SF Diplomat

New Digs

2008-11-17T13:41:38+00:00

I have started up a film-centric critblog at ruthlessculture.com. It's a slow blog so the posts will be occasional rather than regular and there will be less SF but, for those interested, I shall be posting links there to any future pieces I might write.

Stepping Off The Treadmill

2008-09-23T23:32:23+01:00

Regular readers will have noticed that my enthusiasm levels have been dipping of late. My tone has turned increasingly sour, my reviews increasingly half-hearted and my general output sluggish at best. I have been fighting it for a while, but clearly SFDiplomat has run its course and it is time to move on.

I am going to leave the site up for others to read and refer to but it will cease to be a living document.

My reason for this is that I no longer enjoy blogging about SF. My relationship with blogging has been an awkward one for a while as I do think that the medium brings out the worst in me. Aside from bringing the confrontational and argumentative elements of my personality to the fore, it also plays in to my fondness for objectively quantified measures of success. The same personality traits that once hurtled me through academia, now push me to post more and more frequently about subjects that only half interest me.

My best criticism comes from me picking my targets with considerable care and taking my time when formulating an opinion, but the nature of blogging means that there is pressure to turn reviews around quickly and to review the latest products as quickly as possible. I do not think that this is a hospitable atmosphere for my best work. In fact, I do not think that it is the best atmosphere for anyone to produce their best work.

My plan is to continue producing work for the venues I am currently associated with (new issue of Fruitless Recursion coming as soon as someone submits their revised draft... ahem) but to otherwise step back from the online SF scene. However, I am currently thinking about my next online venture but it will most likely not reflect my interest in SF and it would output at a much more sedate pace.

Thank you all for reading and contributing through comments and links and so on. It's been a fun few years :-)

You May Have Missed... Links 23/09/08

2008-09-23T11:04:43+01:00

This link gathering isn't as easy as it seems. In any given week there's always some interesting stuff floating about but on any given day? That's less clear. I'd say that, for every solid substantial piece, there are probably 8 pieces of advertising (either direct or indirect) and 3 pieces of what this place refers to as 'me stuff'. It's also interesting to note the more popular subject matter. The YA scene, for example, is far more healthy and productive than the SF scene and the 'get people to watch rubbish TV shows' scene is always a favourite.

Nice Daily Graun piece by Graeme Allister about why David Simon is a 'TV Goliath'. Personally I wasn't convinced by Generation Kill... I think it's too soon to produce really good fiction about the Iraq war. Hollywood has tried to overcome this problem but the result is 75 films by lefty Hollywood types, none of which have anything particularly insightful to say about the problem.

Stephanie Cross, again at the Daily Graun, has a piece about realism in fiction based on some remarks by Will Self at a WG Sebald conference. I mention it as I've been really wrestling with precisely that issue of late... the artifice of SF.

Nic Clarke at Strange Horizons has a very good review of MacLeod's The Night Sessions. Nic reaches a lot of the same conclusions as me about why the book doesn't work, but she's a good deal more patient and detailed with it than I was.

Paul Raven at Futurismic raises awareness about a new news-aggregation SF site called 42Blips. He notes with pleasure that a few literary links were on the front page. I note with displeasure that the front page now contains two links to something dreadful called Gossip Girl and another piece about celebrities at the Emmies. Good old viral marketers eh? where would we be without them?

Is It Just Me, Or Has The Independent Gone Downmarket?

2008-09-22T11:16:50+01:00

Is it just me or has The Independent really gone downmarket in the last year or so? I used to buy the paper every day religiously as I preferred its tone and coverage to The Guardian, The Times or The Telegraph. However, I now find that I hardly ever buy it at all and if I do buy a paper I go straight to the Independent.

I have a few separate issues with the paper.

Firstly, I think the columnists are boring and increasingly repetitive. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown only ever seems to write about identity issues surrounding being both Muslim AND British, Janet Street-Porter tends to deal mainly with the bleeding obvious in a really unpleasant tone, Steve Richards spent the months prior to Brown's accession to Number 10 so far up Brown's arse he could taste whitening tooth-paste and now that Brown's premiership is falling apart, he devotes himself to attacking the Labour rebels in quite a half-hearted manner. Bruce Anderson is what Jon Stewart would call a 'Partisan Hack' as he puts the boot into the government without wit or insight and then turns on his own party and tries to steer the debate. Nor is he above partisan trolling.

