I’m growing mightily tired of “science fiction” novels in which a future 800 years from now is full of people driving “late model American sedans,” taking notes with pencils on notepads, fighting an apparently endless war between corrupt, evil Israel and degraded Palestinians, and paying the price for ignoring the Kyoto treaty or the obvious benefits of Marxist socialism.
This shit isn’t science fiction. It’s leftwing ideological polemics dressed up in a fantasy-go-to-meeting dress.
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I missed something. Which novel(s) do you speak of?
There are many - but the immediate cause of my ire was “Spin Control” by Chris Moriarty.
It does seem, however, that the “new generation” of Euro SF writers, in particular, have become enamored of some sort of socialism - Charlie Stross, an infinitely more intelligent writer than Moriarty, seems to fall into this class, although his future societies don’t insult the intelligence of the reader as hers do. I read Charlie, for instance, for his takes on how a Singularity might unfold, and ignore some of his less attractive ventures into economic theory (although those, too, are integral to his visions, and worth reading about, even if you don’t like them).
I’m not convinced that Charlie Stross believes in socialism; I think it’s possible that his near-future novels (I’m thinking about Halting State in particular) are written that way because he believes that that will be how the UK will be in 20 years.
I don’t follow sci-fi and the like all that much, but I also tend to notice that when the setting for a story is a utopian society, it generally resembles a socialist paradise.
I also notice this a lot when astronomers and cosmologists talk about possible extraterrestrial civilization. As it goes, advanced civilization have passed concepts such as the nation state, free enterprise, the very concept of war and so on. It continues, if us earthlings don’t get with the program, we’re going to destroy ourselves. Carl Saagen seemed especially fond of this vision.
Any reason for this?
With one hand he guided the wheel of the hovercar, quickly scribbling a note with his neutronium pencil on the matte white plastisteel notepad. The Delta 88 drifted across two lanes of the Obama Memorial Highway before he had finished. He silently cursed the wonkey stabilizer jets. That’s the price you pay for when you convert old Detroit iron, he reasoned. He increased his speed, anxious to get to the “Stop Global Cooling Now” protest. He’d be damned if I let those corporate fatcats do to Mars what they did to Earth. Mars belonged to the people; with the proper elitist guidance of course. He was pleased that a Hillary would be there at the protest. Now that every public servant was a Hillary clone things tended to run smoother. Smother than before.
He shuddered. Many years had passed since the Compact Fluorescent Bulb Disaster, yet the nightmares still haunted him. Who could have known that the Earth had been protected for over one hundred years by the little known fact that Thulian Space Pirates had all been raised on bedtime stories of Bulby, the Tungsten Filament Lamp of Death? Once incandescent bulbs were banned, we were at their mercy…
Heh.
But it’s actually worse than that.
It would be as if somebody in the 1950s were writing SF about the early 21st century, in which people were driving around in carriages and the main political question was whether the Pope or the Holy Roman Emperor would achieve control of the empire. Also, in late-breaking scientific news, demons were still controlling the weather.
Makes more sense than the current “consensus” does.
If you want to read about something different from the usual socialist SF utopias, try Voyage From Yesteryear by James P. Hogan. Yeah, Hogan isn’t the most emotive writer in SF, but his ideas are usually thought-provoking, and I’ve enjoyed quite a few of his books.
As for Sagan and others who are strangely fond of one world government and that sort of thing, this is just the logical outcome of utopic thinking. As Thomas More pointed out 500 years ago, utopia can only be brought about by restriction of free will. Some people seem to find this acceptable. I don’t.
In Masamune Shirow’s SF comic, Appleseed, there is a dark underside to his quasi-utopia that few readers seem to pick up on, which is that the new race of genetically engineered beings–the “bioroids”–are the only ones allowed to get life extensions, since they are all designed to get along with each other for the “common good” like nice little communists. Regular humans are limited to their natural lifespan, with the reason given being that since humans are a natural part of Gaia, they should not be “interfered with.” Just the sort of cold-blooded rationalization one hears from the Greens these days….
Toren, did Shirow make it clear that the technology was possible to apply to ordinary humans as well? I didn’t get that sense from reading it. OTOH, I’m reading your work here, so presumably you’re pretty familiar with it… (Also, aren’t there actually lots of different dark undersides to that particular quasi-utopia? ;p)
Then again, it’s kind of a throwback to read Pournelle’s novels talking about the Co-Dominium, as if detente was the best possible outcome of the Soviet era…
A “Bravo” and “Well done” to NIMROD. I admire folks with that kind of humor bubbling freely at the ends of their fingertips.
