james_nicoll ([info]james_nicoll) wrote,
@ 2009-06-29 08:54:00
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Cage Match 2009: Two SF authors go in, two SF authors come back out
MilSF thriller author taken to task for writing an SF book without the rigor all SF futures must have.

When will SF authors learn to stick to proven concepts like throwing relativity out the window for plot convenience rather than that crazy climate stuff?

There's a followup.

Full disclosure: I am not keen on this series but my lack of enthusiasm is not because of the climate model he uses. Briefly: 1: Yet another America as a dictatorship novel and 2: strong back-swing tendencies.

Anyone know if the author ego-googles? I would, if I was a published author.

Nicked from prof_brotherton

(94 comments) - (Post a new comment)


[info]carloshasanax
2009-06-29 01:13 pm UTC (link)
Nothing, but nothing, says "mad crank" like JEP.

Although I am saddened (but hardly surprised) to learn that Anderson's wife has also drunk deep from the Moronian spring.

(Reply to this)


[info]carbonel
2009-06-29 01:17 pm UTC (link)
my lack of enthusiasm is because of the climate models he uses.

Is there a missing "not" here?

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[info]james_nicoll
2009-06-29 01:19 pm UTC (link)
It should be in there now.

Once again I am amazed that if I leave out a word, it will be the word whose absence completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

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(no subject) - [info]armb, 2009-06-29 03:46 pm UTC (Expand)

[info]sinboy
2009-06-29 01:24 pm UTC (link)
Just about the only way to get a worse opinion of LASFS is to watch how the male membership acts when an attractive young woman shows up. The few times I visited with someone fitting that description, the room oozed with leers, and there was a lot of deflecting of unasked for touch.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]james_nicoll
2009-06-29 01:34 pm UTC (link)
Quick, someone get Jonathan Tweet to explain why humanity's evolutionary history predicts this behavior.

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(no subject) - [info]seawasp, 2009-06-29 06:22 pm UTC (Expand)

[info]tavella
2009-06-29 04:29 pm UTC (link)
That's one reason a lot of younger fans don't feel comfortable at conventions dominated by old-school fans; the way many old-schoolers treat young women being sexually harassed by some old lech as something that should be viewed as an honor. As some of the worst offenders have died off it's improved some, but not enough.

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(no subject) - [info]brigidsblest, 2009-06-29 08:25 pm UTC (Expand)
Lasfs - [info]squiptryx0, 2009-07-21 10:12 pm UTC (Expand)

[info]barberio
2009-06-29 02:47 pm UTC (link)
I've come to a conclusion. By it's nature, Science Fiction publishing attracts people who want to defend the debunked, unpopular or improbable. This is because it gives them an outlet to write their own fantasy future where their ideas are all correct. In some ways, this would be a good thing, fiction has always had it's place in debate...

Were it not for the Golden Age legacy in Western Science Fiction. There's this huge weight of legacy bias towards the work produced by the 1950s establishment, that of middle class predominantly right wing white Americans. The 'The New Wave' introduced 'new' literary techniques, but manly failed in changing social mores in Science Fiction publishing it's self. To a huge extent, as uncovered during the spate of fail earlier this year, modern Science Fiction publishing is still stuck in the future of the 50s.

This is changing, and perhaps it's tipped over into a radical generational change, but Science Fiction is going to be full of drama about it for quite some time.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]mmcirvin
2009-06-29 03:20 pm UTC (link)
American SF, at least. The British field's somewhat different and (what little I know of) non-Anglophone SF is more different still.

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(no subject) - [info]barberio, 2009-06-29 04:04 pm UTC (Expand)

[info]fivemack
2009-06-29 03:52 pm UTC (link)
I think it would be hard to put, say, Clarke's short stories as 'defending the debunked, unpopular or improbable'; there's much more of the sense of marveling that we could contemplate walking on the Moon, and trying to write about what it would be like. Egan works now with wonders more subtle than engineering but in the same kind of vein. Asimov couldn't write, but you didn't have much of a sense of a hunt for thundering vindication.

There is, alas, Heinlein.