The problem is that these columnists are all, in effect, rubbish bloggers. They're not proper journalists and so they don't go out and investigate theories and stories, they just soak up the media and use news items to air their talking points. Frankly, if all you're going to do is comment then you should do so with real insight. The kind of insight that comes from being a political insider, a scholar, a politician or some kind of expert. Being a semi-retired journalist who pumps out the same stuff day after day just does not cut it anymore. The gulf in complexity between The Indie and The Graun is vast.

Secondly, The Independent's coverage is incredibly shallow. Not only is their arts section a complete joke, but their coverage of foreign news is lazy and patchy. For example, the US elections are a major political event with repercussions that will shape the globe for years to come but there's hardly any US election coverage in the Indie. The odd story here and there but compared to The Guardian's excellent coverage it is a joke and looks incredibly amateurish.

Ths is doubly disappointing as the reason why I started reading The Indie was that, during my PhD, their coverage of the War and the US political situation was without a doubt better than that of any of the other major paper. Especially as The Guardian's response to the War was to get sucked into the anti-colonialism vs. anti-fascism civil war that ripped through the remains of the British Left. By contrast, The Independent these days seems to devote itself almost entirely to utterly fruitless speculation and navel-gazing over the future of Brown's tenure as Prime Minister. There is so little to actually go on and so little insight to be had that it has reached the point where its comparable to the treatment of the Maddie case by 24 Hour News Channels.

Thirdly, the paper seems to have been completely taken over by its lifestyle section. The Indie always used to do these 10 Best lists but at the moment it seems to be the only thing it actually puts out. If you look at the list of most read articles, you'll see it's almost completely made up of 'articles' like '10 Best Lingerie Sets' or '10 Best Video Games'. Today, for example, there is a glossy magazine called Love and Sex featuring such ground-breaking journalism as 10 Best Ways for a Woman to Impress a Man and 10 Best Ways For a Man to Impress a Woman. It also includes this piece by Esther Walker, which simply has no place in a newspaper. Note also the heterosexism, no room for men to impress men or women to impress women.

I can't read The Independent anymore. I get the impression that their response to the decline of newspapers has been to fire all of the actual reporters and become a purely reactive publication that keeps hitting 'reload' on the AP website until something interesting to write about comes along. Still, at least it has stopped going on about needless waste whilst including bird-watching posters that invariably went in the bin.

You May Have Missed... Links 22/09/08

2008-09-22T09:53:07+01:00

Today I have to wait in all day. By three o'clock I shall be climbing the walls and gnawing on the door frame. Why should staying at home provoke such ire? evidently one of the local houses building sites (because nobody actually lives in Chelsea, they just buy the house, do it up and sell it on) has been angle-grinding since 8 this morning and they show no sign of stopping. I need to find some kind of means of causing pain via blue-tooth.

Michael K. Crowley at The House Next Door re-publishes an excellent piece about Se7en.

The BBC roll out its latest adaptation of Merlin. I saw an advert for this at the cinema and I actually thought it was a joke. So far reactions to it have been mixed but purely on the basis of the trailer I decided, without an instant's regret, that I would rather drink a bucket of tramp's piss than watch any of it.

Liz Henry at Feminist SF reviews David Louis Edelman's Infoquake. Ouch.

Cinefantastique are having an Alien day! There are reviews of a few of the films,a Q&A with Ridley Scott and a video interview with exec producer Ronald Shusett.

Birthday Over

2008-09-22T00:57:29+01:00

It was my Birthday on Sunday. I was, and indeed am, 32. It was a good birthday by my standards and thanks to all who sent me warm thoughts :-)

I am not that big on birthdays, or any socially mandated celebrate-able event; birthdays, weddings, Christmas, New Year's... you name it, I'm alienated by it. The part of me that will always be an angry, frustrated and unhappy 16 year-old sees it as a form of conformism. It is a totally unacceptable compromising of one's individuality to acknowledge social events that you are supposed to be happy about. I don't think I ever said that I had 'too many principles' to celebrate Xmas but it would not have been at all out of character for me between the ages of about 14 and 20.

