Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 162

Heaven Is A Flying Car And A Laser Gun Dept.

Word reached my ears recently of a new anthology, Hieroglyph, in which a whole gaggle of SF authors have been called upon to produce bright, shiny, optimistic, smiley-faced visions of the future instead of the dystopian grimdark gloomndoom nowayout stuff crowding the shelves. The way they put it is "optimistic, technically-grounded science fiction stories depicting futures achievable within the next 50 years":

"Why do we end up with the technologies we do? Why are people working on, for exampl...

Next To Last Stop Dept.

There's a good chance that by the time this post goes live, the first draft ofWelcome to the Fold will be complete — about six months behind schedule. But then again my self-imposed schedules have always been somewhat unrealistic.

In retrospect, I'm amazed I got anything done at all in the past year. Between changing to a new full-time job, fixing up the house, getting it sold, moving (those last two in the middle of one of the worst snowstorms the Northeast had seen in years), settling in wi...

Get In Line Dept.

One of my favorite quotes from John Cage is from hisLecture on Something, in which he mentions in passing about why rankings — "First, Second, No Good" — of creative works amounts to being the hobgoblins of small minds.

Most of the talk about what comes first, or what is best, is little more than a way for people to find something to put on a pedestal. Perhaps they want something to look up to; perhaps they want to have other people look up to it; perhaps they want to take credit for recognizi...

A You-Shaped Hole In The World Dept.

Capping off a splendid encomium to Jack Kirby, this graf:

A Time For The Old Gods To Die: The Legacy Of Jack Kirby - This Is Infamous

I can’t help but feel saddened and depressed by the notion that the greatest feeling in the world is sniveling at the feet of monolithic corporations for the privilege of aping people you admire, for twisting their work and motivations, for doing things counter to the way they would. It’s much more fulfilling and important to leave You-shaped holes in the world....

Two Cultures And In Between Dept.

Sometimes I get the impression that the reason SF&F and the literary worlds tend to be at such odds — with exceptions, and I'll go into one such example separately — is because most of the folks involved with the latter surround themselves with an environment that discourages real experimentation.

I had my own brief experiences with this in my teenage years, during a summer creative writing course I took at a local university of major renown. Everyone involved was tremendously enthusiastic an...

Certified Copy Dept.

Stanislaw Lem and His Push For Deeper Thinking | Kirkus

... in an article in Science Fiction Studies, [Lem] explains his issues with genre fiction as a whole: "If anyone is dissatisfied with SF in its role as an examiner of the future and of civilization, there is no way to make an analogous move from literary oversimplifications to full-fledged art, because there is no court of appeal from this genre. There would be no harm in this, save that American SF, exploiting its exceptional status, la...

On Staring Away From The Abyss Dept.

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 73, John Gardner

I think that the difference right now between good art and bad art is that the good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating, out of deep and honest concern, a vision of life in the twentieth century that is worth pursuing. And the bad artists, of whom there are many, are whining or moaning or staring, because it's fashionable, into the dark abyss. If you believe that life is fundamentally a volcano full of baby skul...

Those Who Do Not Curate The Present Are Condemned To Repeat The Past Dept.

Matt Lees has a fine little video in which he talks about (among other things) the way the gaming industry has become cyclically insular. Teenage boys who play games aimed mainly at them grow up and become part of an industry where they create video games aimed at ... teenage boys.

Sound like another cultural sphere we talk about here a lot? It sure did to me.

SF has long had the same problem, where "the same angry isolative white male nerds [are] pushing out everyone else to the point of stag...

The Rightest Thing Dept.

In the comments section of a really good essay on Spike Lee's best and most widely debated movie is this gem. I have excerpted it here in full, because it deserves it, and because I'm about to go off on some major tangents with it.

HULK’S FAVORITE MOVIES: DO THE RIGHT THING (1989) | Badass Digest

I think the point on why audiences expect films to moralize is kind of simple: we use film, in America at least, to live vicariously through others so we don't have to engage in the actions ourselves....

Did I Call It Or What Dept.

OK, I can't help myself here.

The first thing that leapt to mind when I saw the article "Make Your Own World With Programmable Matter":protomics.

For those who just walked in, protomics was the name of the fictional in-universe technology I created forFlight of the Vajra, where various forms of matter have been created that are programmable and malleable. (I started writing that story over three years ago.)

The researchers call the building blocks "catoms" (or "claytronic atoms"), but even the c...