Wings Over the Pyre

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Various Artists - Milla / Rocket Collecting (Squid's Redoubt)

Thanks to some discussion on various blogs about the relative rarity of conservative SF and SF writers, I chased a link to the free copy of Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle & Michael Flynn.

High over the northern hemisphere the scoopship's hull began to sing. The cabin was a sounding box for vibrations far below the threshold of hearing. Alex MacLeod could feel his bones singing in sympathy.

Piranha was kissing high atmosphere.

Planet Earth was shrouded in pearl white. There was no break anywhere. There were mountain ranges of fluff, looming cliffs, vast plains that stretched to a far distant convex horizon, a cloud cover that looked firm enough to walk on. An illusion; a geography of vapors as insubstantial as the dreams of youth. If he were to set foot upon them . . . The clouds did not float in free fall, as was proper, but in an acceleration frame that could hurl the scoopship headlong into an enormous ball of rock and iron and smash it like any dream.

Falling, they called it.

Yes, I'm a late-comer to the book. The geeks in the audience probably know why, the fen certainly do, and the rest of you should probably read it, anyway.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Voltaire - Brains! (Squid's Redoubt)

Lifted from Caias:

"So what's the deal with Christopher Pike? He's handicapped in the 23rd century and all his damn wheelchair can say for him is 'yes' or 'no'? Stephen Hawking not only gets a voicebox in the 20th and 21st century, but some fine-ass ladies as well. Don't believe me? I've seen pics of him at a strip club explaining the String Theory to luscious girls nit names like Mandy and Katrinka...

and Pike gets two flashing lights. Pike can't pick up the ladies unless they are in the Signal Corps..."

On the failure of the Americans with Disabilities Act in the Star Trek Universe.

This is, perversely, true and something I've noted in a lot of SF settings where it makes no sense whatsoever. In Trek, they can build a full-bore android with transhuman physical capabilities, convert human bodies to streams of energy and reassemble them on a surface without an antenna, but they can't jack a well-known and well-liked starship commander's brain into a better body or at least means to communicate? Hell, Chris Pike would have been thrilled to be wired straight into the M4 core computer of a starship as the vehicle's central computer. Better than a blinkenligtten chair-surfer.

Of course, then Shatner would have probably been compelled to destroy him by inducing some kind of divide-by-zero error and sending the ship hurtling into the sun, but them's the breaks in the Trekverse.

Then there's the bulk of the cyberpunk genre (exemplified by Cyberpunk 2020, really), where the idea of replacing bits of you with superior-functioning metal and nanotech makes you go nuts. They don't exactly cover if taking people with non-functional or crippled limbs and upgrading them pushes anyone toward cyberpsychosis, but I've ranted about that at length before.

My guess is that almost no SF writers actually know any cripples, actually. Most people don't, but the average SF writer is probably more insulated than most in their personal lives. Some, of course, are cripples of various sorts (myself and Bruce Baugh come to mind in the field of genre RPG fiction), but there's just not a lot of folk who understand the stressors well enough to even tackle the idea. Which is a bit of a shame, given that SF begs for introducing characters with various kinds of brokenness who then find one of the tenets of the setting making them notionally "whole," whether it be the hardware of traditional cyberpunk or the medical miracles of Trek.

Current Mood: discontent
Current Music: AC/DC - Hard As A Rock (Squid's Redoubt)

With a coolly measured demeanor and adaptive thinking, you enforce your will
on others using your multitude of abilities.

Do you hear that, Mister Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.

I suppose this really goes right to the heart of how I feel about humanity.

Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.