Gramarye

I really, really like i09, but I was really, really underwhelmed by this list of 20 life-changing science fiction novels.

I know, there’s no reasonable expectation that every book on everybody’s list of books will match up. But some of this stuff is just dumb. The Dispossessed?? Please. “Oh, our societies are different, in a way that had cultural significance during the cold war.” Try The Left Hand of Darkness.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. As a blogger who supports the copyleft movement, I have a confession to make. I can’t stand Cory Doctorow’s writing. Seriously, I try, but something about the way the man puts together sentences strikes me as irretrievably douchey, and also makes me want to hit him over the head with a collection of Theodore Sturgeon stories.

I, Robot. No. Even discounting that horrible movie, this is not life-changing. Unless you’re a robot.

The Sparrow. Meh. I like ??The Sparrow??. I like it a lot. But I think a lot of sci fi readers overestimate its importance because it reminds them of something most people in the world already know — that Christianity is of cultural significance.

The Mountains of Madness. I’m also a bit torn on this point. I know people who had life-changing experiences with Lovecraft, but I don’t really know why. Maybe there’s a lack of imagination, here. Although this may also be a case of my inability to care about the problems of people who are really, really, really white.

I suppose I mostly wish they didn’t make a list that includes both life-changing and genre-influencing books, but call it a list of life-changing books. A lot of genre-influencing books are important and ground-breaking, but are later surpassed by their imitators in every respect except chronology. ??The Forever War?? is a good example of a book that was important mainly for its position in history, rather than the quality of its writing or its relevance to readers today.

Okay, that was all pretty mean. Sorry, Cory, et al.

I suppose it’s obligatory at this point that I make a list of my own. Fine fine. Listage, in no special order, and — frankly — twenty “life-changing” books is a lot to ask for, so I’m going to use moderate values of “life-changing” and I may cut the list short:

* ??The Fortunate Fall??, Raphael Carter. This doubtless pseudonymous work singlehandedly justifies the existence of cyberpunk as a genre. Gender, sexuality, film noir, self-evolving AI, African supertechnology, and fascist cyborg cops who just want to serve you tea, and wipe your brain. Tragedy. Morality. The human spirit. All that crap.
* ??Dream Master??/”He Who Shapes”, Roger Zelazny. This book contains pretty much everything that’s important in Zelazny’s writing, and nothing that isn’t. It also makes nearly every piece of science fiction written in the 1980’s unnecessary. If you read this, you can also lower your JG Ballard intake by about 50%, thank god. Overpopulation, technology vs. the soul, mind to mind linkage, talking, bloodthirsty german seeing-eye dogs.
* “The Widget, The Wadget, and Boff”, Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon’s understanding of the human spirit and of love is…well, life-changing. This is maybe the best piece of prose ever written.
* ??A Wind in the Door??, Madeline L’Engle. I could have picked any of several of L’Engle’s novels. They aren’t literary masterpieces, but they substantially shaped some of my ideas about humanity, morality, relationships. And unlike most of the life-changing stories, I think L’Engle’s reinforced my innocence rather than eroding it. Which is nice.
* ??The Inuitionist??, Colson Whitehead. Bit borderline whether this is SF or not, but I’m going to go ahead and wave it in. It’s a race allegory involving elevator inspection. And it’s also one of the best books I’ve ever read.
* ??The Atrocity Exhibtion??, JG Ballard. I’m thinking of the re/search dingus. I don’t really want to talk about this book. Or think about it. Or its illustrations.
* ??The Postman??, David Brin. Any book which can make me feel optimistic about (a) the course of American history, (b) apocalyptic, society-collapsing events, and (c) government supersoldier research, and which maintains my affections despite a horrible Kevin Costner film adpatation…well, that’s about as life-changing as it gets.
* ??Driftglass??, Samuel R. Delany. This is, based on my reading to date, Delany’s best collection. How can that which makes me monstrous make me wondrous?
* ??VALIS??, Philip K. Dick. If you want to have a life-changing experience about science fiction and religion, shelve ??The Sparrow?? until you’ve read this.
* ??The Demolished Man??, Alfred Bester. I don’t know whether this is Bester’s best novel, but it’s the one that sticks with me. On one level, it discovers a lot of the same stuff about telepathy that every other telepathy related SF novel discovers. (And yes, Sturgeon does that better.) More interesting is the book’s approach to good and evil.
* ??The Whipping Star??, Frank Herbert. Everyone talks about Frank Herbert’s ??Dune??, in which he meticulously creates an epic, somewhat bloated, grandiose universe. ??Dune?? is nice, but it didn’t hit me the way ??Whipping Star?? does. ??Whipping Star?? describes a universe even larger and more strange than the universe of ??Dune??, but it does so using far fewer strokes. ??Whipping Star?? constantly alludes and occasionally reveals, but does not exhaustively describe. And it creates a vision of the future that is firmly grounded not in physics (so passe) but in sociology, psychology, and linguistics. And in ??Whipping Star?? and its somewhat more well-known (although inferior) sequel, ??The Dosadi Experiment??, Herbert does some surprisingly original thinking about good and evil, justice and injustice, law and crime.
* ??Brother Termite??, Patricia Anthony. Patricia Anthony has an amazing knack for describing visions of the world that are far darker than I could ever imagine them to be. ??Brother Termite?? asks us to care about the existential plight of a member of a conquering alien hive race that is systematically destroying life in the universe, with the exception of humanity, whom they want to knock up first. Disturbingly, she suceeds.
* ??The Doomsday Book?? and ??To Say Nothing of the Dog??, Connie Willis. Connie Willis has the ability to write time travel novels that I don’t want to set on fire. That in itself is remarkable. More to the point, she has the ability to bring forth the tragedy and the comedy of the past in a way that mere works of history or historical fiction cannot, because reading her books, we experience these things through the eyes of historians — meaning, nerdy academics with modern/postmodern sensibilities.
* ??Dangerous Visions??, ed. Harlan Ellison. It shouldn’t be necessary to explain why this book is important. If you haven’t read it yet, go ahead and do that before you do anything else. Ever.

