I recommend this recent fanfic sequel to "The Lottery," "Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death." It purports to be a New Yorker article by Ian Chotiner, who is famous for his in-depth and sometimes very uncomfortable interviews (for the interviewee) of public figures. And, in this case, the Lottery has continued into the present day, the interviewee is a resident of the small town, and Chotiner grills him on the town's strange ritual
If you're read a Chotiner interview of three, it's very well done.
I'm thinking of writing a story about the people who refuse to participate in a town's ritual of pelting a random citizen with eggs. I'm going to call it "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelets."
"Look, Bobbie Lou, there's no harm. No one's done died of salmonella yet."
There was: The Demolished Man, which is all about telepathy. Straczynski pretty much lifted the entire structure of the Psi Cops from The Demolished Man. Indeed, every fictional portrayal of telepathy since 1953, from the X-Men to B5 to StarCraft owes a debt to Bester.
Which is an ambivalent legacy, because while I love Bester's writing style, I'm not a fan of the prevalence of telepathy in science fiction. (Although that was pushed largely by John W. Campbell, who was a believer.)
At one point, back in the seventies, Brian DePalma was going to direct a movie version, as a thematic follow-up to Carrie and The Fury. I used to have a paperback edition of the novel that proudly proclaimed on the cover: "Soon to be a Major Motion Picture from Brian DePalma."
I'm still waiting . . . .
Thanks for the recommendations.
I am almost done reading through Jeeves Stories from StandardEBooks. It compiles all of the Jeeves short stories up to Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit. I have already picked up Very Good, Jeeves to finish off this collection. Basically, I have read My Man, Jeeves; The Inimitable Jeeves; Carry On, Jeeves; and the beginning of Very Good, Jeeves. I highly recommend these stories. They have always cheered me up at lunch time at work.
Unfortunately, my library doesn't carry Thank You, Jeeves, so I set a price watch with ereaderiq.
And I'm at the last stretch of Parable of the Sower. It's well written, but it's down right depressing compared the Jeeves stuff.
Adding Angel Down to my holds list tonight. Library says at least 6 months, so maybe I can read it over the Christmas Holiday.
I am almost done reading through Jeeves Stories from StandardEBooks. It compiles all of the Jeeves short stories up to Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit. I have already picked up Very Good, Jeeves to finish off this collection. Basically, I have read My Man, Jeeves; The Inimitable Jeeves; Carry On, Jeeves; and the beginning of Very Good, Jeeves. I highly recommend these stories. They have always cheered me up at lunch time at work.
Unfortunately, my library doesn't carry Thank You, Jeeves, so I set a price watch with ereaderiq.
And I'm at the last stretch of Parable of the Sower. It's well written, but it's down right depressing compared the Jeeves stuff.
Adding Angel Down to my holds list tonight. Library says at least 6 months, so maybe I can read it over the Christmas Holiday.
As others have pointed out, Bester’s The Demolished Man was the telepath novel. And I’m glad I’m old enough to have read The Stars My Destination when it was newer than Star Wars is now.
The idea that PKD wrote a lot of his work under the influence of psychedelic drugs seems to have come from Harlan Ellison’s introduction to “Faith of Our Fathers” in Dangerous Visions. Dick was reportedly not amused. But if you want to read Dick on drugs (that is, writing on the subject of drugs), read A Scanner Darkly. And if you want to read a mind gradually deteriorating, due to amphetamine abuse, mental illness, and revelations from God and alien computers, read the five volumes of his Selected Letters.
Yeah, JMS said so, as I recall.
There’s never an oh my god eyeroll emoji when you need one. (I know, there probably is.)
Yeah, I remember when JMS was on Compuserve hyping B5 before it aired, talking about it as the most scientifically accurate space opera ever (he probably didn’t call it a space opera). I asked, okay, why telepaths? He said, lots of great SF writers used telepathy. I don’t recall if I pointed out that he’d moved the goalposts with that reply, but he was cranky about it. As much as I loved a lot of B5, JMS could be as full of shinola as everyone he criticized.
The only decent science in B5 was the use of rotation for gravity and the realistic physics in the way the Starfury fighters maneuvered in space. And maybe using plasma handguns instead of energy beams. Everything else was just standard fanciful sci-fi tropes -- humanoid aliens, hyperspace with made-up rules, psi powers that do whatever the story requires, etc. And even more absurd stuff like the show's approach to "life energy" as some finite reservoir that determines a person's life expectancy, so that any disease can be cured just by topping someone up with a transfer of someone else's life energy. (In Keith DeCandido's Reactor reviews, he refers to the life-transfer machine as the Great Hit Point Redistributor.)
I'm not sure if JMS was knowingly making false claims about the science. I suspect it was just a case of believing the science was good because he didn't know enough about science to know how bad it was.
As I recall, he wanted to differentiate B5 from the fanciful SF of Star Trek… while doing pretty much all the same things, aside from Star Trek’s many alien/human hybrids.
Which is weird, because at the time, Star Trek was the least fanciful thing in SFTV. It was practically the only show that used scientific consultants and attempted to be moderately plausible, aside from the poetic license required by storytelling needs and budgetary restrictions. Just knowing what the word "galaxy" meant and that you couldn't make interstellar journeys with conventional rockets (or a drifting Moon) put Star Trek far ahead of its competition in terms of credibility. The only other remotely credible American SFTV show I can think of from that era was the short-lived 1988 series Probe, co-created by Isaac Asimov, about an eccentric genius scientist solving scientific mysteries. So it's weird that he'd single out the show with the least fanciful science, comparatively, as his example of fanciful SF. It seems more like going after the top gunslinger to try to make one's name.
I mean, certainly it would've been possible to do a much more plausible show than ST, as we've seen with things like The Expanse. But man, B5 wasn't it.
Might just have been a marketing kind of thing, presenting B5 as not just a Star Trek knockoff... though I originally heard of B5 before "The Gathering" aired because JMS was a regular poster in Compuserve's trek forum.
I was amazed to discover that our local library system had a single copy, which was listed as "Available."
I requested it immediately. With any luck, it will show up at our downtown branch by next week at the latest.
Apparently, the entire 304-page book is one long sentence!
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I watched the A Scanner Darkly movie with Johnny Depp, RDJ, Winona Ryder, and Woody Harrleson a while it, it was good.
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