C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

I watched the first hour of Ursula K. LeGuin's Legend of Earthsea on the SciFi channel last night and was disappointed but not surprised that it was a rehashing of tired cliches. I'm sure there is innovation somewhere in this genre that doesn't just plagiarize the ancient Myth of the Hero and use Good Vs. Evil to avoid having to motivate the antagonist. Can someone point it out to me? We aren't kids sitting around the campfire listening to a static oral tradition, folks! How did that old adage go? "There are only seven stories"? Balderdash, there are only seven kinds of unimaginative authors and readers. This brought to mind dawnwolfe's recent question to me, "If you met someone who had never, ever read a single SF/Fantasy book in their lives, had not even heard of the genre but was open to trying it out, what is the first book you would introduce to that person." It depends on what they want. Different books are good are for different folks and they can get different purposes from the same book. Mine is just one flavor of preference and I'll offer it as nothing more. My thesis is this: I like science fiction to the degree that it's not a fantasy.( Read more... )

In my wanderings around the web I've noticed that certain kinds of conflict happen to very certain kinds of projects. ( Read more... )And yet all these are the very same people who have the greatest need to band together to succeed, because they serve a niche within a niche. ( Read more... )

I rented the anime anthology Memories by the creator of Akira, Otomo Katsuhiro. The entire film is top-notch, with breathtaking visuals and uncompromising artistry. Each segment is an individual vision instead of marketing-driven by a board table full of business suits. The first episode, Magnetic Rose, set in orbit in 2192, is now my favorite work of animation ever. It's rare to see zero-gravity depicted and ships with thrusters that actually fire correctly to move in it, even in anime (Cowboy Bebop notwithstanding). For its realistic acting and plausible visualization of the future I've got to own Magnetic Rose. A couple of technologies (which I won't describe to avoid spoiling it) are on the blue-sky fringe of legitimate futurics, but are depicted so convincingly that they are more an asset than a liability to the segment. The film contrasts them against a background of solidly realistic hi-tech which is antique to the characters because it's based on our own present-day research trends. I'd like to show Magnetic Rose to my GURPS Transhuman Space group, but I doubt I'll find a copy in time for our session Saturday.