By and large this has improved somewhat as I have 'grown the fuck up', but I still feel very uncomfortable being a member of a 'society' or 'community'. I am, psychologically speaking, a child of Thatcher in that I am happiest when I am with a bunch of individuals and I am at my most miserable when I am having to fit in. Seriously, there's a picture of me aged 15 and about to head off to my oldest brother's wedding and you would think that someone had just shot my dog.

For someone who would, deep down, be a lot happier if birthdays just went away, I think it was a good day. I got some nice presents, I had a very nice dinner and I spent much of the afternoon sorting loose change and uncovering, to my horror, that I had over £200 of it sitting in a cupboard. That's something worth celebrating!

Shayol's Pandora - I is in German!

2008-09-19T12:05:42+01:00

Gott im Himmel!

I have been translated into German!

Yesterday morning I received in the post a copy of the third issue of Pandora, a rather impressive German language periodical dealing with SF and Fantasy. If you sprechen sie the lingo you can buy a copy of it HERE from the Shayol website.

The zine is edited by Hannes Riffel and Jakob Schmidt and it contains short fiction as well as articles and my review of Peter Watts' Blindsight (translated by Sara Riffel)

Hats off to Hannes and Jakob as the zine itself is really fantastic to look at. It has great art as well as a clear, uncluttered and yet stylish lay-out and the content seems good too. I get the impression that they only do one issue a year but I'm very impressed with what I've seen. I don't think my work has ever looked better or been in more august company.

I wonder if this publication model would work in English?

You May Have Missed... Links 19/09/08

2008-09-19T10:17:20+01:00

Plans are being concocted and are starting to take interesting shapes. I'm going to be shaking up the way I work at some point in the next few weeks, re-examining the nature of my output as well as my online presence. I also have a great idea for my next Blasphemous Geometries column giving me a full month in which to think about and research the topic, so I'm looking forward to that.

Alvaro Zinos-Amarro reviews Damien Broderick's new non-fiction anthology Year Million for Strange Horizons and does a fine job of it.

John Self at Asylum reviews the new Richard Price novel Lush Life. It's not SF, but Price is one of the guys (along with George Pelecanos) who wrote for The Wire and as The Wire gets much love on this site, I thought I'd link to decent review of his latest work.

Matthew Belinkie at Overthinking It reports on something almost Lovecraftian in its hideousness... that's right! The Sex in the City woman is moving into YA! A new book shop opened near me recently taking the place of the gone-but-hardly-missed Pan Bookshop and not only is there no SF section but about a third of the shop is devoted to YA and Kids' books. Regardless of what you might think of it artistically, there's no denying that YA is a great big money pie upon which authors and publishers are gorging themselves, which is great news because crass commercialism that panders to the tastes of children is definitely my favourite kind of crass commercialism.

Andrew Osmond at the Daily Graun attends the screening of Osama Tezuka's anime shorts that is currently running at the Barbican.

Jason Sanford at The Fix reviews Strange Horizons' short fiction output for the month of August.

You May Have Missed... Links 18/09/08

2008-09-18T09:14:07+01:00

Apparently Lloyds TSB is going to take over HBOS thereby creating a mortgage giant that, on a similar scale to Fannie Me and Freddie Mac, will control close to a third of Britain's mortgages. This is only possible because the government are allowing them to by-pass competition laws. So, because of a lack of regulation, a bank that is too big to fail looks like it might fail and, by ignoring regulation, the government is creating a bank that is too big to save. Crisis of Capitalism anyone?

Niall Harrison at Torque Control looks at Justina Robson's short story "Legolas Does The Dishes" as featured in Postscripts 15. Personally, I find Robson to be completely unreadable. I've never finished anything of hers that I've started.

Karen Burnham at Spiral Galaxy Reviewing Laboratory writes about the July/August issue of Analog and doesn't seem overly impressed.

Theofantastique writes about Otherkin. I adore the otherkin as they're effectively religious people stripped of the fig leaf of social acceptability that comes with age and size of community. Much like Christians, the Otherkin pick up works of fiction and use them as the basis for systems of morality and identity.