It all started with Star Trek, where only about a dozen people on the Enterprise (total crew 1,000) ever did any work. The ultimate triumph of union featherbedding.
Any reason for this?
I dunno. Maybe because the population of SF writers contains a subset of Gramscian damage-causing mush-headed leftwing dipshits, just like the population of general fiction and non-fiction writers (and the world) does? That would be my guess. Just ‘cuz you write sci-fi, doesn’t make you smart, or particularly scientific in your approach to the Big Problems.
Stross is a fairly muddle-headed libertarian whose touchstone is “if the United States is doing it, it has to be wrong. Explain how.”
Regards,
Ric
Bill,
Maxwell’s Demons, of course.
Why is so much future-SF set in a socialist utopia?
Because an awful lot of SF writers are utopian socialists.
The first wave of great SF writers grew up during the Depression years and saw firsthand the evils and destruction that fascism can produce — both the destruction it commits, and the destruction committed in the course of defeating it, all topped off by the awesome power of the atomic bomb. With that kind of childhood experience, it’s not surprising that they concluded warfare was a threat to the very survival of the human species, and any future that included humans had to be a future in which humans no longer went to war with each other. The only way to accomplish that was to get rid of all the reasons humans go to war: nationalism, factionalism, religion, limited resources, personal greed, etc. On the surface, socialism enforced by a world government of wise, intelligent leaders looks like the perfect answer to that problem. It still does, in fact — I think that’s the primary reason why so many intellectuals support the UN. They see it as the prototype world government, and fail completely to understand that as long as the UN is run by humans with all the failings of humans, the chances of getting a socialist-utopian world government out of it is nil.
It’s easy to extend that logic and conclude that any intelligent species that avoided killing itself long enough to reach the stars would also be socialistic and pacifistic.
Those authors then influenced later generations to such an extent that today a majority of SF writers are socialists. (I’ve interacted with some SF writers directly, and in a few cases I’d even use the term “socialist moonbat.”) Being socialists, of course they write stories set in socialist futures.
Bill!
Stat! Go read some Heinlein, H. Beam Piper, Niven & Pournelle, or L. Neil Smith (Probability Broach) or F. Paul Wilson (Enemy of the State).
Feel better now?
The one recent left-leaning hard SF writer I’ve been able to enjoy is Ken MacLeod, particularly his The Sky Road. There’s some good socilaist-libertarian tension there.
I also left out J. Neil Schulman (Alongside Night) and Barry B. Longyear (the Infinity Hold series)
Some of those are libertarian leaning, others quite radical.
I’ll admit that there are a subsect of Scifi writers who are socialists- as has been mentioned, Charles Stross, James P. Hogan, and Chris Moriarty are among them. So are Ken McDonald, Kim Stanley Robinson, China Meville, and Iain Banks. Would anyone include Issac Asimov among the God-Scientist lovers? He certainly wasn’t a fan of Hobbesian stuff.
There are also Scifi writers who are NOT socialists. I can easily say that for David Weber, John Ringo, J. Michael Strazynski, Robert A. Heinlein, Dan Simmons, Orson Scott Card, William R. Forstchen, Timothy Zahn, and John Scalzi. Some of them might be centrist with leanings either way in the US, but they’re definitely not card carrying members of the Socialist party.
A good number of fantasy writers also qualify (and I think are far more numerous), but I think their topical work tends to lend itself to non-socialist concepts to begin with.
Spin Control failed on a number of levels as a story and a novel. The heavy-handed present-day leftism was the least of the problems.
Part of the problem here is that the Scottish sci-fi has been the best game in town in the 21st century. Iain Banks, Ken MacLeod and Charlie Stross are all leftists, and all very good writers. I just read them and enjoy the prose - you’re not required to swallow all the politics. I find it easier to ignore, say, Kim Robinson, who seems to have about one book in him, and he’s written it half a dozen times.
Lately I’ve also been enjoying Peter F Hamilton and Alstair Reynolds, two writers who know how to spin a good space opera. Neither one seems particularly heavy-handed on the propaganda.
I would not include Hogan as a socialist. Voyage to Yesteryear is an attempt to move beyond–its one of the earliest attempts to deal with the ‘economy of abundance’ Bill thinks we’re heading into.
