Status Updates From Trace Elements: Conversatio...

I adore this book so far 💖

...it is easy to forget that as recently as the 1700s recreational torture of cats and dogs was considered a normal form of children’s play (see Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre [1984]), and figures like Descartes and Bentham debated whether animals experience pain at all.

There were comments about the immorality of rereading because it causes you to miss new books, and comments about learning morality from reading. It all became surprisingly Victorian.

...the Texas A&M University Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, which has one of the world’s great science fiction collections, an impregnable treasure vault full of rare pulps, fanzines, first editions, and the archived papers of authors from Star Trek scriptwriters, to George R. R. Martin, to (now) me. [Ada Palmer]

I knew what was being published in the UK, and it didn’t look anything like what I was writing. If you weren’t ironic, you couldn’t possibly be taken seriously.

We prefer the narratives in Marvel’s Iron Man (2008) where we just have to wait for the nerds to invent clean power and save us all...

But there is nothing more like the future than the past: long spans of time with events happening, societies changing, technologies arriving and disrupting; both are spaces where history happens, and both hinge on the present. Ken MacLeod has said, “History is the trade secret of science fiction.”

Philip Larkin says sex was invented in 1963, but it too didn’t really make it onto the pages of Romance novels until the 1970s. This happened both with hugely successful writers like Jackie Collins and Nora Roberts pushing the boundaries of what bedroom activities could be described.

Romance is the largest genre of fiction in the US today, outselling all the rest of fiction combined. Forty-seven million romance novels sold in the financial year 2020–21 according to Fortune magazine (combined paper and e-book), and fully a third of all mass market paperback sales are Romance—that’s of all book sales, not just fiction sales.

Japanese SF also looooooooooooves its robots, has loved robots since the days of Astro Boy and kamishibai cardboard theater, and while Western SF also loves robots, the palette of standard questions Japanese stories explore is different, focusing on robot civil rights, robot consciousness, the ethics of robot disposability, sentient weapons, and the first-contact-like barrier between biological and digital life.

How did saving the world become a staple of fantasy in the first place?

When people say they aren’t sure if a work is fantasy or science fiction, there’s an old two-part genre-identifying test (first voiced by Debra Doyle): (1) Does it have spaceships? (2) Does it have the Holy Grail? If the answer to (2) is yes, then it’s fantasy even if the answer to (1) is also yes.

You know that beautiful old book smell when you go into a used book shop? Books made pre-1840 don’t smell like that, since that’s the smell of acidic wood pulp paper decaying and turning brown, releasing lignin, a chemical closely related to vanillin, which gives vanilla its smell.

All science fiction is speculative.

'The Disney Princess and many hero stories are purity stories. Think of the messiah-hero who passes uncorrupted through temptations, Sir Lancelot whose invincible perfection is ended by the taint of his lust, Frodo who struggles to resist the ring and takes its aftereffects home with him like a scar, and the classic B horror movie where the girl who has sex is killed by the monster while the virgin survives.'

'Goldman's novel is a swashbuckling fairytale. I think Goldman wanted to write something like a children's book with the thrills of a children's book, but for adults. Many writers have an imaginary reader, and I think Goldman's imaginary reader for The Princess Bride was a cynic who normally reads John Updike, and a lot of what Goldman is doing in the way he wrote the book is trying to woo that reader.'

'That's something no one tells you when you're ten and you want to be an XXX when you grow up. Sometimes people say, "Go for it!" and sometimes people say, "You'll never be an XXX; you should be a computer science major so you have a secure job." But very rarely do people say, "That door is open, but it will close if you aren't careful, so let's sit down together and work out the steps to get you there."

'Dystopian fiction has made the public hyper-vigilant against censorship which resembles that in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it has also made the public take less note of forms of censorship which do not resemble the world of Orwell's novel, which don't come from the inexorable state but rather emerge from the bottom up or from people who feel like the good guys.'

'There comes a point in writing, and it's a spear-point, it's very small and sharp but because it's backed by the length and weight of a whole spear and a whole strong person pushing it, it's a point that goes in a long way. ... When Duncan picks the branches when passing through trees, he's just getting a disguise, but we the audience suddenly understand how Birnam Wood shall come to Dunsinane.'

'Narrative variety broadens thinking. Every time translations give us access to new cultural traditions, the thrill of “The ghost did what?!” is also a window on what is formulaic in the media we’re used to, where so often Fortune favors the plucky and the pure.'