Jason W. Ellis at Dynamic Subspace puts up a three part essay about the relationship between the beliefs of Philip K. Dick and those of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Part two is Here. Part three is Here.

EDIT : I forgot to add...

Stuart Evers at the Daily Graun's blogs somewhat grumpily points out that The Wire isn't that original because Ed McBain's 87th Precinct Novels invented the police procedural ages ago. Is that a backlash I can see off in the distance? gotta love the hype cycle.

BG 6 : The Many Roads - and Solitary Path - to Believable Science Fiction

2008-09-17T17:14:48+01:00

My Sixth Blasphemous Geometries Column has just gone up over at Futurismic.

It deals with what makes science fiction believable and it was inspired by my review of Ken Macleod's The Night Sessions, which is not unbelievable because it's scientifically implausible... it's unbelievable because it's nowhere near as smart as that kind of book needs to be.

You May Have Missed... Links 17/09/08

2008-09-17T10:00:34+01:00

Apologies for lack of recent updates. I am at the bottom of what I like to think of as my 'creative cycle' and while I am crawling back up towards optimum productivity, I am catching up on things I have already watched and read. Expect something from me this week though, if only a film review or two. On the plus side, I have collected a large list of links over the past day. Which is just as well as it's been affy quiet lately.

Steve Biodrowski reviews the pilot for the new J. J. Abrams series Fringe over at Cinefantastique. Is Abrams the most over-rated creative in Hollywood? it seems like everything he touches turns into over-hyped mediocrity.

The SFSite has updated. It includes a double review by Georges T. Dodds of Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy and Weese's Feminist Narrative and the Supernatural as well as a Paul Kincaid review of the Jonathan Strahan-edited Eclipse One anthology.

There's been quite a bit of discussion of the work of David Foster Wallace. In fact, it has even seeped out into the mainstream lit publications including a nice n+1 piece by Benjamin Kunkel.

Another interesting piece by Steve Biodrawski at Cinefantastique, this time it's a retrospective about the works of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director behind such films as Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children and... um... Alien: Resurrection.

Jo Walton at Tor.com reveals that she has read Greg Egan's Permutation City more than ten times and suggests that you should too. I don't think I've read any book ten times. I've maybe read Tibor Fischer's The Thought Gang four or five times but I've never done that thing of keeping books and constantly re-reading them.

The Vault of Horror reports on the up-coming Spike TV Scream Awards. Apparently The Dark Knight is a work of Fantasy while I Am Legend is SF. Nice to see that it's not just the Hugos that have horrific ideas about genre film.

You May Have Missed... Links 16/09/08

2008-09-16T09:04:34+01:00

The new issue of Fruitless Recursion is currently lumbering into view. Reviews are starting to pop into my inbox and I even heard encouraging noises regarding some art work I asked a friend to do. So many thanks to all of you that have submitted reviews and thanks also to the people who have works in the pipeline, your hard work is most appreciated :-)

Joe Sherry at Adventures in Reading chronicles the end of the Helix/William Sanders saga, which you will recall, provoked some anger and bitterness a few months ago. I tend to think that this type of thing is a reflection of the deep political divides in American political culture. Most genre people are quite liberal and as genre is a comparatively sheltered world it's easy to forget that not only is this liberalism not universal but frequently the gap between liberal and non-liberal is really quite astonishing at times.

Nader Elhefnawy at The Fix provides the second part of his epic "The End of Science Fiction" essay. I agree with it whole-heartedly even if I do allow myself a wry grin at the fact that some of the problems he discusses were also highlighted in an old SF Eye article with a very similar title. In fact, I think that the discussion should not so much be about whether or not SF is dead, but whatthe implications of this might be for the future of the people who are still involved in the scene.

Mark Thwaite at ReadySteadyBook reveals that mainstream litbloggers are being given free Sony Readers. If free ARCs are enough to make my principles turn and devour themselves, I dread to think what it would be like if I started receiving expensive technology through the post (especially expensive technology that I think is a complete waste of money).

Adam Roberts at Punkadiddle reviews Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace who passed away recently.

