours reading his "sword and sorcery"** stuff.......... LMAO this is not Franz Leiber's sexual politics



** Realized that over the years I have chomped through way more deconstructed than straight although I can't even really cough up names beyond Pratchett... forex I know I read Joanna Russ as a young teen but remember NOTHING. Then again Nevèrÿon belongs to whatever genre Invisible Cities is amirite (sword and semiotics?).

Comments

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, The Demolished Man is one of those books I'm kind of scared to read again, because I loved them once but worry about what not-so-delicious subtext and such I'd find if I reread them now. (See also anything by Heinlein.) The Stars My Destination was okay, but I adored The Demolished Man. Mostly because the espers weren't actually evil, and they had such great ways of talking. And also the one bit with the judge helped up a tree by a moose, which I still quote to the confusion of everyone but my siblings.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

My reckoning is that TDM has much less Bad Subtext than TSMD, but it is So. Frigging. Freudian. XD;; It never even clawed its way up to Jung!

Also nerrrgh it's not that the espers were evil per se, they were about as non-evil as an innately superior caste with a Well-Meaning Agenda could be? orz With their eugenics and their mindrapes. Not so much that the Demolition shiz was creepy, one had an entire book to think about it (not sure how obvious this would've been at time of publication), but Powell's reactions at the end wigged me out big time.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

(much delayed comment reply, thanks to lost email! ^^;) Ahahah I do remember TDM's Freudian-ness amused me at the time - I was in college studying psychology, so it was all ridiculously textbook. And ridiculous, being Freud. (Freud amuses me terrifically as a framework for fiction. As a framework for understanding actual human beings, he's terrifying, but fiction? HEE.)

The espers...hmm, upon consideration, I have a thing for superior forces who are Good in that they're generally well-meaning, but who absolutely fuck with humanity with all those good intentions. See also Childhood's End. And a lot of my favorite stuff in Futurama, now that I think about it...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

pip pop bim bam!

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Pip pop---hahaha this would've looked cooler as a call-response comment thread. XD

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Sword and semiotics. Thank you. Nevèrÿon (o look you put in the accents!) being to my mind the worst of both because a) I recall no swords in Invisible Cities and b) In Those Days (when they both first came out and I read them) the split between Serious Litrachur and Frivolous Fantasy was absolute and it never occurred to me that Calvino could be called anything but the first. He was published in Picador!

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I just google it and let copy-paste do the job for me. XD

There were probably swords with jeweled pommels in Invisible Cities somewhere, hanging off guards' belts or displayed in a museum... The tagline for Calvino I've always seen is "literary fiction and science fiction", like Iain Banks. Fanwriters of my acquaintance are forever pastiching him, or Saint-Exupéry - and it's always Invisible Cities, never the chivalric stuff (or for that matter the so-called SF). But they add Plot, even if it is gently meandering Plot, and that turns it to properly frivolous fantasy. XD

Sword and semiotics stands a chance of making my fave genre ever, no lie. Although I suspect this is much less me needing semiotics in my swordplay than swordplay in my semiotics.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Fanwriters of my acquaintance are forever pastiching him, or Saint-Exupéry

Two writers who strike me, off-the-cuffly, as nigh-impossible to pastiche without clunkiness.

Saint-Exupéry? *Really?*

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'm talking about obsessive re-castings of The Little Prince with varying levels of actual stylistic pastiche attempted. XD Not promising non-clunkiness, though I don't think Saint-Exupéry per se is that difficult? That is, Little Prince is one thing but I don't see why Wind, Sand, and Stars would be harder than insert-any-other-writer.

I think I could do a pretty decent Calvino, actually. XD But this is complicated by the fact that I mostly read him in French (and Chinese).

[vureoelt.livejournal.com]

Gotta love the language nazis around here. >_<

I popped into a provincial government office the other day to process some papers... I got a big heap of attitude when I asked if they spoke English! While I speak perfectly good conversational French, my vocabulary doesn't always include jargon used in very specific circumstances.

This is the big reason why I am very leery of working for the provincial government. I doubt they'd be willing to pay me enough to put up with that garbage daily.