He’s trying to answer one of the hardest extraplative questions: What would a brand-new system of life look like? He deals with this in later books too.
Jon C. Wright is pretty libertarian, and he’s seriously trying to extrapolate a weird future.
Isaac Asimov–he had a respect for the Declaration of Independence, and knowledge of history, but I’d put him on the left end of things.
Williamson of Baen Books writes very explicitly libertarian fiction. One of his books has a definite anti-democracy libertarian gov’t. I viewed that as part of the growing realization that in a democracy, libertarianism doesn’t succeed. Its an interesting idea–you make lots of dough, give it up, and take a very modest stipend from the gov’t…now you’re a Citizen, and along with 300 or so others, you can vote. Most of the populace are residents.
The Dorsai stuff is not directly political in the categories you’re thinking of, but the Dorsai are basically what Libertarians want to be. Strong, self-reliant, individualistic, skilled with weapons….
Of course, the writer of the Dorsai makes a point–most people are not suited to being Dorsai. There are also Mystics and what amounts to Jihadi, and a whole bunch of normal people in this rather large future history.
The only thing of Stross’ I’ve read is Accelerando, and that didn’t seem particularly socialistic to me. Capitalism seems to be the dominant economic paradigm until the development of “Economy 2.0″, which is inexplicable to non-Singularity-enhanced humans. And if I recall correctly, there are indeed no explanations of economy 2.0 whatsoever, exactly as it should be; if there are clever allusions to Economy 2.0 being socialistic, I missed them.
So even if he has socialist tendencies, I’d submit he’s at least not blinded by them. And I can deal with that; I have “libertarian tendencies”, but I would also like to think I’m not blinded by them.
I’m glad to hear that about Spin Control; it’s one of those books that was a little bit on my radar until now. If it’s loaded with ideological crap I think I’ll give it a pass. And I can do without utopia of any stripe, thanks.
All in all sci-fi has seemed to be in a fairly depressing state though, recalling the doom-and-gloom of the 70s where overpopulation was the bogeyman du jour. I’d rather read books more like the late Brian Daley’s Floyt-Fitzhugh trilogy, of adventure and exploration and the best and worst of humanity let loose on an interstellar scale. Books like that feed the imagination instead of sewing nothing but doubt.
I just want to re-iterate Doug’s comments about Peter F. Hamilton and Alistair Reynolds. Both Brits who can put together an enjoyable tale without too much injection of political biases.
Hamilton is notable for the British Left actually being the bad guys in his early series of “Greg Mandel” novels.
If you like your SF with lots of ideas and minimal preaching, you can’t go wrong with these two. The average Hamilton novel has enough clever new SF ideas and concepts for a dozen lesser novels.
IMO, a lot of the current politics in SF can be attributed to the editors. Take a look at the writings/attitudes of Cory Doctorow and the BoingBoing crowd, and their comments editor Theresa Nielsen-Hayden (an editor along with her husband at Tor Books) of http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/
They are a smart crowd, but if you take one step away from their ideology, your comments are “disemvoweled” or simply deleted. See Jonah Goldberg’s latest book for further elaboration on this concept.
You might want to read some Sci-fi from Baen books.
Very unP.C.
Most unP.C. us Col. Thomas Kratman’s
“A State of Disobedience”
Also from the main Baen site (top left look for “free library” link) is a large collection of FREE books. No encryption, no time bombs, no DRM. Just a belief that good books are best read in dead-tree versions, and that if the reader likes what they read for free they will go ahead and buy that dead-tree version as well.
Another SF writer who is clearly not a socialist is Gene Wolfe, one of the most critically celebrated of living SF writers. The first story in his recent collection Starwater Strains, “Viewpoint” seems like a straightforward pro-Second Amendment/anti-confiscatory taxation piece, and his recent novel in two parts, The Wizard Knight, is largely a celebration of traditional values, like chivalric honor and the duty of authorities to set a good example by being brave and honest and willing to take the risks they expect their underlings to take. I can also recall leftie readers complaining that Wolfe’s four volume Book of the Long Sun, which is partly about political crises in a generation ship, includes passages pushing the right to bear arms and advocating “trickle down economics.”
Politics isn’t the primary focus of Wolfe’s writing, but when he does address such issues it is definitiely not from a socialist viewpoint.