You May Have Missed... Links 15/09/08

2008-09-15T09:29:03+01:00

Aaaah... I went to see a proper horror film last night. Review forthcoming but I warmly recommend Eden Lake to anyone that likes their horror to be socially aware, provocative and really quite well made. The fact that the film's politics are somewhat dubious actually makes it a more enjoyable experience. It's very reminiscent of The Descent too and if anyone reading this hasn't seen that then for shame!

Theofantastique interviews Virginia Wexman, a critic who has commented on films such as Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. I agree with Thefantastique though that Polanski's The Ninth Gate is an under-appreciated film, due no doubt to the fact that its themes are less obvious than those of Rosemary's Baby (due in in no small part to it having received much less critical attention). In SF criticism, this can be called the Alien/Neuromancer/Matrix effect.

William Mingin at Strange Horizons reviews the Lou Anders' edited short fiction anthology Sideways in Crime. It's an anthology of crime stories set in alternate universes. That's very specific.

These redubbed He-man episodes made me laugh. This piece of animation from the Vancouver Film School impressed me too.

James Walsh at The Indie wades into the 'Short Attention Span' debate. What struck me whilst reading the piece was that perhaps people are looking at this the wrong way round. I skim a lot of the things I read but this is not because I'm distracted or failing to concentrate, if anything I'm concentrating more intently than when I simply read, instead I find that I'm wanting something out of a text and the text is not giving it to me and so I start to sift the information on the page at my rate rather than the author's. The example of readers switching from article to article incontinently fits perfectly with this pattern; if you're looking for a particular idea or argument or fact, why read whole articles when you can switch between numerous ones in search of what you're looking for? so I think the issue isn't one of short attention spans, it's one of more demanding readers.

REVIEW - The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (2008)

2008-09-12T15:13:28+01:00

Strange Horizons has my review of The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway.

I think Harkaway has a frightening amount of potential. I think that as a prose writer he's far better than we're used to in the world of SF. However, I also think that there is clear room for the kind of improvement that comes with experience as I think that many of the mistakes Harkaway makes (manipulative characterisation, awkward ending) are due primarily to a lack of confidence. Expect his second book to be incredible.

Some of the discussion about the book has dealt with the Englishness of his writing style and an interesting addendum to that is the fact that after reading it, my GF thought it was set in the UK.

You May Have Missed... Links 12/09/08

2008-09-12T14:49:29+01:00

I watched Conan the Barbarian last night for the first time in about a decade. It's a bloody fantastic film. You have to love a film in which religions are invariably crooked forms of mind control and even if there is a grain of truth to them they're invariably fronts for hideously Other and utterly unsympathetic creatures from beyond. If there's one thing I wish would return from the days of the pulps it's the utter bleakness of the world-view.

Paul Kincaid at Bookslut talks about building an SF Canon (No... not a laser canon). Personally, not being from a lit background, I've never really seen the point of a canon. Kincaid's idea for a rolling canon goes some way to deal with my concerns but I suspect that SF lacks a set of shared values that would allow the creation of a canon. For example, I suspect that a large percentage of SF fans would want Ender's Game on any list of greatest books, and that would instantly transform the whole thing into a farce.

Marc Bousquet at The Valve talks about something called Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which sounds rather a lot like me. Give me a hierarchy I'll react against it, give me an institution and I'll kick at it.

Abigail Nussbaum at Asking the Wrong Questions writes about Ian McDonald's River of Gods and Brasyl. I completely agree that Brasyl feels a lot more like a fictionalised depiction of Brasil than River of Gods did of India, I even drew attention to the fakeness of Brasyl in my review of it. However, where Abigail and I disagree is that I don't think that Brasyl is intended to be a continuation of the methodologies of River of Gods. I actually think that the fakeness is intentional and that the book is stronger for it.

Joe Sherry at Adventures in Reading thinks about the ethics of reviewing following some of the comments I made a little while ago. I'm reminded of Cameron Crowe's film Almost Famous in which he makes it clear that being a fan and being a critic are frequently mutually exclusive. But having said that, his post is exactly why I made the comments I did. I think it's important for the good of online reviewing that people reexamine their integrity and standards.

Andrew Wheeler does his Victor Meldrew act at The Antick Musings but this time directs it at io9 over their coverage of the new Harper Collins imprint Angry Robot.

