As the gods of the International Studies Association have seen fit to place my panel at 8:15 on a Saturday morning, I decided to advertise my talk in the blogosphere in hopes of drumming up some attendees. Below please see the teaser trailer for my working paper this...
The Chinese state media could perhaps be forgiven for mistaking fictional Battlestar Galactica blueprints for future US fleet schematics this week, given this. This incident has me thinking about...
Neill Blomkamp's "Elysium" packs a punch for an action sci-fi film even if its punches don't land. So yeah ... Jodie Foster doesn't give her best performance and the other roles for women in the...
In all the media frenzy over “killer robots,” Terminator imagery comes up a lot. So do references to Battlestar Galactica. So does a specific scene from Robocop, soon to be remade to resonate with...
Yesterday the world lost one of its great contemporary literary lights. Iain M. Banks, named "one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945" by The Times in 2008, died of gall bladder cancer that had only been diagnosed this February. He finished his last novel -- ironically, it's a story about the final weeks of a man dying of cancer -- very recently, and it's due to be published before the end of the month. From all reports, he passed peacefully, having spent as much of his last months as possible spending time with his wife and close friends. Banks was accomplished as an author of...
Because "53 reasons" is just plain stupid, and increments of five are basically listicles, I provide three. 1. We are heading straight for maximum Star Wars saturation. Despite its ham-handed didacticism, Star Trek's values are far preferable to those of Star Wars. We cannot allow aristocratic fantasy to bury republican virtue. 2. JJ Abrams is a pretty good action director, but he doesn't seem to understand the intellectual possibilities of science fiction. At its best, Star Trek has been one of the few non-cable programs to explore those possibilities. And it has almost invariably done so...
This post exists to collect all the links from our Forum on Iain M. Banks' The Hydrogen Sonata into one coherent place: Chris Brown: A Triumphant Return to Form | Gerard van der Ree: Learning from Utopia | Iver B. Neumann: Religion and the Sublime | Patrick Thaddeus Jackson: Actors on the Sci-Fi Stage | Dan Nexon: To Sim, Perchance to Dream | and Iain M. Banks' reply Let me also admit just how geeked I am to have been able to put this whole thing together. Banks is perhaps my favorite currently-working sci-fi author, and it has been a...
Iain M. Banks reacts to the symposium on his book, The Hydrogen Sonata.
The Culture novels have long been concerned with the interplay of simulation, simulacrum, religion, and materialism.
So the Culture appears to both want to pursue this knowledge for the sheer joy of knowing, and for the contribution that knowledge can make to deciding on a course of action. Both constitute recognizable grounds for action, both in the Culture and in our world, but as the novel unfolds, both are called into question.
General Warning: this is emphatically not a spoiler-free Forum! Hence all of the text all of the contributions will be safely below the fold, and only the identifying information for the author of the contribution will be here for even causal browsers to see. If we are to begin with author intentionality, The Hydrogen Sonata is about ‘the subliming business’. In the Western tradition (which is rather less Western than we sometimes imagine it), the concept of the sublime may be traced back to a work that surfaced in Byzantium during the tenth century, but that probably hails from the first...
Three particular themes stand out when reading The Hydrogen Sonata as a utopian narrative. The first is that whatever happens, politics seem to be an inevitable feature of human life. Second, that however advanced technology may become, nothing beats human communication. Third, that purpose is essential.