Communitarian Values

Tuesday, November 5th, 2013

Orson Scott Card brings a set of communitarian values to his fiction:

Not my plan, just who I am. But I think it’s partly the experience of being Mormon — or maybe it’s my communitarian values make me very compatible with being a Mormon — but Mormons all live in these little villages where we’re intensely involved in each other’s lives, where our roles shift from time to time, so we’re constantly moving into new roles and positions within Mormon life. So that colors and affects my fiction. … What I find interesting is the people who commit and keep their commitment at great personal cost, the grown-up story, the story of parents, the story of people who sacrifice for community but stay in it and have to live in the mess they made. … They don’t take off their mask and go back into society under another name. They have to be who they are, wear their own face in their community.

This has made some critics very uncomfortable right from the start. And as my politics diverged from the political correctness that has captured the left — I mean, (in) 1976 I was a Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberal Democrat — and without changing any of my principles, I’ve now become quite a right-winger in the eyes of the left. And I’m a little baffled by it because I’m a liberal and they’re not. They’re repressive, punishing, intolerant of the slightest variation, absolutely the opposite of what it means to be a liberal. But that’s the way it goes. They still get the label. I am the fact of what it meant to be a liberal. I find the most liberals who feel like I do among people who are labeled as conservatives. It’s a very odd thing.

But that political thing has affected the criticism of my work. And it would just make me crazy to read asinine, irrelevant comments by critics who think they’re saying something intelligent.

You see, what happens is, if you respect a writer, then you talk about the work. If you disdain the writer, then you try to psychoanalyze the writer and figure out why would he write this. And that’s all I get from science fiction literary elite. If they mention my work at all, which they rarely do, it’s to dismiss it and to psychoanalyze me, which they are incapable of doing since they’ve never actually formed the kind of community bonds that my fiction always depends on. They have no idea what I’m talking about. They couldn’t produce that fiction if they tried because they don’t share those values. But readers do.

It’s really an odd thing. When you write communitarian fiction, what happens is, the fans that show up at your signings are people who respond to community values. I’ve had bookstore people — widely separated; it’s not like they get together and chat about Orson Scott Card signings — but I’ve had the remark in awe, “Boy, the fans in your signing are so patient and … they’re so nice to each other, and so many friendships begin in line, and people exchanging emails and phone numbers and so forth and taking pictures of each other’s cameras … people who’ve never met before.” … Because the people who respond to my fiction tend to be people who want to build community.

That’s not the elitist literary view. Those are people who are about writing fiction that will impress people, that will make them rise above the community. I write fiction that’s about people who immerse themselves in community and who don’t think that they’re better than everybody else and who aren’t trying to impress everybody. A very different set of values, and I get the results.

Posted in Media, Policy | No Comments »

William Gibson on Starship Troopers

Tuesday, November 5th, 2013

One of the first grown-up science-fiction novels William Gibson read was Heinlein’s Starship Troopers — and I don’t think he got it:

I’d gone away on a trip with my ­mother and I had nothing to read, and the only thing for sale was this rather adult-looking paperback. I was barely up to the reading skill required for Starship Troopers, but I can remember figuring out the first couple of pages, and it blew the top off my head. Later, when I managed to read it all the way through, I got the feeling that I was more like the juvenile delinquents who got beat up by the Starship Troopers than I was like the Starship Troopers themselves. And I remember wondering, Where did the juvenile delinquents go after they got beaten up by the Starship Troopers? What happened to them? Where did they live? Bobby [the protagonist of Gibson's Count Zero] is sort of the answer. They lived with their mothers and they were computer hackers!

The Mobile Infantry soldiers of Starship Troopers don’t beat up juvenile delinquents. More importantly, I don’t think Gibson can imagine a world without juvenile delinquents — even though the phenomenon was new and worrisome when Heinlein penned his novel in the 1950s.

Posted in Crime, Media, Policy | 9 Comments »

Ender Adapted

Monday, November 4th, 2013

Orson Scott Card has revised the Ender’s Game material repeatedly over the years, for the multiple books in the series:

And then during the prep for the movie, I wrote 20 versions of the script myself. I was trying to figure out how to solve the problems. It’s a devilishly hard book to adapt for film. The biggest problem we had was that I would write draft after draft and people who already knew and loved the book would say, “This is it. You nailed it. This is great. This is even better than the last one.” And then (I) would hand the script to someone who had never read the book, and they would have no idea what all of it was about. So clearly it was still dependent on having read the book and already caring about the character, and that’s not what you want.

