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Sunday, September 01, 2002 |
Master of the Mystical Adventure
Via Bruce Sterling, this nice site about Talbot Mundy. I always think of him in the same vein as Ryder Haggard. Though very different writers, they wrote at about the same time, and wrote at a time when some of the world was still unknown to Europeans, so they could make up a lot of stuff. Mundy had quite a life-- ivory poacher, Theosophist, pulp writer, Christian Scientist; this short page tells a lot of stories, very quickly. Reading a whole book about the guy would really be something.
King -- of the Khyber Rifles is a great adventure novel. A year or so ago, I remember seeing some info on the web about an aborted movie project, kind of a pastiche of several Mundy novels that Philip Kaufman was set to film. Alas, the screenplay and info about it seems to be nowhere to be found now. Its too bad Kaufman didn't make the movie, I think he could have done justice to it.
8:42:02 PM Permalink
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Links between Asimov's Novels and Bin Laden?
This is either a strange coincidence or very odd, but:
In October last year, an item appeared on an authoritative Russian studies website that soon had the science-fiction community buzzing with speculative excitement. It asserted that Isaac Asimov's 1951 classic Foundation was translated into Arabic under the title "al-Qaida". And it seemed to have the evidence to back up its claims. [Literacy Weblog]
Science fiction is coming true in all the wrong ways. We aren't living on the moon, we don't have robot valets, poverty and sickness haven't been conquered. Instead we're getting the world that satiric or horror science fiction predicted.
This is creepy stuff; beyond Asimove and Bin Laden, the article also makes reference to Dune and Asimov to Japan's Aum Shinrikyo sect. In a way, it's baloney: it's not just in science fiction that we've had stories of small bands of smart people taking on and defeating evil empires. Look at the mythology of the American Revolution, the Macabees, the French resistence, etc.
One can't blame Asimov for fuelling the swollen fantasies of the murderous. It is the last thing this committed pacifist ("violence is the last refuge of the incompetent") would have wanted. He may not be the only famous sci-fi author to have been taken up by lunatics, anyway. Killer cultist Charles Manson's favourite book is said to have been Stranger in a Strange Land, written by Asimov's rival for the imaginative future Robert Heinlein.
True; for the most part artists can't be held responsible for the uses to which others put their work. Asimov was also famously an atheist and would have been horrified, I imagine, to see his his works used this way by religious fanatics.
4:47:57 PM Permalink
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The Psychology and Neuroscience of Alien Abduction. If the figures are to be believed, up to 4 million people have been abducted by aliens in the US, with many millions more captured world wide. Although the existence of human hungry aliens might be impossible to disprove per se, it is unlikely that extra-terrestrials could manage such mass kidnappings without being commonly noticed. This suggests that there are many people who falsely believe they have been seized by creatures from outer-space, perhaps after experiencing unusual and bizarre phenomena. The purpose of this article is to communicate some of the recent research in psychology and neuroscience that gives us some clues as to how and why these experiences and beliefs occur. [kuro5hin.org]
Very interesting piece. I doubt the 4 million figure -- I think it came from John Mack. Mack is the idiot professor of psychiatry at Harvard who decided that the most likely explanation for all this was -- people were actually being kidnapped by aliens! In contrast, this piece considers explanations which are far more likely than actual alien abductions and, because of that, really more interesting.
4:20:03 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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