Cool books
Sep. 12th, 2005 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexJust wanted to point to today's blog entry by Neil Gaiman in which he, in his very understated way, recommends one of my all-time favorite books, Wasp by Eric Frank Russell. I think there are about 10 people on the planet who liked this book, one of whom I friended on LJ(*) just because he used the phrase "Dirac Angestun".
It's a cool book about a (human) terrorist inserted onto an alien planet in a one-man effort to disrupt the aliens' war-making capability. The book is both eerily prescient and amusingly dated (in that way so much SF of past decades becomes).
I'm disappointed that Neil let the film option expire because, frankly, I think this film needs to be made. I hold out tenuous hope for the upcoming V for Vendetta movie because the message of that movie is extremely important. Likewise, a Wasp movie would have the potential to be absolutely rocking and unnerving to the current national zeitgeist. I hope someone picks this one up, but I doubt it.
(*) Am I the only one who consistently typos it as "liverjournal"? My fingers just want to put that extra 'r' in there.
It's a cool book about a (human) terrorist inserted onto an alien planet in a one-man effort to disrupt the aliens' war-making capability. The book is both eerily prescient and amusingly dated (in that way so much SF of past decades becomes).
I'm disappointed that Neil let the film option expire because, frankly, I think this film needs to be made. I hold out tenuous hope for the upcoming V for Vendetta movie because the message of that movie is extremely important. Likewise, a Wasp movie would have the potential to be absolutely rocking and unnerving to the current national zeitgeist. I hope someone picks this one up, but I doubt it.
(*) Am I the only one who consistently typos it as "liverjournal"? My fingers just want to put that extra 'r' in there.
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-12 02:18 pm (UTC)So...um...do you really think a movie about total government take over, done up Hollywood style, is going to actually get an important message across? We are living in a nation where there is documented proof that our government flat out lied to us in order to deliberately start a war where thousands of people are still getting killed every day, including our own soldiers...and still people out there think Bush is the best president they've ever known.
I think some fall blockbuster is nothing but mind-fluff to most people who will go see it. They aren't going to think "Oh..oh my God, that could happen to us!" they are going to watch the explosions and think "Good thing this is American, where we have democracy, because that could never happen here...that only happens in those crazy far-out science fiction movies."
Many apologies for yesterday. At noon I finally fell into a desparate sleep, after being awake for 24 hours.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-12 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-12 03:00 pm (UTC)As for V, I have no hope that it'll say anything to the 51%. What I'm hoping is that it'll help the 49% realize just how much worse it can get and that they (we) damned well ought to do something. I don't hope for it to be a blockbuster. What I hope for is an honest retelling of a disturbing tale dressed up in enough Hollywood to slip past the first of peoples' mental barriers. I see no reason why anyone except rich white oil men should be sleeping easy in this country.
If sci-fi is good for anything, it's good for telling us things about ourselves we wouldn't listen to otherwise.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-12 03:13 pm (UTC)I think the next president should be a science fiction writer. I know it's a generalization, but it seems that of all the genres, here is a group that really *thinks* about the future, deeply, without rose-colored glasses. And they see where humans are really headed with their over-consumption and greed and a dishonest government based on lies and the "Gold Rule". (He who has the gold...rules..."
Too bad all the really, really good ones have already left us.
Couldn't you just see Asimov in office?
no subject
Date: 2005-09-12 04:04 pm (UTC)I also think you haven't read enough SF in the last 20 years if you think all the good writers are gone. Just off the top of my head: Stephenson, Sterling, Gibson, Walter Jon Williams, Pat Murphy, Pat Cadigan, LMB, Jeter, Powers, Blaylock, Connie Willis. All of them well-published and all pretty near the top of their games still. Happy to loan you reading material...
I wouldn't mind if the US had an "Author Laureate" (sp?) as well as a Poet Laureate, though. I'd settle for an actual artist being in charge of the NEA.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-12 06:08 pm (UTC)And I'm not meaning to degrade the modern talent, I'm just saying it seems like the older group, that golden age group, were just *so good* and so far ahead of their time. They were also extremely outspoken and many of them were vocal about their worries about our society, especially things like space travel and nuclear power.
Maybe the newer authors are too, though, and I just am ignorant of it because you read the *histories* of the writers from 40 years ago whereas the writers nowadays you'd have to be reading news. I don't do news.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-12 10:54 pm (UTC)I *love* Wasp. In fact I sent it to my father for some occasion or other...and he liked it too. Though I have to say I've never read anything else by Russell.
And Connie Willis seems an odd bird in that list of current writers. She and Gibson don't often appear on the same lists :)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-13 03:44 am (UTC)You've been drinking too much. Cirrhosis of the fingers?
;) I'll have to look up this Wasp thing.
But don't forget Tepper. And Vonarburg.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-13 01:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-13 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-22 05:35 pm (UTC)