Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny you talk about the Starship Enterprise... Star Trek is super political lol
And it stinks when they go that way. TOS went there a little. STD goes there all day.
They've been super political since season 1??
How I swapped my ivory tower for the world of science fiction
31–40 of 85 posts
Re: How I swapped my ivory tower for the world of science fiction
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
This person has been demoralized, and unknowingly wishes to inflict that fate upon everyone they come into contact with. The frenetic obsession with "capitalism" and the hopelessness of the future is simply the claw of the crab, pulling its victims back down into the bucket.
Funny you say that when capitalism has no morals beyond profit. Just have a look on what Boeing it's doing.
> capitalism has no morals beyond profit.
Liberalism does, to the extent the goal is human flourishing. Denigrating Capitalism for not being about morals makes as much sense as denigrating a tractor for not being about morals. Capitalism is merely what is employed as a tool (in part, as we used mixed-market economy) for the economic branch of our system.
Re: How I swapped my ivory tower for the world of science fiction
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny you say that when capitalism has no morals beyond profit. Just have a look on what Boeing it's doing.
Boeing's bad decisions were not based on shareholder votes, but rather a cabal of bad actors. You could have this happen in any economic system. In fact, Boeing planes, even with all the cheating, are statistically safer than those produced by the former USSR.
I would hope that today's planes are safer than 40 years ago!
Re: How I swapped my ivory tower for the world of science fiction
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
For good or not capitalism is efficient at incentivizing people to exploit resources. It's easy to project that into guessing that at least our early forays to heavenly bodies will be propelled by that impulse. It's probably the reason that earthly new world cultures are more capitalistic than the old world's. Some ideologies promote exploration more than others. You don't have to like it to predict it.
The point of sci-fi is to lay off the most obvious and current convictions and impulses and to imagine other possibilities.
The point is whatever we want it to be. Pulp adventurism and space exploits was as popular as anything else. Even the ideological books are not necessarily tantamount to "space communism" (see: Neal Stephenson).
Re: How I swapped my ivory tower for the world of science fiction
#35Does it bother anyone else that the picture featuring the author shows a blackboard containing seemingly unrelated equations just to make it look "this-is-high-brow-complex-mathy-stuff-that-I-am-an-expert-in"? Why would someone who wants to be taken seriously as a scientist pose in front of something like that?
> Why would someone who wants to be taken seriously as a scientist pose in front of something like that?
She was probably asked to, knew that the photographer probably has a much better idea of what the publication wanted than she did, and so did what was asked.
She would not have worried about it making it hard to take her seriously because she almost certainly knows that everyone who she needs to have take her seriously has seen hundreds of similar articles with their accompanying similar photos and know how that works. Many have probably themselves been in "whiteboard of equations" shots or the also popular "in front of overstuffed bookshelf" shots.
Re: How I swapped my ivory tower for the world of science fiction
#36Re: How I swapped my ivory tower for the world of science fiction
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny you talk about the Starship Enterprise... Star Trek is super political lol
And it stinks when they go that way. TOS went there a little. STD goes there all day.
TOS went way further than you give it credit for. Different things were controversial and "of-the-moment" when the original aired.
Re: How I swapped my ivory tower for the world of science fiction
#38What is this article? She just released a book, but it's a non-fiction popular science book. I assumed this was about a lifelong academic switching careers to become a full-time science fiction writer, but all I know based on this article is that she's been teaching at community college for about two years, and has written exactly one science fiction short story.
I was expecting it to be someone like Vernor Vinge and was excited to learn about a new author I could read, but instead we got some lazy box ticking.
Re: How I swapped my ivory tower for the world of science fiction
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny you say that when capitalism has no morals beyond profit. Just have a look on what Boeing it's doing.
Boeing's bad decisions were not based on shareholder votes, but rather a cabal of bad actors. You could have this happen in any economic system. In fact, Boeing planes, even with all the cheating, are statistically safer than those produced by the former USSR.
Who cares about the USSR, a system who basically turned into Soviet (council) based modern era overnight from feudalism without stepping inside Enlightenment.
Of course, it didn't end well.
I'm talking about America, with a so-called democracy far older than the USSR. Regulations? New Deal? Wisdom over centuries? What's that? That doesn't make happy my shareholders, so forget that, right?
Said this, Boeing it's a disaster.
Re: How I swapped my ivory tower for the world of science fiction
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of sci-fi is to lay off the most obvious and current convictions and impulses and to imagine other possibilities.
The point is whatever we want it to be. Pulp adventurism and space exploits was as popular as anything else. Even the ideological books are not necessarily tantamount to "space communism" (see: Neal Stephenson).
Neal Stephenson depicted anti-state turbocapitalism as Mafia corpostates in "Snow Crash". Which is what actually would happen if no one regulated business.