Date: Mon, 15 Jun 1998 03:26:05 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: mellon@pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <199806150326.UAA09328@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19980614051600.62407@techunix.technion.ac.il> from "Anatoly Vorobey" at Jun 14, 98 05:16:00 am
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> It supported and enhanced my interest in science; it made me curious
> about computers; it inspired my daydreaming.
Then it served its purpose... personally, I remember nearly every word
I read until puberty, when my storage became non-eidetic. Luckily, I
had several thousan books under my belt by then, and there are still
with me. I can't believe no one has mentioned Dr. Paul Myron Anthony
Linebarger's "Instrumentality of Mankind" under the Nom de plume of
"Cordwainer Smith". Who can forget his novel of science under a
totalitarian regime ("No, No, Not Rogov!")? It is socially relevent
even today, especially in light of Stallmanism.
> But there comes a time when one can look back and reassess the
> books and genre he grew up with. And when I did that, I saw that
> few books really stayed with me, enriched me, taught me something
> besides another idea of a null-space.
Looking back at the majority of 50's science fiction, when it was
really "Westerns recast in space" (ie: Dard Nordis in Andre Norton's
"The Stars are Ours!" is a protypical "cowboy"), I can see how you
would come to that conclusion -- if that's all you ever read. I
guiltily admit to having a very large collection of Tor "double books";
stories such as "The Rights of Ohe" and "Spacial Delivery" are
clearly nothing more than space opera.
> The favourite authors and
> favourite books remain with me, but they are so rare in the sea
> of funky aliens and badly thought-out future societies...
You are reading the wrong books. Really. There is an entire sub-genre
called "hard science science fiction"; it is written by outstanding
scientists, sometimes leaders in tehir field, like Robert L. Forward.
> But above all, I wonder: why only SF, or mostly SF? Why is Ovid
> to be confined to a readership of classics departments in
> universities? Why Shakespeare is something you learn at school
> and then forget, or, at best, a source of worn-out quotes?
Or Omar Khayyam's "Rubaiyat", oft-misquoted as Shakespeare?
The problem is social relevence. SF is socially relevent; Shakespeare
less so. Part of this can be blamed on English Majors, who appear to
have little social utility other than the propagation of more English
Majors, and the grading of coursework based on form (eg: spelling and
punctuation) rather than content.
Would you also dismiss Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" as not a
classic because it is also SF? Jules Verne's "20,000 leagues unders
the sea"? Carel Kapek's play "R.U.R.", from which we derive the word
"Robot"?
> >From a literary point of view, SF looks like an ignorant child. The
> art of writing prose has been refined in Europe during the last
> seven centuries.
You mean it has stultified into "form is everything", don't you?
> It's not easy, writing good prose; writers
> gradually learned to carefully weave the plot line, to breathe
> life into their characters, to avoid cliches and dead metaphors,
> to shift narrative voices, to break and maintain unity of time,
> place and action, to let their words flow or stumble as they
> wished; to break the novel into a surrealistic chaos and resurrect
> it in a Joycean synthesis. SF, as a genre, remains provincial and
> ignorant in regard to this tradition of refining art of prose.
Now I *know* you haven't read good SF; or you are yanking my chain:
"Kid Afrika came crusing into Dog Solitude on the last day in
November, his vintage Dodge chauffeured by a whitle girl named
Cherry ChesterField.
Slick Henry and Little Bird were breaking down the buzzsaw
that formed the Judge's left hand when Kid's Dodge came into
view, its patched apron bag throwing up brown fantails of the rusty
water that pooled on the Solitude's uneven plain of compacted steel."
"Repent, Harleqin!" said the Ticktockman.
"Get stuffed".
...
I could type quotes that contradict your premise all night.
> SF authors, by and large, don't write well, just as cheap romance novels
> aren't written well.
You must be thinking of early work, unknowns, or people like
"Frankowski" -- hacks on a par with Stephan King.
> No SF novel I am familiar with begins
> as beautifully as Nabokov's Lolita: "Lolita, light of my life, fire
> of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking
> a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the
> teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." But one friend of mine doesn't understand my
> fascination with this passage; he sees nothing but a few symbols and
> allegories in it. He expects unusual wonders and novel technologies
> in a book; he lacks the taste that can only be built up by
> reading lots of good prose.
"That golden shape on the golden steps shook and fluttered
like a bird gone mad--like a bird imbued with an intellect
and a soul, and, nevertheless, driven mad by ecstasies and
terrors beyond human understanding--ecstasies drawn momentarily
down into reality by the consumption of su[perlative art. A
thousand worlds watched."
"Castor was halfway across the paddy, part of the long line
of farm workers, when he stepped on the dead man's head. He
was not thinking about dead men. He wasn't really thinking
about poking the rice seedlings into the muck, either, or
about the warm rain dripping on his bent shoulders or about
the ache in his back; he was thinking about Maria and her
problem and about going for a swim and about whether it was
possible that the people at the observatory would let him
apply for a job there and mostly about what he and Maria
would do in bed that night, and then all of the sudden, there
it was. He didn't know it was a dead man's head at first.