Probably one of the greatest adaptations of a classic novel to screen was “Sense and Sensibility,” Emma Thompson’s brilliant adaptation. You don’t have to have read the book to get every single nuance. Then when you do read the book, you realize she actually did a better job than the book did of delivering the story clearly and well. Jane Austen was inventing the novel form at the time and that was her first full-length novel, and so it’s not a surprise that Emma Thompson was able to clarify over what she did.

But adapting “Ender’s Game” was just so hard. But I finally found a way that worked, but unfortunately I did my last draft after (director) Gavin Hood had already started work on his first draft. As far as I know, he never read any of my drafts. There’s no reason he should have. You’re going to lose your job for filming the author-written script, so my scripts really served mostly as showing proof of concept, feasibility studies. That you could do a script even if this isn’t the one they intended to use.

You’ve got to realize that terrified executives in Hollywood always want to know what to say about a script, which means it has to look like it was a product of a film school, which means they have to be able to detect clearly and obviously the three-act structure, to see all the plot points, the formulaic things that they expect…. Nowadays, with anything they do, they’re going to be very leery of investing millions of dollars into a script that doesn’t look familiar to them. So that was Gavin Hood’s job, was to deliver a script that would look familiar to executives and make them comfortable. It was not really to deliver “Ender’s Game” itself. But that’s fine. I made strong changes to the script myself. I had arguments with people. In fact, in some respects, Gavin’s script is more faithful than mine…. He stuck to the structure of the novel in ways that I wouldn’t have and didn’t in any of my scripts.

So it’s not a matter of faithfulness. People who go there thinking they’re going to see a film of scene-by-scene novel of “Ender’s Game,” there’s no way we could deliver that. That would have been 5½ to six hours long anyway. Nobody would have sat still for it.

So they’re going to see a sort of a reduced, compressed, simplified version of “Ender’s Game” with older actors because it’s just so hard, so impossible to work with children — so many children. It wouldn’t have worked. So they had to age it up, and I gave consent for that.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Afraid to Watch Bladerunner

Monday, November 4th, 2013

William Gibson was afraid to watch Blade Runner in the theater because he was afraid the movie would be better than what he had been able to imagine:

In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better. Later, I noticed that it was a total box-office flop, in first theatrical release. That worried me, too. I thought, Uh-oh. He got it right and ­nobody cares! Over a few years, though, I started to see that in some weird way it was the most influential film of my lifetime, up to that point. It affected the way people dressed, it affected the way people decorated nightclubs. Architects started building office buildings that you could tell they had seen in Blade Runner. It had had an astonishingly broad aesthetic impact on the world.

I met Ridley Scott years later, maybe a decade or more after Blade Runner was released. I told him what Neuromancer was made of, and he had basically the same list of ingredients for Blade Runner. One of the most powerful ingredients was French adult comic books and their particular brand of Orientalia — the sort of thing that Heavy Metal magazine began translating in the United States.

But the simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did in Blade Runner was to put urban archaeology in every frame. It hadn’t been obvious to mainstream American science fiction that cities are like compost heaps — just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent. In Europe, that’s just life — it’s not science fiction, it’s not fantasy. But in American science fiction, the city in the future was always brand-new, every square inch of it.

Oddly, Gibson dubbed his imagined megalopolis covering the whole east coast The Sprawl — which now means almost the opposite: sterile suburbs, not gritty noir cities.