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(no subject) - [info]barberio, 2009-06-29 04:02 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]rosefox, 2009-06-29 04:32 pm UTC (Expand)

[info]mishalak
2009-06-30 07:01 am UTC (link)
So would Asimov be considered not golden age or an outlier? Because he was rather liberal. Not a perfect feminist by modern standards, but quite liberal on subjects ranging from health care to gay rights.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)(Expand)
Asimov, Sturgeon, Nourse, Pohl, Silverberg ..... - [info]daev, 2009-06-30 08:09 am UTC (Expand)
Re: Asimov, Sturgeon, Nourse, Pohl, Silverberg ..... - [info]barberio, 2009-06-30 11:21 am UTC (Expand)
Re: Asimov, Sturgeon, Nourse, Pohl, Silverberg ..... - [info]james_nicoll, 2009-06-30 12:07 pm UTC (Expand)

[info]prof_brotherton
2009-06-29 03:40 pm UTC (link)
Someone on a mailing list I share with Dave pointed this out to him earlier today (not me, although I got the initial link from Dave on this list). He might be by.

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[info]fivemack
2009-06-29 03:44 pm UTC (link)
It seemed a lot more like a straight clash of generations; Williams must be twenty years younger than Pournelle, and probably nearer forty. People who regard the USSR as the force who convinced Koreans and Vietnamese to shoot at them personally, rather than as the menace in the East who kept fifty million Mitteleuropeans in dismal gray under tiresome autocrats and could destroy in six minutes all that everyone holds dear.

With the cry of 'whippersnapper' squeaking out from between every line.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]daveon
2009-06-29 05:23 pm UTC (link)
That said, I think that Jerry's generation has trouble understand the fear that was the corner stone of life for a European teenager in the 1980s. I certainly believed then that a nuclear war was possible and couldn't understand the posturing of the sides.

Charlie Stross writes of this far more eloquently than I can though and we're roughly the same age.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)(Expand)
(no subject) - [info]seawasp, 2009-06-29 06:26 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2009-06-29 07:39 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]daveon, 2009-06-29 07:40 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]james_nicoll, 2009-06-29 07:47 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]nebogipfel, 2009-06-29 07:55 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]james_nicoll, 2009-06-29 07:57 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]nebogipfel, 2009-06-29 08:19 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]jhetley, 2009-06-29 08:03 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2009-07-02 01:29 am UTC (Expand)

[info]carloshasanax
2009-06-29 07:24 pm UTC (link)
Pournelle himself was a Communist. And thus his experiences are universal!

In reality, he's a gullible dry drunk from Louisiana who believes forcefully told things that fit his prejudices, powered by a full tank of cultural resentment. He's a victim-hero in his own mind. From Platt's Dream Makers:
"I was a victim of the snigger-theory of philosophy, which is that if you admire anyone other than a leftist then you're barely tolerated in the university department, and they laugh at you. I had been through a pretty miserable war; the communists promised to do something, and it didn't look to me as if anyone else was going to do anything." He shrugs. "Misplaced idealism. Being a communist was a matter of selective blindness. You adopt a system of looking at things, and if you interpret what you see in those terms, and in no other way, it's easy to delude yourself. You cut yourself off from almost everyone else, your only close friends are people who are part of that movement. If you try to quite they throw you out in such a way that people who used to be your best friends will cross the street to avoid you."
Note that it never occurs to Pournelle that the problem wasn't with his former friends or Communism or the university but with him. Which is pretty obvious; the man is a goatse-level asshole.

So. He's in another self-deluded, selectively blind group with a rigid worldview and punitive policies towards intellectual dissent. But they like him in this one! And he'll die there, and not too far in the future.

I suppose it might be considered tragic, using that word very loosely.

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(no subject) - [info]sanskritabelt, 2009-06-30 02:26 am UTC (Expand)

[info]ailsaek
2009-06-29 04:17 pm UTC (link)
I read some of the comments to the followup you noted. Ouch. I think I'll skip the rest.

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[info]tavella
2009-06-29 04:33 pm UTC (link)
I could smell the Baen Bar stank from miles away; the little acolytes running up and going "man, my dude owned you! totally! you are intellectually inferior!"... yeah, I'll be surprised if those guys aren't Baen to the core.

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(no subject) - [info]barberio, 2009-06-29 04:45 pm UTC (Expand)

(Anonymous)
2009-06-29 05:17 pm UTC (link)
Pournelle uses a climate model? I admit that reading this carefully is beyond my abilities at the moment, but I didn't see any mention of his using a model. Saw a few lies, but not that.