I’m not as familiar with Vinge as I am with Wolfe, but Vernor Vinge’s Deepness in the Sky is pretty openly anti-socialist, and is a solid novel.
Re: Avatar
Jerry Pournelle has said on his blog that the CoDominium timeline was a “what if” exercise, not a utopian future.
Interesting notion. But I think it is shortly to be demonstrated to be entirely false.
For instance: I purchased a Sony ebook reader a few months ago. I love it, and I am actively annoyed whenever I find that a book I want to buy is not available in a format suitable for it.
The only time I’ve felt this reader was a hindrance was in reading what is essentially a reference book: Gary Taubes’ Good Food, Bad Food. There are so many small but related references in it that the ability to flip back and forth rapidly between them works better in dead tree than in the Sony (you can do it, but much more slowly, so that the “flip back and forth in an instant” readability is missing).
This goes contrary to the traditional take on ebooks - that they would be good for references, but not for ordinary reading - but then, technology so often makes hash of the conventional wisdom, doesn’t it?
Me? I’m busily emptying out my bookshelves, except for those items simply not available in electronic format. I’m an early adapter, but I expect that within ten years the only people still reading everything on dead tree will be the hopelessly stubborn old fogies who babble on about things like the “feel” or the “smell” of a “real book.”
Fair enough - if I had a reader, I might feel the same way.
I don’t, though, and Baen’s marketing tactic worked on me. Read their copy of Mutineer’s Moon ’cause the company I was working for was involved with an animation project based on it (didn’t come off, in the end), hung around for a couple of the other books, and, well… now I’ve got practically everything Weber ever wrote, a ton of Drake, a good smattering of Ringo and Flint, and some of the other assorted stuff I found there as well. Not that I wouldn’t have ended up buying some of it eventually, but the reason I picked up those authors in the first place was because I could take that first bite free…
Rich, er, of course it’s not a utopian future. “Dystopian” is much more like it, huh? The entire point of the scenario is that at some point it would fall apart into mutual nuclear annihilation…
I think you can draw a distinction between a writer like Charles Stross, whose socialist leanings are apparant but are not the only idea driving the story, and a writer like Ken MacCleod who seems to consider his story nothing but a vehicle for his politics. I can’t manage to push my way through a MacCleod story despite the prose.
With Stross and Banks, its possible to read the story without hearing the pedantic voice of the writer lecturing you through the protagonists. It’s possible to balance the sometimes in my opinion cheap thought with the writer’s obvious vision and imagination elsewhere. It is very hard to do this in other cases. I’m sure its not only problem of the Left, but naturally it grates on me harder when the writer disagrees with and continually denigrates my beliefs.
For example, I very much enjoyed Bank’s ‘Player of Games’ and I think it makes interesting and true observations as well as utilizing simple sterotypes. I can read books like that without thinking continually, ‘The writer believes this to be true.’ because the story is skillful in its conception. When I read MacLeod, all I can read is, ‘This is what the writer believes to be true.’ And it’s neither interesting or the least bit persuasive.
I freely admit to enjoying Gene Wolfe or Vernor Vinge better than either of them. And for that matter, I like Terry Pratchett better, and he’s pretty openly anti-socialist as well, he just puts his words in the mouth of comic characters like Sam Vimes or Nobby Nobbs. Which is I suppose how he gets away with it despite being English.
Bill,
The first one is free at Baen. Dead tree or electronic, once they’ve got you hoooked, they’ve got you hooked. Not screwing with DRM crap just makes me happy that I don’t have a chained library. Baen is pretty clear on the notion that chained libraries are a dead marketing model.
Full disclosure: last night I bought the latest Leary-Mundy book electronically. I read the first one of the series “With the Lightnings” free. You can get it here: http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm
You don’t even feel the needle after a while. But I can quit anytime I want. As long as Ringo and Weber stop writing…don’t get me started on Bujold.
I do agree with you that Banks and Stross make it easier to get past their ideologies than MacLeod does. He certainly loves to pile on the endless Leninist speeches to the oppressed masses.
But there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, if you just flip past all the “nothing to lose but your chains” dialog. There’s actually a fair amount of anarcho-socialism in his politics, and (as a right-leaning libertarian) I find it interesting to see how he imagines that kind of society. The actual sci-fi content is high caliber as well. He’s close to the line for me, but he manages to keep himself on the “worth reading” side of it.