He couldn't see it, though the water was only centimeters
deep, because the sowers had stirred up the bottom mud. His
foot told him it was solid, and heavy, and didn't belong
there. "Tourists," he muttered to old Sarah, next to him in
line. "They throw their garbage anywhere they like!""
"Omphalos dominates Moscow, Green Idaho. It glows pale silver
and gold like a fancy watch waiting to be stolen. A tetrahedron
four hundred feet high, with two vertical faces and a triangular
base, it is the biggest thing in town, more ostentatious than
the nearby Mormon temple, though not so painfully white and
spiky. The leading edge points at the heart of Moscow like a
woodsman's wedge. The vertical fases descen, blind and
windowless, to sink seventy feet below ground. The single
sloping face is gently corrugated like a dazzling ivory
washboard for the leaden sky."
"It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a
small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn't so much
wilderness around you couldn't see the town. But on the other
hand there wasn't so much town you couldn't see and touch and
smell the wilderness. The town was full of trees. And dry
grass and dead flowers now that autumn was here. And full of
fences to walk on and sidewalks to skate on and a large ravine
to tumble in and yell across. And the town was full of...
Boys.
And it was the afternoon of Halloween.
And all the houses shut against a cold wind.
And the town full of cold sunlight.
But suddenly, the day was gone.
Night came out from under each tree and spread."
Again, I could quote all night... though I'd probably have to dig down
to match Vladimir Nabokov's pedophilia, since I have few books which
broach the subject (other than "Lolita" itself, of course, but that's not\SF).
> I am far from condemning the genre. Every genre has its right to live.
> But to read only SF, or even mostly SF, is in my opinion to miss
> the exquisite beauty of great literature that is much more subtle,
> beautiful, passionate and thrilling than all the spaceships and
> subspaces of the multiverse.
But by the same token, pointing at Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte Darthur"
or Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" as fine literature merely
because everyone else does, and "eruditely" shunning SF as "mostly
doggerel" is akin to "Otto" in "A fish Called Wanda" claiming intelligence
because "Apes don't read philosophy". As "Wanda" informed him, "Yes they
do, Otto, they just don't understand it!".
I'm not necessarily putting you in this category, but it's common for
non-readers to claim "SF is trash" without them first taking a representative
sample.
> [a somewhat eclectic list of non-SF writers skipped; I must admit
> I don't know who Guy Kawasaki is, and my knowledge of Japanese
> authors is limited to Akutagava Ryunoske in prose and many haiku
> authors in verse]
Author of "The Macintosh way" and of "Selling the Dream". A former
executive at Apple, Computer, currently on sabbataical, but not expected
to return since the reinvention of Steve Jobs. 8-). He's a well known
Western marketing guru.
[ ... more praise of Lem, which I do not disagree with, so won't comment ... ]
> of Lem's thought (quite well-known Hofstadter and Dennett's anthology
> "The Mind's I" of '81 dealing with similar range of problems is
> unaware of "Summa technologiae" and some of the articles and
> commentaries in it look amazingly childish compared to that work of the
> 50ies).
Here you aren't crediting Hofstadter (or for that matter, Godel).
> And what is read by Lem when Lem is read? Most computer scientists or
> SF lovers who read Lem are familiar only with "Cyberiad", sometimes
> the "Diaries of Ijon Tichy", rarely with anything else. These are
> very good, and very funny works, but they are *old*, they have
> been written in 50ies and 60ies, and since then Lem has been writing
> amazingly smart and beatiful SF for more than 30 years. "Solaris",
> "Fiasco", "Investigation"... many more novels and stories, essays and
> novelettes which together comprise some of the best SF ever written andmost
> of which remain virtually unknown to American readers. I own a 14-volumed
> set of Lem's works translated into Russian, and these are selected, not
> complete works. I suppose that a half of these works were
> even never translated into English.
Here I think you are unfair to use "Most" here, at least without a survey
to point to. I have a full collection of the Lem English translations:
Imaginary Magnitude, The Chain of Chance, The Cyberiad,
Tales of Pirx the Pilot, More Tales of Pirx the Pilot,
Memoiurs of a Space Traveller, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub,
The Futurological Congress, The Investigation, The Invincible,
His Master's Voice, A Perfect Vacuum, Solaris, The Star Diaries,
Return From the Stars, Mortal Engines, Eden, Fiasco, The
Hospital of the Transfiguration, Microworlds, One Human Minute.
And I have forced many computer scientists to read them. 8-).
I'm even aware of Lem trivia, such as the theme to the TV series "Cosmos"
(by Isao Tomita, on of my favorite synthesizer artists) was inspired by
a viewing of the Russian Since fiction movie "Solaris", based on Lem's
book "Solaris". I even have the movie "Solaris", in Russian, with
English subtitles (sorry; I don't do Slavic languages yet). I have to
say the tunnel scene rivals the 2001 time-to-orbit scene for "scenes
which are too long even for a otherwise very good movie".
Terry Lambert
terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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