A Pledge on Short Fiction

2008-09-11T17:23:27+01:00

It's been a while since I last read a work of SF that I really enjoyed. Egan's Incandescence had flashes of brilliance obscured by a disastrous central theme and Harkaway's The Gone-Away World has prose to die for but is a clear 200 pages too long.

As you can probably tell from reviews like this, my frustration is starting to show as book after book feels stunted and inadequate. I recently tried changing tack by taking on Morgan's The Steel Remains but the result was a reaction that combined THIS with THIS.

I've decided to switch to short fiction for a while. Every time I read short fiction I say that I should read more of it and so I intend to do so and I think that making it an avenue for my critical output will encourage me to follow up on that pledge. It's also getting a bit dull putting the boot into established authors who should be doing better. Hopefully by reviewing short fiction I shall get the chance to discover some new authors who are more deserving of critical coverage.

I have one more novel-length review pledged and but other than that, you will not see me review another SF novel before the new year. There may be decent books that appear between now and then but they will have to wait.

So Sayeth Jonathan

Christmas for Republicans?

2008-09-11T12:03:48+01:00

Last election, the Republicans famously went on and on about 9/11 and how only they could save America from the terrorists (despite the fact that 9/11 happened on their watch and the fact that they spent billions bombing the shit out of Afghanistan with little to show for it). I wonder whether the 'issue free zone' will extend to terrorism or will the power of nightmares again prove to be a gift in the quest to return the Republicans to the Whitehouse?

(With apologies to Clement Clarke Moore)

Tis September 11 and all through the house,
Not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse.
The banners are hung on the cave walls with care,
In the hope that bin Laden soon will be here.

The Children are nestled with guns and C4,
With visions of houris; some 30 or more!
Omar with his beard, and I with my daughter,
Have settled our souls for a year's worth of slaughter.

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window, I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,
Gave the luster of mid-day to objects below.
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
A Toyota pick-up... The Master of Fear!

A beard of snow white and a new RPG
I knew in a moment that it must be he.
He spoke of McCain victory, vital to our plan,
No terrorist Kingpin, he is but a man.

"Now Sarah! Now Johnny! All Republican!
On Tax cuts! On Jesus! On Halliburton!
Destroy those Democrats! Push them to the wall!
If they realise I'm made up, our regimes will fall!"

You May Have Missed... Links 11/09/08

2008-09-11T11:06:47+01:00

After a week of chaos, my flat has returned to a state of Tidyness-Usefulness equilibrium. I can have the place tidy and the girlfriend can have access to her clothes and things. Compromises are what relationships are based on. I gave up on making her sleep in the storage space in the basement pretty quickly. I'm a reasonable person that way. This cohabitation thing would not have been possible without the wholesale rejection of materialism by both parties.

Lauren Wissot continues the journey of self-discovery as she tries to find her voice as a film critic over at The House Next Door. Personally, I think Roger Ebert's film reviews would be far more interesting if he dropped in annecdotes about having sex with body-builders.

Ron at Galleycat talks about the re-issuing of books with DVD extra-type material. Rudy Rucker did this with Postsingular by making his notes available to download and Gaiman's Anansi Boys had some stuff at the back of it too. I was thinking about this after reading Martin Lewis' excellent Fruitless Recursion review of Roz Kaveney's book on SF film and I think the problem is that while film has a 'cult of the author' thing going on, books have moved past it. So Rudy Rucker making his thought processes publically available effectively adds nothing to my understanding of the book. Also the trend strikes me as a way of selling old titles at inflated prices to people who bought them the first time around. If you're going to do it, do it the way Rucker and Egan do it.

Fabio Fernandes reviews an oldy but goody at The Fix, it's Kelly Link's Magic For Beginners. I think this might well form the basis for quite an interesting feature... a series of linked reviews of great collections of same-author shoft fiction.

Mlawski at Overthinkingit has a lok at Pan's Labyrinth, tries to work out why it doesn't quite work and suggests ways of fixing it.

Lydia Lunch picks a fight with God and the American Right over at 3:AM Magazine.

Does My Arse Look Fascistic in This?