Which brings up what I don’t like about my Sony ereader: the damnable Format Wars.
Sony has their proprietary format. amazon has theirs. They all want to chain you to the hardware. So you go to the Sony store, or to amazon, or wherever. It didn’t work with music, and it’s not gonna work with books. But that doesn’t mean the morons won’t try their damnedest, even in the face of demonstrated failure.
Bill,
Baen books are available in RTF, which the Sony Reader presents. I still use my old iPaq with a blown battery attached to its cradle. In 2001 when I bought it, the iPaq had the brightest screen. The backlight hasn’t dimmed appreciably, so it makes a good book reader. You can get a good used iPaq for $100 on eBay and then you can read in whatever format you want. I’ve been perfectly happy with the Microsoft Reader format for the last seven years.
You can also use the same SD cards on the iPaq as the Sony Reader. Of course, if you’ve bought Memory Sticks, you deserve to suffer as a lesson in not being suckered into proprietary formats.
Yes, but as with most things, rtf is a compromise, and you forfeit some of the abilities that the proprietary format gives you: for instance, resizing fonts. For me, the larger, the better. Sony is fairly good about presenting several different formats: but pdf, for instance, can be really a crapshoot as far as getting it into a readable font size.
I’ll take a look at one of the Baen rtf products, and see how it works, though. I’m always on the lookout for free books, and I’ve got space on my reader for about 10,000 of them.
I have SD, of course. And I cherish the Sony reader for finally freeing me from the tyranny of batteries. Also, I love the form factor. And it is an excellent example of one thing Sony does almost as well as Apple - it’s a stylin’ little machine - in fact, with its smart leather cover, most people don’t even realize I’m not reading a “real book” unless they happen to see the screen.
Yet another Side Note: I don’t really understand the resistance to e-readers, although I suspect to a large extent it’s based on ignorance of what the current iterations can do.
But as for the format itself, how many times have you changed the format of your music library? I’m old enough to have reached at least six - 78s to 33s to 8-track to cassette to cd to mp3. and I’ll probably be hitting at least three on video stuff - vcr to dvd to some sort of open digital file format that plays on everything.
Why should your 600 year old book format be inviolate?
It might be something as simple and mundane as people not liking to read off of a screen for an extended period of time rather than a general aversion to new technology. At work, I tend to like to print things out and read from paper, rather than on the computer screen. Perhaps also, most people don’t read enough books (as opposed to magazines and newspaper articles which you can access via the web on a Iphone, blackberry, etc.) to make up for the sunk costs of buying the equipment, and upgrading with next generation models.
I resemble that remark. While I do enjoy e-reading, I get a more active enjoyment out of holding a physical book in my hands. Color me a fuddy duddy, but the tactile sensation is part of the process of reading that I fell in love with as a lad. That said, I have many books which are getting long in the tooth and, unless I sell my collection (horrors!), I may have to find a way to convert some of them within the next 20 years or so, as some of them are long out of print. Some of my books are more than 40 years old, and while I take great care of them, some of the books are printed on paper which appears to be dissolving as I watch. Saving the text in a more permanent format appeals to me. But the very act of saving the text will likely damage the books themselves, so I’m in a bit of a quandrary.
Baen has several formats available: HTML, Ebookwise / Rocket, Mobipocket / Palm / Kindle, RTF, Microsoft Reader, CD ISO Image. Go ahead, kid, take a hit, it’s free…
Admittedly I’m now buying Ringo and Bujold in hardback, but really, I can quit any time I want. Really!
Why should your 600 year old book format be inviolate?
The question is the answer, Bill. You demonstrate that with your own example. In my lifetime, music has gone from 33rpm LPs to cassettes to CDs to digital files, while video has gone from VHS to laserdisc to DVD and now Blu-ray. In the same timespan, computer recording media has gone from reel-to-reel tape, through 8″, 5.25″, and 3.5″ diskettes, on through MRM, RLL, ESDI, SCSI, IDE, EIDE, and now SATA hard-disk types. And we’re about to move into flash memory as primary storage, with no moving parts at all. And then there are all the data formats — different OS’s, different clustering schemes, and the gods alone know what else.
At least one format for storing information should always be inviolate, because otherwise you run the risk of having some essential or much-wanted piece of information stored in a format that can’t be read anymore.