Posted in Media, Urbanism | 1 Comment »

On Any Given Day the World Could End Horribly

Sunday, November 3rd, 2013

In 1981, it was pretty much every intelligent person’s assumption that on any given day the world could end horribly, William Gibson claims:

There was this vast, all-consuming, taken-for-granted, even boring end-of-the-world anxiety that had been around since I was a little kid. So one of the things I wanted to do with Neuromancer was to write a novel in which the world didn’t end in a nuclear war. In Neuromancer, the war starts, they lose a few cities, then it stops when multinational corporations essentially take the United States apart so that can never happen again. There’s deliberately no textual evidence that the United States exists as a political entity in Neuromancer. On the evidence of the text America seems to be a sort of federation of city-states connected to a military-industrial complex that may not have any government controlling it. That was my wanting to get away from the future-is-America thing. The irony, of course, is how the world a­ctually went. If somebody had been able to sit me down in 1981 and say, You know how you wrote that the United States is gone and the Soviet Union is looming in the background like a huge piece of immobile slag? Well, you got it kind of backward.

That war was really a conscious act of imaginative optimism. I didn’t quite believe we could be so lucky. But I didn’t want to write one of those science-fiction novels where the United States and the Soviet Union nuke themselves to death. I wanted to write a novel where multinational capital took over, straightened that shit out, but the world was still problematic.

Posted in Media, War | 8 Comments »

Blackfish

Saturday, November 2nd, 2013

Tilikum, an adult male orca, or killer whale, killed his third human victim, trainer Dawn Brancheau, a few years ago. I remember finding it odd that he wasn’t kept away from people after killing the first two. Then, he went back to work after killing a third.

Blackfish PosterBlackfish takes a fascinating look at Tilikum and other killer whales in captivity.

I was under the vague impression that most marine mammals in captivity were either rescued or born in captivity. Tilikum was captured off the east coast of Iceland in November of 1983, at about three years of age. Blackfish includes some powerful footage of whalers in the 1970s, before Tilikum’s time, driving a pod of orcas into shallow water, separating the young from their mothers, and then loading them aboard, while the mothers stay just outside the nets and wail. The salty old sea dog they interview seems shaken and distraught about what he did.

From there, Tilikum ended up at the not-so-prestigious Sealand of the Pacific, in British Columbia, where he spent his nights in a tiny “holding module” with two older, female whales — who didn’t seem to like him. On February 21, 1991, trainer Keltie Byrne slipped into the tank, and the three whales drowned her, in front of the audience. Blackfish presents this as Tilikum’s doing. Sealand shut down — apparently with no inquest into the death — and Tilikum moved to SeaWorld Orlando, where the trainers were told he was not responsible for the death at Sealand. (If he was, this is sinister. If he wasn’t…)

Years later, in 1999, a man’s body was found, dead and nude, draped over Tilikum’s back. The 27-year-old man, Daniel P. Dukes, apparently snuck into the tank after hours. (Yeah, he was disturbed.) It’s hard to blame the whale for that one, but… the man’s genitals were ripped off. Also, one of the trainers interviewed seemed to think that Tilikum had stripped the man and was quite consciously parading him about when the morning crew showed up.

Less than a year later, he killed trainer Dawn Brancheau after a “Dine with Shamu” show. Now, when a trainer gets killed by a killer whale, that seems like an occupational hazard, but both SeaWorld and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) treated it as if it needed some explanation. SeaWorld tried to blame the trainer — for having a ponytail, which might have got caught in Tilikum’s teeth — and OSHA blamed SeaWorld for “safety violations”, leading to their current practice of keeping the trainers away from the whales, behind a barrier.

Can’t we accept that working with killer whales is dangerous? When your human co-workers are cranky, they raise their voice, say something unkind, maybe slam a coffee mug on the meeting table. When your multi-ton carnivorous co-workers are cranky, they kill you. The trainers may be a bit deluded about their special relationship with the animals they train, but who knows more about the animals than they do?

Well, it turns out that SeaWorld seems to know a lot more than it shares with trainers and the public about killer whale attacks. Some examples:

