Let Me Play Among the Stars

If you don't know what that's from, just...well, seriously, you should know at least one version of what that's from.

Science fiction. And science. And fiction.

• I'm very confused by the appeal of Hunger Games. A dude, commenting on an article about it that I was reading, said, and it's difficult to dispute him, that the thing is basically an allegory of the Marxist class-war. Only, applied to the "generation gap", which isn't actually a thing—just a local fad of late-Victorian Britain's upper class, like so many of our follies.
  
  Frankly, one wishes that Boomers like Suzanne Collins would shut up already. Guess what, coffin-stuffers, you're the old people now, and you've done more bad and less good than every generation before you.
  
  Then again, I suffer the disadvantage of reading a lot of manga. And trust me, Battle Royale is only the most prominent series to use the "young people fighting to the death as metaphor for some generational disaffectedness" idea. Been there, done that, learned the kanji for the slogans.
• Speaking of kanji, due to the Nook thinking it's 1997, the electronic version of my book, when it's out, seems like it won't have the Hebrew, Arabic, or East Asian letters displayed properly. But the Greek comes out okay, though I had to remember to tell Calibre to encode the thing in UTF-8. All of this would be easily solved if the Nook's reader, like its internal browser, could display multiple fonts, but apparently that's just too hard. Fortunately I plan to do my book print-on-demand as well, because ebooks are all well and good but being able to take a book off a shelf and say "I wrote this" is still something you need to do.
  
  Before anyone asks, PDFs may be able to encode fonts, but in every single other regard they are awful on e-readers. Also? For some reason, my book simply ceases to be after page 53, when encoded as PDF. On a reader, anyway; read in Acrobat on a computer, it's just fine. No, I don't get it either.
• The kanji for "equivalent exchange" (tôka kôkan) are 等価交換. That's important, because they are my favorite 4-character idiom. Given the concept's applications to economics, thermodynamics, and mythology, I consider them fundamental to all my writing, fantasy as well as science fiction.
  
  Personally, if a fictional religion is not founded on "I give that you may give", I have a hard time swallowing its existence—unless explicitly set up as a messianic existential theodicy that specifically denies the principle, the way Christianity and Buddhism are. And if a science fiction setting purports to be realistic, and then gives me terraforming in less than 10,000 years, or high-acceleration rocketships that aren't mostly propellant tank, well...I'm sure giving each portion of the ship a color-scheme themed for its most associated character is just as good.
• So Vernor Vinge apparently coined the concept of the Singularity, which he originally described as being the point where technological progress becomes an asymptote of vertical—that is, undefinable, incomprehensible, and ineffable.
  
  Only...Equivalent Exchange. In this cosmos, thanks to Mr. Thermodynamics, "progress" reaches a point of diminishing returns. Our processors, whose speed doubles every 2 years (Moore's Law)? Yeah, that's going to end right around next year, after which it'll be every 3 years. We may eventually run up against a processor-speed limit that's a function of physical laws.
  
  Despair is the inescapable price of your boastfulness.
• I actually realized this thinking about "DarkerAndEdgier" Westerns, of all things, e.g. Sam Peckinpah, but it applies to any and every creator who thinks he's making his stuff more mature and realistic by shoving in lots of pointless death, brutality, and, especially, rape.
  
  Namely, I used to write stuff like that too...and then I became a high-school junior. It's arrested development; as I think I said before, the actual grownups don't need to demonstrate that they're mature, and—unlike adolescents, who are clinically almost indistinguishable from psychopaths—have sufficient empathy as to not find that crap entertaining. (In Peckinpah, and especially in "dark fantasy" à la G.R.R. Martin, there is also an element of what I have called "chronological blackface minstrelsy"—pandering to the ignorant prejudices of a provincial, bigoted audience.)
• Speaking of empathy, however, I always hated that being how you spot the androids in both BladeRunner and Yada-yada Electric Sheep. I think I might actually have an android in my book point out that humans can't directly experience the emotions of others of their kind (well, apart from certain psi-users), while AIs can.
  
  Of course, empathy is a two-edged sword, despite what hippies like Phil Dick might think. Christian charity or Buddhist compassion, which are the actual moral thing that Dick was pointlessly emotionalizing, are at the foundation of Just War doctrine and the Life-Giving Sword. And you know what aspect of public discourse involves the most appeals to empathy? Death penalty advocacy—if I even suspect an article will be about crime policy, I don't read it, for fear of having to endure some horror-story.
• I don't think I've mentioned it, but the device—a staple of the genre, going back at least to Bester—of portraying psi-interactions as a sort of virtual-reality thing, much like bad cyberpunk (but I repeat myself) portrayals of hacking, needs to die as soon as possible. And be buried in a shallow unmarked grave.
  
  Admittedly, that would tend to make the visual portrayal of "psychic combat" difficult, but, well, as Chesterton and Tolkien have both pointed out, some things only work in written form. Though I have seen good attempts in manga—they may be using visual metaphors, but very simple ones, e.g. how Greed interacts with the souls of Father and Ling, in Fullmetal Alchemist. (Though, how the hell you can cold-cock a guy's mind is anybody's guess—that scene gets grandfathered in for being awesome.)
• This is here because occasioned by feminist science fiction, but has anyone stopped to consider that the whole edifice of post-modernism—RE: things like the sexes being "socially constructed"—is essentially nothing more than the elevation of the worst part of phenomenology into a fetish? I refer to that whole thing in phenomenology that basically says, to sum up a very vague body of speculation in an epigram, that no, the tree in the forest nobody can hear doesn't make a sound.
  
  Because, bullshit. The sexes existed a billion and change years before you were around to get professorial chairs by claiming they're socially constructed. Did you learn nothing from the Sokal hoax? The physical world exists; a bunch of reductive materialists should not be talking like Mary Baker Eddy, but that aspect of PoMo discourse is virtually indistinguishable from Christian Science. Because—far from coincidentally—both are basically warmed-over Gnosticism, the perpetual discharge of elite classes looking to safeguard their status. As I have said before, and Chesterton before me, the body is one of the ways in which men are equal.