2008-09-10T12:04:57+01:00

[Pic From Here]

Yesterday I made some comments about the Republican National Convention and I was greeted this morning with a splendid rant from Robert Bee from New Jersey (whose SF criticism has been published in many places including IROSF and NYRSF) :

You are truly an idiot, Jonathan. McCain and Palin did not say the "world's problem was homosexuals getting married." That fact that smug liberals like yourself simplify the views of people who disagree with you is one of the things that makes you liberals such a despicable group of people. Furthermore, the real fascists are liberals like yourself who accuse anyone who disagrees with a pc position of being a fascist. If you're typical of liberals, then I have no respect for left-wing positions, and I sincerely hope you liberals lose the next few elections, and don't have a chance to run anything for, say, thirty years.

I particularly enjoyed the use of quotation marks around "world's problem was homosexuals getting married" as if to make it look like I actually said those words. Firstly, it's barely literate (there should be an 'only' or 'greatest' in there somewhere) and secondly it beautifully illustrates the misdirection and dishonesty coming out of US conservatism at the moment.

America and much of the rest of the world are facing a global recession, the Americans economy lost 650,000 jobs last year (while needing 150,000 more jobs a month to keep up with population expansion) and what gets the biggest cheers at the RNC? No to abortion! No to gay marriage! Yes to the values of small towns despite the fact that our party's economic policies have made life harder and harder for people living in those towns, the fact that many millions of Americans neither grew up in small towns nor live in small towns and the fact that small towns invariably represent a wide array of different opinions and ways of seeing the world!

If the convention speeches were an articulation of what the McCain campaign sees as the most pressing issues facing America then one thing is clear, for the Republicans, this election is not about issues.

At this point, the Conservative movement is a Zombie, a shambling husk without brain or thought. The foreign policies of the Neoconservatives have not only failed to unite the country (as predicted by Leo Strauss) but they've also made the world a far more dangerous place than it once was. Meanwhile the domestic policies of the traditional Conservatives have resulted in an economic climate that has just brought about one of the largest nationalisations in history. Even culturally, the Conservative movement has utterly failed as women across America continue having abortions and gay people (while still second class citizens) enjoy levels of social acceptance and visibility that would have been impossible when the modern Conservative movement took power 30-odd years ago.

So they are now reliant upon banging a drum for causes that energise the grass roots and which get discussed by a tame, toothless and un-critical media (Vonnegut used to say that TV was like the lead pipes that drove the Romans mad, I disagree it's just 24 Hour News Channels). They appeal to the worst in people's natures; the selfishness, the small-mindedness, the vindictive, the ignorant, the lazy, the hate-filled.

I called Palin's speech fascistic because it was fascistic. It drew on entirely fictitious nationalistic conceptions of the real America being that in small towns, it lambasted the enemy within thereby creating scapegoats and it did all of this under the pretence of American exceptionalism so as to obscure the real issues and the real problems facing the country. It's clear cut if you ask me, though I appreciate the attempt to invoke "political correctness" (which is always a sign of base stupidity) and to say that actually it's the people criticising the nationalistic, scape-goat summoning authoritarians who are the real fascists. I'd laugh if I didn't know that such arguments weren't common-place in American politics at the moment.

You May Have Missed... Links 10/09/08

2008-09-10T09:25:22+01:00

I now have shelves in my kitchen! They look quite nice too and serve to free up the work surfaces as shelves tend to do. There was a modicum of drilling involved. Some hammering and some measuring. I was not responsible for any of it... I was looking at a clothes catalogue. Take THAT gender roles!

Michael Dirda in the Washington Post reviews Stephenson's Anathema. This was about the 17th thing I read about Anathema yesterday. Is it just me or is it getting hypey in here? [Thanks Tom]

Cheryl Morgan looks at Lauren McLaughlin's Cycler, a YA tale of gender swapping, over at Cheryl's Musings. Seems like a rather good idea for a book. Particularly one aimed at that age group.

Dustin Kurtz at Strange Horizons reviews Walter Jon Williams' Implied Spaced. This was also quite a hyped little book but the reviews are by and large mixed. Kurtz seemed to enjoy it though.

Lauren Wissot at Behind the Green Door has an interesting piece about the role of a critic's world-view and history in what they write and being aware of those influences. What's also interesting about the post is that it's someone on the outside of the straight mainstream looking in and realising that she has preconceptions.