  • On June 12, 1999, 22-year-old Kasatka grabbed her trainer Ken Peters by the leg and attempted to throw him from the pool during a public show at SeaWorld San Diego.
  • On July 8, 2002, a trainer by the name of Tamaree was hospitalized for a broken arm and several minor injuries after an incident occurred in Shamu Stadium at SeaWorld Florida. The 28-year-old trainer was doing poolside work with two of the park’s orcas, Orkid and Splash. “She was playing with the whales, talking to them… the next thing we know, as it appears from the video, she was pulled into the water,” said SeaWorld spokesperson Darla Davis. Visitor video shows that the trainer was pulled in by her foot after the female Orkid grabbed a hold of it during the session. Both Orkid and Splash continuously pulled the trainer under as she screamed for help. A fellow trainer made the decision to make as if to let in a more dominate female into the pool. Orkid who was holding the trainer at the time dropped her and Tamaree was able to escape. Park officials stated that the trainer exited the pool without assistance and was taken to a local hospital, where a pin was needed to reset her arm.
  • In late July 2004, during a show at the SeaWorld park in San Antonio, Texas, a male orca named Kyuquot (nickname Ky) repeatedly jumped on top of his trainer, Steve Aibel, forcing him underwater and barred the trainer from escaping the water. After several minutes the trainer was able to calm the animal and he exited the pool unhurt. “Veterinarians believe the whale… felt threatened by the trainer, perhaps a result of the effects of adolescent hormones.”
  • On April 4, 2005, SeaWorld Florida trainer Sam Davis was repeatedly “bumped” by an 11-year-old male orca named Taku. The show continued uninterrupted but the trainer was later taken to Sand Lake Hospital for unspecified minor injuries and released the same day. Additional eyewitness account: “The trainer and Taku were about to slide on the slide out at the end of the show when Taku completely stopped and started “bumping” the trainer. The trainer was male and he finally swam out of the tank. I knew something was wrong because none of the whales except Kalina wanted to perform. Then they finally got Taku out to splash people at the end of the show, when this incident took place.”
  • On November 15, 2006, a SeaWorld California trainer was injured when the park’s 18-year-old female killer whale, Orkid, grabbed veteran trainer Brian Rokeach by the foot and pulled him to the bottom of the tank, refusing to release him for an extended period of time. Orkid released Rokeach only after heeding fellow trainer Kenneth Peters’s repeated attempts to call the animal’s attention back to the stage. Rokeach suffered a torn ligament in his ankle but was not taken to the hospital. In response to the incident, SeaWorld increased the number of trainers who must be available during performances and in water training to five staff members, but this was ineffective because a fortnight later trainer Kenneth Peters was involved in a similar incident with a different orca.[52][53]See next bullet for Peters attack.
  • On November 29, 2006, Kasatka, one of SeaWorld San Diego’s seven orcas, grabbed her trainer, Kenneth Peters, by the foot and dragged him to the bottom of the tank several times during an evening show at Shamu Stadium. The senior trainer barely escaped, after 9 terrifying minutes, when Kasatka released him. The whale chased and tried to grab him again, after he got out of the pool. This was the second documented incident of Kasatka attacking Peters and was the third most widely reported of all the SeaWorld incidents.

Posted in Animals, Media | 1 Comment »

Where did cyberspace come from?

Saturday, November 2nd, 2013

Where did cyberspace come from? William Gibson explains:

I was painfully aware that I lacked an arena for my science fiction. The spaceship had been where science fiction had happened for a very long time, even in the writing of much hipper practitioners like Samuel Delany. The spaceship didn’t work for me, viscerally. I know from some interviews of Ballard’s that it didn’t work for him either. His solution was to treat Earth as the alien planet and perhaps to treat one’s fellow humans as though they were aliens. But that didn’t work for me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to function in a purely Ballardian universe. So I needed something to replace outer space and the spaceship.

I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn’t even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality. Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them — it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.

The only computers I’d ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. The poster was a photograph of a businessman’s jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holding a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger than a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe.

I sensed that it would more than meet my requirements, and I knew that there were all sorts of things I could do there that I hadn’t even been able to imagine yet. But what was more important at that point, in terms of my practical needs, was to name it something cool, because it was never going to work unless it had a really good name. So the first thing I did was sit down with a yellow pad and a Sharpie and start scribbling — infospace, dataspace. I think I got cyberspace on the third try, and I thought, Oh, that’s a really weird word. I liked the way it felt in the mouth — I thought it sounded like it meant something while still being essentially hollow.

