[NON BLOG] CFTAG After-Report

[rfmcdonald]

I met up with schizmatic for a couple hours' entertaining discussion. Some high points.

• Stargate SG-1 is a very fun series. It's interesting to see a contemporary science fiction setting featuring real military forces. Also, machine guns seem to have a higher firing rate than most sci-fi energy blasters.


• The technothriller universe is much scarier than our own. Not only do many enemy states go to any length to hurt the US--Dale Brown's novels, punctuated by nuclear exchanges, come to mind--but even American allies are plotting to wage savage war. Consider, in Larry Bond's Cauldron, the willingness of a Franco-German alliance to use nuclear weapons against US carrier groups and bloodily conquer central Europe, or the desires of Japan in Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor to attack the United States and conquer Siberia.


• Japanese manga and Korean manwha have managed to take over American-style comics' market share quite nicely, penetrating beyond comics' traditional teenage male market to reach entirely new demographics, like girls/women. This is an achievement.


• It's annoying how, in Star Trek and kindred televised science-fiction, races are made archetypes, the Peaceful Thinkers, say, and the Brutal Conquerors.


• Circa 1910, the German language was poised for an extraordinary period as a world language, with millions of Teutophones living outside Germany in central and eastern Europe, sizable German-language communities in places as far separated as Texas and Rio Grande do Sul and South Australia, millions of Germanized Asheknazic Jews, and great prestige in business and scholarship. Two world wars put an end to this.

We actively recruit, so if you're in the GTA next Sunday at 1 o'clock and in the vicinity of the Starbucks at Yonge and Wellesley, come, join us!