Is that twenty books? No? To hell with it. I’m tired.

Excellent overview of the topic.

How To: Stop a 500-Foot Monster (Think Missiles, Not Bombs) | Danger Room from Wired.com

Employee discounts, or in this case, employee fee waivers, rock. I’m taking Laney’s basic photography class (i.e., “This is film. It goes in the camera this way.”) I’m an almost total film newb, so this is working out quite well, and having access to a real, fully-stocked darkroom makes learning this stuff a lot easier than if I were trying to develop film with a changing bag and my bathroom sink.

The development process went pretty smoothly, and I wound up with a roll of nicely usable film. Somebody was rearranging the rolls, and I’ve got a fragment of someone else’s image stuck to mine, but other than that, everything was jake.

Printing was more hairy, partly because it’s a more complicated process with more guessing and judgment and iterations and so forth, and partly because I’m not very deft with tongs. Also, I believe I did some very stupid when I was setting up my enlarger — but anyway, it all sort of worked out in the end.

Here’s the contact sheet:

And here’s the first print:

Nothing super awesome, but it’ll do for a start.

Yeah, I keep going dark. Sorry about that. I’m busy. Or something. Here, look at a bee:

Grrr. Back in the day, I subscribed to emailed job postings from idealist.org, a hippie-type job clearinghouse dingus. Ever since, these emails have been accumulating in one of my spare email accounts, mostly unread. I decided I might as well turn them off, since I’m not reading them, and there’s no reason to clog the tubes of the interweb with wasted bits.

Now, this isn’t spam — I did initially request these messages — but all automated mass mailings should have an unsubscribe link in the body of the email that you can click to unsubscribe, or an automated unsubscribe address you can send a blank email to.

In this case, I was required to log back into the site and change my account settings from there. Irritating, but whatever. So I logged in (had to have them email the password, which they did in the most insecure manner (plaintext email of the original password w/out provision for changing it) ). Before the site would allow me to get to the account settings page where I could turn off emails, I was forced to confirm my name and email, and agree to some highly flowery prose about community standards (essentially an amendment to the TOS, although it wasn’t written in very legal language). There was no way (that I could see) to refuse to agree to the amendment and still get access to the email settings, and there was no way to opt out by refusing the amendment and deleting my account.

This should be a no-brainer. If you’re going to make a change (however phrased) to the conditions under which someone uses your site, and agreeing to that change is a precondition of continued use, there needs to be a way for users to decline the change and delete their account WITHOUT AGREEING TO THE CHANGE.

But, there wasn’t. So I checked the box and clicked through. I had now decided that I should simply delete the account — I didn’t really have a use for it, and I was pretty ticked off by the bad behavior. So, I clicked the button to delete my account, and was informed that the site was “overloaded.” In case you’re wondering, the site wasn’t overloaded; no other page produced this message.

So, now what? The spurious overload page encouraged me to send an email to “down@idealist.org.” I copied the email address off of the link and pasted it into an email — only to find that the mailto pointed not to “down@idealist.org,” but “down@down.org,” a domain belonging to a totally different organization.

This is clearly either evidence of serious ineptitude or intentional, malicious behavior. It’s probably the former, but still, it reflects very poorly on the site that so little attention would be paid to a function that — while not exactly sexy for the folks running the site I’m sure — is essential.

I went ahead and emailed “down@idealist.org” — we’ll see what comes of it….