Returning to my earlier topic: I agree with the comments that there are indeed a lot of SF writers who aren’t socialists (in which group I include James Hogan, incidentally — I think he’s more of a frustrated libertarian, heavily contaminated by pseudoscience). However, most of them are recent, and I suspect many of them started writing SF partly as a reaction to the heavily socialist subtexts of the SF they were reading in the 1970s and 1980s.
Bill,
I have a friend who is horrified at the notion of migrating to e-books. I made the suggestion while in the middle of moving her and her husband’s collection from the storage locker they were keeping and I figured it was a fair target since I wasn’t even getting beer for my efforts as a mover. She almost broke down in tears at the thought. She also defended wearing glasses as a lifestyle choice instead of getting radial keratotomy to correct her vision. She said this while her glasses were completely fogged.
Yes, she is a SciFi fan and yes she goes to WorldCon on a regular basis. There are some people so adjusted to their liabilities that they define themselves by them.
(By the way, I’m terrible at moving people and anybody who tells you differently is a liar. No, my truck is not available to help you move. I have a very good handtruck that will help you move, operator not included. I really hate moving. I’ve moved over a hundred times in my life.)
Daniel, I doubt if you have actually ever read off an epaper screen, such as the one the Sony reader offers. Do so, and then let me know what you think.
I fancy I have read as many, if not more, paper books in my lifetime as any of my readers here. The switchover to the Sony reader was entirely painless. Within an hour or so, my own brain was sending me signals that I was reading a “real” book. I kept unconsciously reaching up to turn the physical page.
That finally fades, after a few weeks. Then the switch is complete.
Well, there’s a lot of that sort of info out there already. I can’t call up the original manuscripts of my first novels, because they were written in Scripsit, and stored on 5 1/2 in floppies. Yes, they could still be read, with a lot of work and effort, but even that won’t be true at some point in the future.
If you want to read during lunch break, its a lot easier to bring in a book than something that looks like a computer in many jobs that have computers at the office. You also don’t have to worry so much about theft when the medium is 4$ instead of 50$.
Also, the format wars are a large barrier. If I’m going to convert my whole library, then I’ve got to worry if the proprietary format goes away, yes?
Just a few ideas why…
Heh.. I got disemvoweled at Boing Boing. I was a little surprised as the whole tone of the site seems to be pro-freedom… but it’s pro-freedom to express Lefty views only, apparently.
I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, but I’ve recently started reading more modern thrillers, like Lee Child, Robert Crais, Jonathan Kellerman, Stephen Hunter, and others like that.
I am happy to get an ebook reader at some point. But it would only increase my frustration at having so many books that I want to convert to digital format but can’t. practically. I am hoping someone builds a book scanner that lets you dump a book into a bin and then it scans and converts the text without a negligable error rate.
Earnest, I am addicted to all the thriller writers you mention, but if you haven’t already, give yourself a real treat and start reading John Sandford. Leave aside that he’s a pal o’mine, there is nobody doing the pop thriller format better than he is today.
Read his Lucas Davenport “Prey” series, of course (you’ll be addicted) but read all his other character series as well. You won’t be disappointed.
(I downloaded his entire output to the ereader, first thing, by the way).
Read Vernor Vinge’s “Rainbow’s End” for a rather horrifying take on this notion.
Actually, I think I’ve read all of Sandford, too… I forgot to mention him. My problem is that I read too fast. I like to try books that are #1 in a series so that if I like it, I know that I’ll get more reading out of it than I would a single stand-alone novel.
And I meant “with a negligable error rate”… d’oh!
email me and I’ll tell you what Sandford once said to me about Hunter….
What a relief to see this post!
I made a comment on Amazon, lumping Stross, Moriarty, and Richard K. Morgan together as reflexively anti-American. Nobody else seemed to have the same take.
It’s nice not to be in a minority of one.
I’ve known Charlie a fair while now, and I don’t think he’s reflexively anything. Further, he differs quite a bit in his writing from the other two, both of whom manage to piss me off for a lot of different reasons.
For instance, both Moriarty’s and Morgan’s futures are hideous dystopias. Lefties and socialist seem to excel at creating futures you’d rather commit suicide than live to see.
Everybody is poverty stricken, except for a tiny class of exploiters. The society of abundance apparently never materializes for these congenital grumps - probably, I guess, because the universe still, despise all their wishes and hopes, has not forced the iron yoke of socialist collectivism around every conceivable neck.