William Hyde

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[info]davidjwilliams
2009-06-29 07:05 pm UTC (link)
hey, it's one of the steel cage participants, delurking. Hi folks, and happy Monday.

I think the core of our disagreement was that Pournelle is very certain about what the future has/doesn't have in store for us, and I'm a lot less so. To me, SF is about sketching out a wide continuum of possible futures--obviously you have to pick just one for whatever narrative you're penning, but to conflate that with full-on prophecy is problematic. History shows us just how often expectations of future have been confounded. To say nothing of the hubris of writing fiction that merely reflects/justifies one's choices in the voting booth.

FiveMack's comment resonates with me. Pournelle fought in Korea, and I suspect that in a sense he's never stopped fighting. While I've enjoyed some of his books, I've always seen his fiction as a fairly transparent projection of whatever conflict the U.S. is engaged in... .i.e., the sort of military SF where the Evil Alien Marauders are thinly disguised metaphors for Communists/terrorists/Al-Qaeda, i.e., whoever the U.S. happens to be fighting at any given moment. In my talk at LASFS, I referred to this body of mil SF (without citing his work directly), and this may have irritated him further, especially as it came on the heels of our disagreement re global warming.

And as some of you observed, Pournelle's defenders were out in force on my blog looking for payback. I had to close off blog comments two days in a row subsequent to my losing patience at being called a KGB dupe, but my handler in Moscow says that merely means the capitalist pig-dogs are on the run.

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[info]daveon
2009-06-29 07:36 pm UTC (link)
Interestingly this spat came just as I finished Niven and Pournelle's Escape from Hell which was extremely disappointing, especially as Jerry's politics came leaking from every other scene.

Especially where he castigated both real and made up characters for making decisions which he deemed to be sinfully wrong.

It was a shame to read it.

Anyway, I'll go out and get Burning Skies now - just to see what upset him :)

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(no subject) - [info]davidjwilliams, 2009-06-29 10:13 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]agrumer, 2009-06-29 10:29 pm UTC (Expand)
Nicked from the dicussion
[info]james_nicoll
2009-06-29 07:36 pm UTC (link)
I think the reason this is so hard for you to see is that I’ve been saying US and USSR, and those concepts trigger emotional responses. So imagine that Side A is the USSR instead of the US. Meaning the USSR now has the partial missile shield, and the US doesn’t. That doesn’t worry you?

Wasn't this the situation with the Soviet A-35 ABM system aside from the short period Safeguard was up and running?

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Re: Nicked from the dicussion
[info]carloshasanax
2009-06-29 08:16 pm UTC (link)
Sure, from 1971 all the way through the fall of the Berlin Wall. Let's see:

Did the Soviet ABM system increase Soviet adventurism? (The wingnut fear.) Not particularly. Some proxy wars, by definition distant sideshows, and Afghanistan, which the Soviets regarded as in their sphere of influence (hard socialist government, on their border, which had previous requested and received military assistance).

Did it increase American proliferation? (The moonbat fear.) The American stockpile actually dropped about 15 percent from 1971 to 1989. Now, the Soviet stockpile tripled during this time.

(There's a lie commonly espoused by the radical right that SDI wrecked the Soviet economy. No, the Soviet economy came pre-wrecked. The collapse of oil prices in the 1980s had a lot more to do with it. But in the last analysis, it was a social collapse. Communism's political legitimacy evaporated, and with it, any institution which required its support.)

(Reply to this) (Parent)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion
[info]keithmm
2009-06-29 08:16 pm UTC (link)
The A-35 was allowed under the ABM Treaty: both the US and USSR were allowed to protect one area. The Soviets picked Moscow. Given the level of saturation Moscow was going to get in the event of a nuclear war--under NATO unified planning, between the US and UK there were allegedly something like 10 different warheads aimed at the Kremlin alone--no one seriously thought their ABM system had a chance. Even if the system did work and protected Moscow and the suburbs...who cares? Obliteration of the rest of the country meant its survival was immaterial.

