We think we know what women like to read - we claim it is something called "CHICK LIT". So what do deniers/birthers/spacers - call 'em what you will - read ?
Can the jokes about them being unable to read, or only reading with their fingers while breathing through their mouths as the knuckles of their other hand grazes the ground , ape-style.
These guys do read - a lot. A lot more than their younger critics probably do.
I think we will find that they read 'Hard SF' and its close cousins - with authors like Robert Heinlein, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton high in their Pantheon of author-prophets.
It isn't polite today to claim that anyone other than some long dead foreign Nazis believes in "The Triumph of the human Will" - so we have had to re-brand it as "the ultimate triumph of the human spirit" , for these guys and their boy-fans.
Nice word 'spirit' : particularly for a bunch of perpetual teenage boys who claim to be either religious and to despise atheists or to be atheists who despise the religious.
Both types of 'hardcore' SFers are content to wallow in a form of softcore quasi-spirtuality, totally devoid of any hardcore of orthodoxy and doctrine.
If high American literature - from Hawthorne onward was a critic of Americanism, this genre SF ( along with all manner of 'adventure' books: westerns,spy and war) is 100% patriotic American.
Roth and his ilk, they say, is read and written by liberal Democrats: we are read and written by conservative (ie Liberal)/libertarian Republicans.
DENIER LIT : filling the popular genre bins of what is left of your local bookstores: pick one or ten up today......
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
There are lots of science fiction that doesn't mindlessly promote space imperialism - what about margaret atwood for example ?
ReplyDeleteMargaret Atwood was right the first time - SF should be limited to what is called hard core SF - the rest is better called speculative fiction since it diametrically opposed hard core SF.
ReplyDeleteHard core SF is DENIER LIT : the mein kampf of those who would destroy and deplele the Earth and then move on to Mars as the new Earth 1.0% .
We won't allow pro-criminal books to be included in among pro-detective books would we ?
Why then do that, in effect, with SF versus speculative fiction?