According to the Utrechts Nieuwsblad the Dutch police has managed to fine 177 people a day for not carrying a valid I.D. since this was made compulsory for everybody over 14 years earlier this year. Total income for the state: 800,000 euro.
A nice little earner that.
Ken MacLeod has written a post about his perceptions of science fiction in the seventies and how wrong they are in hindsight. He also discusses the impact the science fiction of that period, from just after the New Wave movement had collapsed to sometime before Cyberpunk got going. Common wisdom has it this period was something of a wasteland, yet
MacLeod is able to name a long list of classic science fiction novels from that period, which have clearly
influenced modern science fiction as much if not more so as the New Wave and cyberpunk movements did. So what’s going on here? One reason this period is so maligned might have been because the influencial voices of the time were so critical themselves:
They contain some of my favourite stories from the time, and many that I loathed, but the main thing
that has stuck in my mind from them is the criticism, largely by John Clute and M. John Harrison. At
the time I enjoyed it. I still do, in a way. But what strikes me, on re-reading, is how negative it was.
Harrison, in particular, has with very rare exceptions (Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron, Arthur Sellings’
Junk Day) not a good word to say about anything published as SF. It’s a tellingly selective range that he targets. Most of the books he notices are now forgotten, and were marginal at the time. (Colin Wilson’s The Black Room, anyone?) Those that weren’t (e.g. Tau Zero) are lined up to have their cardboard characters kicked and their clunky dialogue ridiculed. Their specifically science-fictional strengths – and come on, a competent book about travelling at relativistic velocities to the end of the universe has to have some science-fictional strengths – are passed over with a yawn. It’s like reading SF criticism by someone who despised SF; who just didn’t see the point of SF’s existence in the first place.
I’ve seen that attitude elsewhere as well; in the various anthologies people like Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison put together, a rock hard conviction that the best times for the genre lie in the past. It is even visible in the 1979 edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, where the focus again seems to be on past glories rather than contemporary developments. Compare it with the 1992 edition, which is far more optimistic and much broader.
But what made people so pessimistic? Charlie Stross, in that post of his I refered to earlier, has argued that in the UK at least, this was a period in which the “retreat from empire” as Stross calls it, hit the UK hard and that this worked through in the science fiction of the period. Certainly, much science fiction from that period is extremely gloomy, but then British science fiction has always been more pessimistic than US science fiction; just compare H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds with Garret P. Servis’ Edison’s Conquest of Mars.
I think there were two developments within the genre itself, that helped caused this impression that nothing good was happening in science fiction. The first and most important development is that this is the exact period where science fiction transformed from a genre based on the short form (short story, novelletes, novellas) to one in which the novel (and ever longer novels) reigned supreme. A side effect of this was the sidelining of the sf magazines (and one of the biggest magazines, Galaxy would not survive the decade).
The people who were influential in the genre at the time were people who grew up with the short story as the heart of science fiction and with less short stories published, with quite a few writers unable to make the jump from short story to novel, with the quality of the short story dropping as writers started to care less about them, no wonder people were so gloomy about the future of the genre.
The second development was the crashing of the New Wave, especially in the US, where it degenerated into decadence for a great part. There was no movement in the seventies on the scale of the New Wave in the sixties and Cyberpunk in the eighties to give form to science fiction, to enthusiase people. The biggest candidate, feminist science fiction, sort of died stillborn for all sorts of reasons (anti-feminist backlash, still inbred sexism of the field, etc.). Without a schema to fit them into, it becomes more difficult for people to see the forest for the trees.
There’s also an element of revisionist history in the common widsom of the seventies as stagnant, dating back to at least the propaganda of the Cyberpunk gurus (Bruce Sterling, I’m looking at you) or even the militant rightwingers of the mid-late seventies (Jerry Pournelle in particular…) The early seventies were an amazing fertile time for alternative science fiction, politicised science fiction, left wing science fiction and modern science fiction, certainly in America, is overwhelmingly rightwing in most of its attitudes.
But than that’s the mailing list I got this link from: The Making of a Party? The International Socialists 1965-1976 which is a short history of the English International Socialists, later the much loved-to-hate scourge of the pseudoleft, the Socialist Workers Party.
I must confess I do have a eakness for the sort of Peoples Front of Judea/Judea Peoples Front history/gossip that makes up much of the British left’s history. Anybody having any good links for me?
There is once again a minor kerfluffle going on about Wikipedia, with the usual nonsense being spread about it. Some of the more egregious being spread by Danah Boyd:
On topics for which i feel as though i do have some authority, i’m often embarrassed by what appears at Wikipedia. Take the entry for social network: “A social network is when people help and protect each other in a close community. It is never larger than about 150 people.” You have *got* to be kidding me. Aside from being a patently wrong and naive misinterpretation of research, this definition reveals what happens when pop cultural understandings of concepts become authorities.
How serious can you take a criticism of Wikipedia which links to the simple English version of an article and never acknowledges this, even after this had been pointed out in the comments to the post. There’s a reason it’s called simple English.
What also pissed me off was having the following quote by Robert McHenry, Former Editor in Chief, Encyclopedia Britannica, added in an update:
“The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.”
Note that this comes from an article written for FlackCentralStation, that noted bastion of fair and balanced reporting on various technological and political matters, last seen spreading lies about DDT use and malaria.
And like so much else coming from FlackCentral, this quote makes for a great soundbyte but is wrong in all particulars. Anyone can easily check the history of a wikipedia article, know exactly what the article looked during any given revision and can track the changes in it. Try this with any of the commercial encyclopedias.
In general, this article is an exercise in kicking in open doors: never trust a single source, many students are inclined to be lazy and many students are naive in their research. None of which, an astute observer may notice, is specific to Wikipedia.
It is not that there aren’t real problems with Wikipedia. There is for example, the question of Wikipedia’s systemic bias or the very real problem of it becoming a battleground between various groups of political and religious zealots. But these sort of worries do not make for easy scaremongering or easy sensationalism, so therefore we get these pseudo issues about trust.
Too good not to quote entirely, this wonderful proposal reported upon
by Charlotte Street:
A friend of mine suggests a new left blog, using the following formula:
a. There will be occasional analyses of safely canonical texts from the Left tradition.
b. He will, however, carefully eschew any Marxist or even radical left analyses of the contemporary world.
No mention of class, inequality, exploitation, imperialism; most conspicuously, capitalism will be spared
any thoroughgoing critique.
c. Most of his energies will instead be devoted to chasing a spectral entity called the ‘liberal-left’ as it manifests itself, especially, in X newspaper, and in decrying the ‘pseudo-left’ as manifest here there and everywhere.
d. He will be comfortable with his citation on the blogrolls of various right-wing groupuscules and
assorted reactionary ranters.
e. He will defiantly maintain that he is the authentic custodian of radical thought.