Just a reminder…

 

Just a little reminder for you guys (and girls, hehe) that this site is now on a different address : www.scifirama.com

Wednesday posts at scifirama.com

1. Science fictionized movie posters photoshoping contest
2. Cloverfield review
3. Amphibious car
4. Batman – online comic
5. How to write a novel (part 1)

More at www.scifirama.com

Tuesday posts on scifirama.com

1. Quick thoughts about Sarah Connor Chronicles
2. Heroes action figures
3. Torchwood personality test

More at www.scifirama.com

Sundays posts on scifirama.com

List of all todays posts at our mother site Scifirama.com :

1. Elijah wood confirms dual Hobbit movie details
2. Shiny metal garbage city
3. US stem cell policy inspired by anti-authoritarian scifi
4. Free audiobook – “Gray” by Jon Armstrong

You can read all the non-gaming posts at www.scifirama.com

New use of this site

Well, since we went on and bought new domain and hosting (www.scifirama.com) I tried to think of some way to use this blog for other purposes. Since my vision of Scifirama was pretty serious I decided to make this blog sort of a branch of scifirama.com and dedicate it to sci-fi games. Thant’s right, this site is soon gonna crawl with gaming informations. So, stay tuned

Room

Click on the picture tu find out more about Room 59.

Host 2 update

Click on the picture to get more info

SCIFIRAMA has moved

I finally dealt with all the quirks my hosting provided for me so WWW.SCIFIRAMA.COM is now ACTIVE!

Go visit us at: www.scifirama.com

Wisdom found in sci-fi : Heinlein

The Morning news – Morning news columnist Becca Bacon Martin wrote about wisdom that can be found in sci-fi and especially in Heinlein’s books. This is what she come up with:

It’s not too late for New Year’s resolutions. (I know because I haven’t delivered my last Christmas gift yet!) Longtime readers of The Morning News should know these words by heart, though, because I reprint them every year. They originally belonged to the father of science fiction, Robert Heinlein.

Heinlein almost certainly didn’t consider excerpts from the notebooks of his most famous character, Lazarus Long, “resolutions.” He denied they were wisdom, for that matter. But his approach to life has colored so many of my attitudes about so many things, and what he wrote in “Time Enough for Love” (1973) is better than anything I could ever think up myself.

So, with hat tipped to the late Mr. Heinlein, who is, I hope, bellied up to a bar somewhere in Boondock, I give you these borrowed words to live by as the holidays of 2007 roll into the doldrums of January 2008:

* Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you; if you don’t bet, you can’t win.

* Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.

* Delusions are often functional. A mother’s opinions about her children’s beauty, intelligence, goodness, etc., ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.

* A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.

* If you don’t like yourself, you can’t like other people.

* Avoid making irrevocable decisions while tired or hungry. (Circumstances can force your hand. So think ahead!)

* A woman is not property, and husbands who think otherwise are living in a dreamworld.

* A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

* The more you love, the more you can love — and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love.

* The shamans are forever yakking about their snake-oil “miracles.” I prefer the real McCoy — a pregnant woman.

* A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.

* You live and learn. Or you don’t live long.

* The phrase “we (I) (you) simply must –” designates something that need not be done. “That goes without saying” is a red warning. “Of course” means you had best check it yourself. These small-change cliches and others like them, when read correctly, are reliable channel markers.

* Do not handicap children by making their lives easy.

* Always tell her she is beautiful, especially if she is not.

* Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget, awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity.

* Another ingredient for a happy marriage: Budget the luxuries first!

* And still another: See to it that she has her own desk — then keep your hands off it!

* And another: In a family argument, if it turns out you are right — apologize at once!

* Keep your children short on pocket money — but long on hugs.

* A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.

* Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other ’sins’ are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful — just stupid.)

Amen, brother!

Why do critics still sneer at sci-fi?

Guardian – Science fiction writers are dismissed by the mainstream, but for mind-expanding ideas and sheer narrative excitement the genre is hard to beat.

Keanu Reeves in Scaner Darkly

The annual Hugo Awards for science fiction and fantasy have been running uninterrupted (with the exception of a brief hiatus in 1954) since 1953. Voting is open to anyone prepared to stump up the money (currently $40) and the ceremony has been held all over the world. As such, the awards can lay serious claim to being one of the most venerable, democratic and international in existence, not to mention one of the most transparent.

Outside the sci-fi community, however, the awards barely resonate. Leaving aside the (admittedly interesting) question of whether democratic voting will always select the best novel over that year’s populist Dan Brown equivalent, there’s the well-known snobbery around these genre books. Science fiction may be one of the defining literatures of the last century, but it’s rare that its products get any kind of acceptance by the academy (and when they do, they’re then generally called something else).

The 1953 winner, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, is a case in point. Although it still makes most fan lists of the top science fiction books of all time, it’s rarely mentioned in the mainstream press. Trawling through the Guardian digital archive, for instance, I uncovered only two hits for the book; one an advert placed in the Observer in 1953, one in an article by Martin Amis in 1975, who mentioned it (briefly) only so he could dismiss its author as a cult figure (“always a worrying sign”). Meanwhile in more recent Guardians there have been just two more passing mentions here and here – both written by self-confessed sci-fi junkies.

So I was curious to see if The Demolished Man deserves to have been so ghettoised, or if this is a book that could appeal to someone like me, with only a casual interest in the genre. Since I enjoyed it, I suppose the short answers are “no” and “yes”, respectively. There is a rather more complex long answer, however.

The plot is intriguing. It’s a kind of 24th-century how-dunnit about Ben Reich, a man who manages to commit a murder in an age when the police force is dominated by psychics and most crimes are spotted long before they happen. It’s fast-paced and snappy and films like Minority Report (not to mention a mooted version of this book itself) are testament to the continuing fascination of its central premise.

The trouble is that before the action can really get rolling, Bester has to go to a lot of trouble to explain how the various levels of psychics (known as “peepers”) operate in society, how people travel from planet to planet, how the anti-hero will be able to deflect the attentions of the peepers, and so on. Alongside all that, there’s a lot of work to put in wading through jargon about “hydropathic beds”, “multi-clocks”, “espers”, “v-phones” and similar.

“Information dumping”, of course, is one of the sticks critics of sci-fi use to beat the genre. Such naysayers could also probably make a fairly strong case about Bester’s writing and its marked pulp fiction tendencies. That Bester’s prose isn’t exactly subtle can be fairly well gauged from the very first words (and their accompanying punctuation): “Explosion! Concussion!” Worse yet, he doesn’t hold back from bizarre, universe-warping plot twists. Towards the end, we are told (breathlessly) that Reich is set to become “the deadly enemy of Galactic reason and reality” and that this is certainly cause for “Alarm!” Sadly, the reason he might become so dangerous is never properly explained. Even if it weren’t daft, it would be confusing.

All the same, I did see the appeal. Bester’s quick-fire prose shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. He’s no Hemingway, but there is something to be said for his lean, spare writing, while a few dabs of typographical experimentation surrounding peeper psychic communication work admirably.

Many of Bester’s ideas are also fascinating as historical curiosities. It’s fun seeing how the future was imagined by someone writing before the age of the microchip – when a giant ticker tape-spitting computer would seem like the most impressive machine imaginable – not to mention someone who thought that if you ventured inside a person’s psyche you really would find the raging torrents of the id, the ego, the superego and other Freudian ideas made manifest. Some of his imaginative fancies, meanwhile, remain strikingly modern. Vivid descriptions of grungey post-apocalyptic brothels and cynically exploitative holiday planets wouldn’t seem out of place in contemporary cyber punk, while a few neat jokes remain surprisingly fresh. (There’s a particularly good line about annoying jingles being called pepsis although no one can remember why.)

Finally, as science fiction advocates are always telling us, the futuristic setting allows Bester to pose all sorts of interesting questions about man’s position in the universe, not to mention the structure and values of contemporary society. The Demolished Man might be an unashamedly easy read, but that doesn’t mean it’s dumb. Certainly, it intrigued me enough to make me want to get my mitts on the next Hugo winner – the very special looking They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clitfon and Frank Riley.