That's significantly different from the American plan to protect a large portion of the country, which makes surviving a second strike seem contemplatible.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion
[info]davidjwilliams
2009-06-29 10:04 pm UTC (link)
JN - The A-35/Galosh missile system was intended to lay the groundwork for possible, future strategic shields, but in and of itself it was strictly regional, designed to protect Moscow, and permitted as such in the ABM treaty, which provided for deployment of one regional ABM system per side (Safeguard being the temporary American response). It thus didn't seriously concern American planners the way SDI did the Soviets.

By way of calibration, "partial" in the sentence you've excerpted from my blog is intended to mean "a far-from-totally-leakproof SDI still capable of exacting substantial attrition from incoming strategic strikes." Many of the commenters on my blog saw nothing potentially destabilizing about a U.S. in possession of such a system, but I was arguing that had the U.S.S.R. possessed the equivalent, they might have started to worry. Let me know if that helps clarify.

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Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]james_nicoll, 2009-06-29 10:13 pm UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]davidjwilliams, 2009-06-29 10:19 pm UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]james_nicoll, 2009-06-29 10:26 pm UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]wdstarr, 2009-06-30 12:02 am UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]carloshasanax, 2009-06-29 10:46 pm UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]davidjwilliams, 2009-06-29 10:53 pm UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - (Anonymous), 2009-06-29 11:17 pm UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]carloshasanax, 2009-06-29 11:56 pm UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]davidjwilliams, 2009-06-30 01:34 am UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]carloshasanax, 2009-06-30 03:40 am UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]james_angove, 2009-06-30 05:08 am UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]martin_wisse, 2009-06-30 09:11 am UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]carloshasanax, 2009-06-30 10:21 am UTC (Expand)
The racial thing - (Anonymous), 2009-06-30 11:44 am UTC (Expand)
Re: The racial thing - [info]carloshasanax, 2009-06-30 12:59 pm UTC (Expand)
Re: The racial thing - (Anonymous), 2009-06-30 05:53 pm UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]barberio, 2009-06-30 03:18 am UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]fivemack, 2009-06-30 01:10 pm UTC (Expand)
Re: Nicked from the dicussion
[info]sanskritabelt
2009-06-30 02:45 am UTC (link)
ObSF: Arslan, in which a Soviet missile shield and inadequate security of the premier's person led to certain geopolitical changes.

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Re: Nicked from the dicussion - [info]nebogipfel, 2009-06-30 01:15 pm UTC (Expand)

[info]redbird
2009-06-30 01:14 am UTC (link)
Is it unreasonable of me to say "own goal" to anyone who attacks the assumptions in someone else's fiction as unscientific but has written stories that involve either FTL drives or time travel?

(Reply to this) (Thread)(Expand)

[info]gohover
2009-06-30 02:36 am UTC (link)
It really depends. Refer to Indistinguishable from Magic by Robert L Forward for some approaches which approach plausible.

Moreover, science is a process, not a set of conclusions. When someone handles a surprising and currently unknown phenomenon in a "scientific" way, I'm very satisfied!

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(no subject) - [info]sanskritabelt, 2009-06-30 02:47 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]gohover, 2009-06-30 03:04 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]gohover, 2009-06-30 02:46 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]sanskritabelt, 2009-06-30 02:49 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]gohover, 2009-06-30 03:00 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]sanskritabelt, 2009-06-30 03:16 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]gohover, 2009-06-30 03:35 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]mmcirvin, 2009-06-30 03:38 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2009-06-30 03:54 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]barberio, 2009-06-30 11:26 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]gohover, 2009-06-30 03:54 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2009-06-30 04:47 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]gohover, 2009-06-30 04:56 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]mmcirvin, 2009-06-30 05:15 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]james_angove, 2009-06-30 05:13 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]gohover, 2009-06-30 07:52 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]carloshasanax, 2009-06-30 10:39 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]narmitaj, 2009-06-30 09:25 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]james_nicoll, 2009-06-30 12:03 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]fridgepunk, 2009-06-30 08:39 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]james_nicoll, 2009-06-30 09:01 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]nelc, 2009-06-30 09:51 pm UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - [info]james_nicoll, 2009-07-01 03:35 am UTC (Expand)
(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2009-06-30 06:15 pm UTC (Expand)
Own Goals - [info]squiptryx0, 2009-07-21 10:05 pm UTC (Expand)
Re: Own Goals - [info]redbird, 2009-07-21 10:59 pm UTC (Expand)

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