What I had was a sticky neologism and a very vague chain of associations between the bus-stop Apple IIc advertisement, the posture of the kids playing arcade games, and something I’d heard about from these hobbyist characters from Seattle called the Internet. It was more tedious and more technical than anything I’d ever heard anybody talk about. It made ham ­radio sound really exciting. But I understood that, sometimes, you could send messages through it, like a telegraph. I also knew that it had begun as a project to explore how we might communicate during a really shit-hot nuclear war.

I took my neologism and that vague chain of associations to a piece of prose fiction just to see what they could do. But I didn’t have a concept of what it was to begin with. I still think the neologism and the vague general idea were the important things. I made up a whole bunch of things that happened in cyberspace, or what you could call cyberspace, and so I filled in my empty neologism. But because the world came along with its real cyberspace, very little of that stuff lasted. What lasted was the neologism.

And then he went and typed the story up. On his typewriter.

Posted in Media, Technology | No Comments »

Mahna Mahna

Friday, November 1st, 2013

Everyone knows Mahna Mahna from The Muppets — although they may not know that the back-up singers are the Snouths (or Snowths):

The act actually appeared earlier on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Dick Cavett Show, This is Tom Jones, and Pure Goldie:

The original version, from Sesame Street, features a trio of more generic “anything Muppets” singing a slightly different version of the song:

The beatnik male singer got the name Bip Bippadotta, but as he evolved he became known as Mahna Mahna.

The original, original version though didn’t feature muppets at all. Rather, it featured Swedish lesbians — in a now-tame exploitation film called Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso (Sweden, Heaven and Hell):

The song is Piero Umiliani’s “Mah Nà Mah Nà“:

It was a minor radio hit in the U.S. and in Britain, but became better known in English-speaking countries from its use in a recurring blackout sketch for the 1969-70 season of The Red Skelton Show, the 14th episode of Sesame Street, the first episode of The Muppet Show, and also from its consistent use as the primary silent comedy sketch scene music for The Benny Hill Show.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Mr. Cyberpunk

Friday, November 1st, 2013

Mr. Cyberpunk, William Gibson, the science-fiction author who coined the term, isn’t very cyberpunk:

On a short walk to lunch one afternoon, from the two-story mock-Tudor house where he lives with his wife, Deborah, he complained about a recent visit from a British journalist, who came to Vancouver searching for “Mr. Cyberpunk” and was disappointed to find him ensconced in a pleasantly quiet suburban patch of central Vancouver. Mr. Cyberpunk seemed wounded by having his work pigeonholed, but equally so by the insult to his home, which is quite ­comfortable, and his neighborhood, which is, too. “We like it quiet,” he explained.

He sounds a bit like Neal Stephenson’s neo-Victorians, really. This bit sounds rather more SWPL:

When I’m writing a book I get up at seven. I check my e-mail and do Internet ablutions, as we do these days. I have a cup of coffee. Three days a week, I go to Pilates and am back by ten or eleven. Then I sit down and try to write. If absolutely nothing is happening, I’ll give myself permission to mow the lawn. But, generally, just sitting down and really trying is enough to get it started. I break for lunch, come back, and do it some more. And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process.

Posted in Media | 1 Comment »

The Plague Behind Zombies and Vampires

Thursday, October 31st, 2013

The plague behind zombies and vampires is rabies, of course.

Tags:
Posted in Media, Science | No Comments »

It’s pronounced “Eye-gor” now

Thursday, October 31st, 2013

The canonical Igor of pop-culture — Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant — does not exist in the original novel and isn’t named Igor in the movie.

Tags:
Posted in Media | No Comments »

Gremlins on a B-17 Bomber

Thursday, October 31st, 2013

Horror sci-fi classic Alien was originally going to involve gremlins on a B-17 bomber.

Tags:
Posted in Media | No Comments »

The Birds

Thursday, October 31st, 2013

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead — but with birds instead of zombies.

Tags:
Posted in Media | 1 Comment »

Calvin’s Snowman House of Horror

Thursday, October 31st, 2013

I still love Calvin’s Snowman House of Horror.

Tags:
Posted in Media | No Comments »

Some Words with a Mummy

Thursday, October 31st, 2013

A few years ago I read Poe’s Some Words with a Mummy for Halloween, and it turned out to make for excellent election-year reading.

Tags:
Posted in Media, Policy, Science, Technology | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »