Subject:
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Re: Saw the movie today! (bit OT)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.fun
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Date:
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Mon, 10 Dec 2001 22:26:08 GMT
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Viewed:
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619 times
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a somewhat fuller review:
Thomas M. Disch: _The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction
Conquered the World_
I didn't realize how sardonic his book was until I had paid for it. In the
first chapter, The Right To Lie, Disch explores how UFOlogists get away with
selling "unverifiable" stories, and how publically challenging anyone with
an unverifiable story leads to humiliation. (More power to James Randi.) He
quotes the Times: "People are more accepting than ever of exaggerations,
falsifications, fabrications, misstatements, misrepresentations,
gloss-overs, quibbles, concoctions, equivocations, shuffles, prevarications,
trims and truth colored and varnished.
*"They even encourage their children to do it by praising them for using
their imagination."*
Disch asks "Are we a culture of liars?" Through the rest of the book, he
makes you consider, did we long ago cross the line from imagination to
delusion? What is SF anyway?
In Chapter 2 he goes back to our first nationally successful liar, Edgar
Allen Poe. People read Poe like crazy. (Among the curious devotees of the
first seventeen editions printed by his estate were Baudelaire, Nietzsche,
Rilke, Kafka.) Disch argues that Poe enrolled Science and a scientific
demeanor to attempt to give respectability back to the supernatural and the
afterlife.
That, in a nutshell, is what is embarassing about science fiction: it is
full of self-delusions about immortality.
Disch goes on to mine the other embarassing tropes of SF: the domesticated
universe, Star Trek, token equality, SF's insularity, ersatz religions,
military fantasies, aliens and the third world, and something about virtual
reality indicating that ultimately SF is solipsism, that what audiences want
is vicarious involvement.
Along the way some writers are grace-noted, who put more facts into their
fiction than others.
However, the theme of the book is that SF has trailblazed all of the
irresponsibilities from which the future will be chosen. It's a dystopian book.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Saw the movie today! (bit OT)
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| (...) Hmm.. Another great point. Maybe I should reduce the "absoluteness" of my earlier comment, and say simply that many post-Tolkien writers are very heavily influenced by him. How's that for non-commital?! 8^) (...) Feh! Time and space are surely (...) (23 years ago, 7-Dec-01, to lugnet.off-topic.fun)
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