Charlie’s futures look like fun and exciting places to live, from a personal, (post-human) viewpoint, even if their political economies sometimes seem either odd or repugnant from a libertarian point of view.
And Charlie really doesn’t like SF libertarianism. He’s an atheist, and tends to lump ideologies he doesn’t care for in with religions. He thinks libertarianisn breaks down over the problem of the tragedy of the commons and, actually, I tend to agree with him on this, as I have said here before.
2015 is seven years away, not ten.
Yes, and…?
Simple; makes my eyes hurt and/or causes headache.
Also, I find the whole tactile element of turn-page, hey-wait-a-minute, turn-back-page to make it easier to keep track of where I am, and to jump back to a certain location. I think of previous pages as more of a physical location in the book, rather than “I’m on page 237, and want to go back to page 221 to look at something again”.
A lot of the features that e-readers boast over your standard paperback are things I might want in a manual or technical document, not a novel.
Toss in the perviously mentioned bits about the physical characteristics of books and why they’re often preferrable for tossing into a bag, and there you have it.
There is are conversion tools available for use with the sony reader. Libprs seems to be one of the ones that work fairly well at least it seems to for the folks over at mobileread.com.
http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Libprs500
Its true that this is just another hoop the people have to jump through to use their readers, but until something settles out for books like mp3 did for the music, people will be stuck with it.
I also have to admit that I’ve become addicted to Ringo, Weber, Flint and Williamson because of the Baen practice of giving you the first one for free.
After reading the comments here, I think I’ll wait a little longer to choose a “reader”. Dead tree books still work pretty well for me and I don’t want to get stuck with an obsolete file format. My legacy video tape collection includes both VHS and Beta tapes and my Sony Beta recorder still works, but will die one of these days. As an aside, does it mean the Singularity is really getting close when Microsoft releases a new OS development kernel called Singularity SDK?
Tim, have you ever actually read anything on one of the new e-readers like the Sony or the Kindle, or are you just spouting through your hat?
From what you’ve written, it sounds to me as if you have absolutely no experiences with them at all, and are just babbling stuff you decided on ten years ago - in other words, a fogey.
“By cracky, sonny, you’ll never get me to use one a them new-fangled cellumlar tellyphones, they make my ears ache and where’s the darned dial wheel?”
Thanks, Derrell. I think I’ve tried that one, but I’m not sure. I’ll go check it out.
That “proprietary” Sony format is actually some version of Mobi, I think, but you can’t read a Mobi file as is.
Derrell, I hadn’t tried that, and it is excellent. Just what I’ve been looking for!
Glad to help. The whole ebabel mess is just ridiculous. I understand everyone wants to lock their customers to their own hardware but that’s not helping to promote ebooks and in turn hurts the hardware companies as well as the publishers.
Bill -
Get back to me when you can drop your reader into your coat pocket, jump in the car and slam the door on that same pocket, and then pull your “book” out and continue reading, heh.
Put me in the old fogey class.
And as Wolf said, how long before your selected format goes away? Me, I’m starting to copy my VHS collection over to DVD. Of course, this means I’ll may have to that all over again when TV’s all go HD in a year or so…
emdfl- I do exactly that a couple of times a week. I drive a RAV-4 - and carry my reader in the left hand pocket of my jacket, which is car-coat style. It catches in the seat belt all the time, and occasionally gets whapped by the door when I close it.
The reader is in a protective leather book-jacket (which, admittedly, costs 20 bucks extra) and with it, seems as durable as a book in ordinary use. And it looks just like a book, too.
I repeat, all you fogies - criticize the actual item, not your way-outdated notions of what you think it is.
And please: I’m not interested in lifeboat scenarios: “Stick your reader in a nuclear explosion - underwater in your bathtub - on an ice floe in antarctica” - blab infinitum. I never used any of my paper books that way, either.
Formats?
Well, I guess if you really want to be a fogey, you can always find what you think is a good reason. But you’re still gonna be a fogey, grampy. It’s not a function of age. It’s a mindset.
I’m kind of will Bill on this one. People don’t seem to know what a modern reader looks like, acts like, or is used like.
I read book on my pda, and it’s significantly different than newer reader.
EDIT: that said, I don’t have any use for a book reader if it’s not going to keep my schedule, contacts, etc etc etc, so that’s why I have a PDA that shows books, instead of an Ereader that has a few other bells and whistles. I’m waiting on the convergence…