- The Transformers and the Middle Ages – Having been a boy of a certain age in the 1980s, I was one of the many, many fans of the cartoon show The Transformers (confession – I still watch the show on occasion, and have a collection of the toys in a box in my basement). Now, as the fourth live-action Transformers film hits the screens, I want to take you back to when the Autobots and Decepticons went medieval!
- Sibilant Fricative: Ian Watson, Mana (Lucky’s Harvest, 1993; The Fallen Moon, 1994) – I’ve been holding back writing about Watson’s two Mana books, for reasons to do with that mode of debilitation called ‘but where to start?’ Given my peculiar academic background, and the topic of my PhD, excuse me if I open with a completely left field comparison to Robert Browning. A critic once described Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello as like ‘three dragons, guarding the entrance to the gold of Browning’s mid-career poetry’. You see what he means: however much you enjoy ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Andrea Del Sarto’, you know that you can’t get a proper sense of Browning’s work without tackling the three brontosaur-sized texts with which he commenced his career.
- Britain’s Nuke-Proof Underground City – The Daily Beast – As the world held its breath during the Cold War, England built a top-secret underground city to save its government in case of nuclear attack. For half a century, "Burlington" lay ready.
- Is Ann Leckie the Next Big Thing in Science Fiction? | Riverfront Times – The Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke and Hugo awards are the Triple Crown of science-fiction writing. If Ancillary Justice claims the Hugo, it will become the first novel to win all three. After years toiling in obscurity, Leckie's given up trying to wrap her mind around how quickly she and her gun-slinging, galaxy-traversing heroine, Breq, have climbed to critical and popular adoration.
- Trinity: The Black Fantasy. – But who could blame Harmony? What black woman wouldn’t envy Storm? Storm had no need of relaxers or sunny Saturdays spent beneath the searing metal of her grandmother’s pressing comb. She never sat patiently while a beautician sewed blonde ringlets to her head to hide her tightly woven brown cornrows from view. Her hair was naturally straight. Her hair was naturally light. She was born conforming to the majority of our society’s beauty norms. She was born not looking like all the other little black girls. And because of that, she was lauded as beautiful. Because of how not black she appeared to be.
Articles with the Tag Cold War
Blog fodder for June 7th through June 10th
Blog fodder for June 7th through June 10th:
- Son of Blade « The Hooded Utilitarian – Seibles told my class that he saw the character as an “emblem of alienation,” a metaphor for what it feels like to be black in the U.S., to feel “both American and not.”
- Revealed: Asian slave labour producing prawns for supermarkets in US, UK | Global development | theguardian.com – A six-month investigation has established that large numbers of men bought and sold like animals and held against their will on fishing boats off Thailand are integral to the production of prawns (commonly called shrimp in the US) sold in leading supermarkets around the world, including the top four global retailers: Walmart, Carrefour, Costco and Tesco.
- Some Wonderful Kind of Noise: Star Wars: Star Wars first impressions – What watching Star Wars for the first time feels like in 2014.
- Alternate Visions: Some Musings on Diversity in SF | Antariksh Yatra – The best speculative fiction, like travel, does that to you – it takes you to strange places, from which vantage point you can no longer take your home for granted. It renders the familiar strange, and the strange becomes, for the duration of the story, the norm. The reversal of the gaze, the journey in the shoes of the Other, is one of the great promises of speculative fiction. Much of the time it doesn’t deliver, however. Much of the time you get to go to other worlds with your feet firmly encased in your own shoes, carrying around your perspectives and prejudices as though you had never left home.
- War of the worlds: who owns the political soul of science fiction? | Books | The Guardian – Myriad militaristic SF books and films suggest the most interesting thing to do with the alien is style it as an invading monster and empty thousands of rounds of ammunition into it. But the best SF understands that there are more interesting things to do with the alien than that. How we treat the other is the great ethical question of our age, and SF, at its best, is the best way to explore that question.
- Netherlands Armed Forces Order of Battle 1985 –
Chipping away at Stone
It’s downright fitting that it’s Commentary Magazine (or what’s left of it), that Cold War CIA warhorse, that’s started the latest round of retroactive redbaiting, with the claim that I. F. Stone was a Soviet agent. Despite the end of the Cold War being almost twenty years behind us, redbaiting s still alive and well in America, with claims like this still having the potential to ruin reputations.
Few people my age or younger will have more than a vague idea who I. F. Stone was, but many of the people he annoyed in his lifetime are still around and more than willing to take their revenge posthumously. As you can see from the Wikipedia article linked above, already the allegations of espionage take up most of the space. Just another little rewrite of history in which an independent leftwing critic of America is turned into a two dimensional Soviet stooge. It may not look important in the great scheme of things, but its all part of the continuing marginalisation of critics of American foreign policy. Smear the man and you smear his reporting; obviously you can’t trust what a commie spy wrote about America’s motives for fighting the Korean War. Stone’s reputation needs to be defended, and I’m glad to see Brad Delong and other liberals do so, even if their defence can be as wrong as the original redbaiting, as it operates on the same flawed assumptions that anybody who was supportive of the USSR was ignorant, wrong or a traitor, but that there are special circumstances that can excuse this support.
Now I called Commentary a CIA warhorse because while it may be a liberal or even leftist magazine, many of its more influential writers and editors (e.g. Irving Kristol and Sidney Hook) have been deeply involved in the CIA’s Cold War Kulturkamp, as documented in Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper and elsewhere. As part of the socalled “anticommunist left” Commentary was as much an agent of the CIA as Stone is accused of being of the KGB.
The real crime I. F. Stone committed therefore was not that he may or may not have supported a brutal and ruthless regime that oppressed millions of its citizens and brutally subjugated its neighbours, but that he may have supported the wrong one. It doesn’t matter whether or not Stone was a supporter of the USSR, as his influence on that country was nihil: what mattered was that he was critical of his own country and its rulers.
Socalled respectable journalists meanwhile can always be found cheerleading the latest US invasion of a third world country, the latest dictator installed by the CIA to “fight communism” (or “terrorism”) or the latest interference in a supposedly sovereign country’s elections for the sake of “democracy”, happily excusing murder, rape, torture or worse, but since they’re on the right side they’re rarely held to account. A journalist like Judith Miller could lie and lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for years before she finally “retired”.
For anybody who doesn’t operate on the principle of “my country, right or wrong”, it’s obvious that the behaviour of Miller and generations of journalists like her, enabling and supporting American imperialism is much worse than what somebody like Stone could ever do. We shouldn’t excuse Stone for his allegiance as pillorate his critics for supporting a country that has been and still is a far greater menace.