Archives for March 2009

I just learned that my good buddy Tobias S. Buckell tuckerized me in his Halo novel The Cole Protocol.

Lieutenant Dante Kirtley ran the communications station with Lieutenant Burt on the UNSC Midsummer Night in 2534. He was responsible for relaying messages throughout the ship. Kirtley believed that the Office of Naval Intelligence tortured their prisoners, which greatly offended Major Akio Watanabe.

He survived the Battle of the Rubble and the Battle of Metisette.

How cool is that?

I set up a profile over at LibraryThing if anyone wants to browse my bookshelf. These are mostly all books I’ve actually read. (Click on “xxx books cataloged” and then “Covers.”)

There’s now a website up for the independent film The Arrangement, which is being produced by my good friend Rob Bland. I attended a staged reading of the script last fall, I’ve seen some of the preliminary footage, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the finished movie. Check it out.

Now this is interesting. I just watched this debate on “Freedoms of Speech” between Christopher Hitchens and Shashi Tharoor. I studied Constitutional law in college, and even I didn’t know the history behind this famous legal declaration:

Shashi Tharoor: I think it’s also worthwhile quoting the American Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said that freedom of speech does not extend to the right to shout fire, falsely, in a crowded theater.

Christopher Hitchens: Justice Holmes’s famous judgment, it seems to me, is one of the stupidest remarks ever made from the bench of the United States Supreme Court and, by the way, he made it in the following context: A group of Yiddish-speaking socialists, who were opposed to Mr. Wilson’s first World War … America’s participation in the imperial bloodbath, gave out leaflets — in Yiddish — in New York saying don’t sign up for the war, don’t believe in it, you’re being led into a disaster. They were put in prison for life, for producing leaflets in Yiddish making a socialist case against the war, and bloody fool Oliver Wendell Holmes had the nerve to say it was the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater where there was no fire. Course there was a fire! There was a bloodbath on the Western Front. That’s a fire enough for anybody.

** Spoilers for Battlestar Galactica Series Finale **

Are you fucking kidding me? Adam & Eve meets There Are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know meets Touched By an Angel? The second half of this abomination has got to be the worst hour of television I’ve ever sat through. If I hadn’t been at a party with a bunch of friends I would’ve turned it off forty-five minutes before the end. This was so bad it nuked the whole series. I can never watch Battlestar Galactica ever again. Just the prospect makes me nauseated. What were they thinking? Hey, let’s take the lamest, hoariest, most notorious science fiction cliche, mix in the sort of reflexive anti-science hysteria that makes real science fiction fans despise media sci-fi hacks, toss in a generous helping of patronizing, soft-headed ecumenical hokum, and top it all off with a bunch of crass sermonizing and really shitty dialogue.

I remember I was at a con once where David Brin was on a panel. This was between Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions. He said it was possible to watch Reloaded and believe that the filmmakers actually knew what they were doing, but he was extremely apprehensive because, as he explained, it is an ironclad law of the universe that the third movie in every sci-fi film trilogy must suck, and must completely undermine and betray everything that was established and done right in the two preceding films. And, of course, that is exactly what came to pass in the execrable Matrix Revolutions, which resembles the finale of Battlestar Galactica more than a little. Both share the same contempt for the audience, for delivering upon the answers that were promised, and for basically just conforming to some minimal degree of logical coherence. Both also share the appalling tendency, which is lamentably all too common in our culture, of trying to pass off vapid pseudo-mystical gobbledygook as profundity. Why does nothing in the whole Battlestar Galactica series make any goddamn sense? Oh, simple really — the whole plot is part of a divine plan that is sometimes benevolent and sometimes malevolent and which is all beyond human comprehension. Talk about the mother of all deus ex machina endings. What a sad day for science fiction. What a sad day for television. What a sad day for anyone who cares about good writing. This is a fiasco almost beyond comprehension. The whole time I was watching it I was thinking, “I must be dreaming. This must be a nightmare. I’m going to wake up any moment now, and then I’m going to go meet up with my friends and watch the real series finale to Battlestar Galactica. Any moment now I’ll wake up. Any moment now…”

When it was — mercifully — over, my friends were all like, “Why did I ever start watching this stupid show?” “Dave got me into it.” “Yeah, Dave got me into it too.” “Yeah, me too.” “Thanks a lot, Dave. It’s all your fault.”

Mea culpa, all. Mea culpa maxima.

I just watched this lecture by Kenneth Miller. Here’s one part I found surprising and fascinating:

“It’s interesting that you brought up Muslim science. About three or four years ago, I started — because I have a little web page with a lot of evolution stuff up on it — I started to get emails from Turkey, and Lebanon, and even a couple from Iran, believe it or not, from students who wanted me to answer their questions about evolution, and a few of them I asked, ‘Why are you asking me this?’ And they connected me with the writings that go under the pen name of Harun Yahya, who is an Islamic writer based in Turkey, who has written a whole series of anti-evolution books, and one of the students was actually kind enough to buy me an English translation of the book and mail it to me from Turkey so that I could see what all this was about, and it astonished me. Two parts about it were — one was, I suppose, not so astonishing and one was downright hilarious. The not-so-astonishing part is that all of the arguments made in the Islamic world for the scientific insufficiencies of evolution are just recycled versions of the ones that I’ve talked to you about here, so there’s nothing new. But the second part was genuinely amusing, and that is Harun Yahya argued to his young readers that they should appreciate the fact that evolution is a Western Christian plot to subvert the morals of Islamic youth, and as part of his proof of this he pointed out that Charles Darwin studied for the priesthood of the Church of England, and that proves to you that he’s just another crusader, which I thought was a rather interesting take.”

There’s some interesting material on the Wikipedia page for Thomas Paine.

Following the outbreak of the French revolution, Paine traveled to France to take part in the fun, but found himself on the outs with the faction in power and was sentenced to death:

While in prison, Paine narrowly escaped execution. A guard walked through the prison placing a chalk mark on the doors of the prisoners who were due to be sent to the guillotine on the morrow. He placed a 4 on the door of Paine’s cell, but Paine’s door had been left open to let a breeze in, because Paine was seriously ill at the time. That night, his other three cell mates closed the door, thus hiding the mark inside the cell. The next day their cell was overlooked. “The Angel of Death” had passed over Paine. He kept his head and survived the few vital days needed to be spared by the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794).

This section is amusing:

Loyalists vigorously attacked Common Sense; one attack, titled Plain Truth (1776), by Marylander James Chalmers, said Paine was a political quack and warned that without monarchy, the government would “degenerate into democracy.” Even some American revolutionaries objected to Common Sense; late in life John Adams called it a “crapulous mass.”

Oh snap.

Paine certainly seems to have made himself a lot of enemies. I guess that’s what happens when you write stuff like this:

“The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.”

Which leads to this last interesting tidbit:

Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, reports that Lincoln wrote a defense of Paine’s deism in 1835, and friend Samuel Hill burned it to save Lincoln’s political career.

Via saycestsay, the inspired opening sequence of Watchmen is now online:

http://www.businessinsider.com/watchmen-opening-credits-are-on-the-internet-forever-now-clip-2009-3

Awesome movie, btw. I didn’t think it could be done, but they totally nailed it.

Breaking news: Warren Lapine has purchased Realms of Fantasy from Sovereign Media and intends to have the magazine up and running again shortly. More at SfScope.

Recent Alpha student Rachel Sobel’s short story “The Loyalty of Birds” is out now in the March issue of Clarkesworld magazine.