[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] What to Do When Flawed People Make Flawless Art

I
The Jews, who in ancient times the prophets slew,
Were there when on the cross Christ died in blood;
Scoffers and hangmen they together stood
As Zion's crimes their celebrations drew.

The above paragraph is taken from Émile Nelligan's poem "The Deicides," which continues on for seven more stanzas divided into two sections of four stanzas each in much this tone. His poem 'The Antique Dealer" deals with an Algerian Jewish antique dealer whose shortsighted greed causes him to lose everything.

( Read more... )

A suggestion, to be debated: It is only relevant what bad an artist is believed to have committed or supported only if it generally infects the oeuvre, or if it is sufficiently extreme.

Thoughts?

GURPS Books

Yesterday, I picked up a new copy of GURPS Alternate Earths to replace my old broken copy.

Today, I've placed orders via the Comic Hunter for three more books from the GURPS Transhuman Space line: The High Frontier, In the Well, and Deep Beyond.

That'll be it for the summer; that, and the upcoming Broken Dreams and Under Pressure.

On My Place of Work

We're busy moving the fiction shelves back to their former location, after the fiction area has been recarpeted and has seen its walls repainted.

We've moved two, so far. By the time that we're completely done, we'll have to move 19 more shelves, and reshelve the entire collection. In some cases, multiple times.

There are some problems with the job. The library, since it's not part of the same administrative apparatus as the rest of the Confederation Centre, is (pardon the phrase) the red-haired stepchild of the place. The paint job has been somewhat slipshod, with some dirt included in the paint, while the painters have been occasionally destructive, breaking plants, wall fixtures, et cetera.

Tomorrow, I'll be working from 8:30 am to 9 pm. This will be fun, in a tiring kind of way.

Still, I need as many hours as I can get over the summer, and I think--with one other temporary/permanent worker scheduled to drop out owing to her pregnancy--I can get it. Travelling this August before grad school at Queen's is something I really really want to do.

SF powers?

Your SF superpower is: Pyrocreativity

You have power to, er, burn. What praise more can
I say? Don't toast any wooden nickels!

Beings who share your superpower: Charlie McGee
(Firestarter), Pyro (X2), Gandalf (The Lord of
The Rings), Laven Firestorm (Brightly Burning)


What Is Your SF Superpower?
brought to you by Quizilla

More quizzes

( Read more... )

[SPACE NOTES] Articles on 1-Ceres

Detailed Hubble Images of the Surface of Asteroid Ceres

In a paper set to appear in the January 2002 issue of the Astronomical Journal, astronomers report Hubble Space Telescope images taken of asteroid 1 Ceres that show surface detail at a resolution of ~50 km. Among the surface features they have observed is a large, ~250km diameter surface feature for which they propose the name "Piazzi'' (after the asteroid's discoverer). It is presently uncertain if this feature is due to a crater, albedo variegation, or other effect.

( Evidence for ammonium-bearing minerals on Ceres. )

( Phyllosilicilate absorption features in main-belt and outer-belt asteroid reflectance spectra )

( The Sun's fab four. )

Just because it's small doesn't mean that Ceres isn't interesting.

And, finally, a picture:

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Earth, a Third World Planet

(Originally posted on the Futurists list at yahoogroups.com on 26 May 2002. Changes have been introduced.)

Lately, I've been thinking about the role of Earth--a near-future Earth, actually, if you define "near" as the next few millennia.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of television shows tend to future humans competing alongside assorted alien cultures as approximate equals, as people who should be consulted as more-or-less equals in particular areas of science, like genetics. The television show Earth: Final Conflict, for instance, has experts in the human biological sciences being treated as experts, and humans in general being considered honoured partners (even if not quite mature enough to handle interplanetary travel, but never mind that). Other series often introduce the humans of Earth into a mess of galactic politics and suddenly, using very marginal resources, carving a renowned name for themselves in said mess. Even in Babylon 5, where the Earth-Minbari War accidentally started by an adventurous Earth government would have ended in the extermination of homo sapiens sapiens but for Minbari mercy, Earth ended up remaining a power of note despite being thoroughly defeated.

All these stories seem exceptionally optimistic to me. We can get an idea how unrealistic by examining the figures bandied about, of energies necessary to produce working wormholes, of the costs needed to generate these energies, but we often don't really understand it, or don't want to. A society that can do that is as far ahead of us (as defined here, briefly, as "we post-industrial societies, from Honolulu to Seoul to Prague to Dublin") as, well, we are ahead of most of the Third World.

( Read more... )

All this, of course, is just a science-fictional rumination. I suspect myself that this will never come to pass, simply because extraterrestrials are probably few and far between given the difficulty of generating complex life and the evitability of intelligence and language. Still, it's something science-fiction writers should consider.