jameswharris

Next Issue: Can Magazines on Tablet Computers Replace Printed Magazines?

Years ago I gave up subscribing and buying paper magazines in hopes of going paperless. Oh, I’d break the rules and buy a magazine now and then. Then recently a guy a work started giving me his magazines after he read them with recommendations of articles to read. I started discovering that some articles found in magazines are vastly superior to most of the free articles I was finding on the web. I guess it’s a case of getting what you pay for. I also discovered for some subjects its much more fun to browse a magazine than the web.

So I started back on a couple of paper magazine and quickly discovered I really don’t like them piling up. Once you go paperless, it’s hard to go back to paper. Then I discovered Next Issue. For $15 a month I got digital access to a library of magazines. (There’s also a $9.99 version with fewer magazine.) I quickly rediscovered just how much I love magazines. The only trouble is they don’t look very good on my iPad 2.

That’s not completely true. Some look much better than others. For the most part the magazines look like their paper versions – I see all the editorial content and the ads. Some even have extras, like animations, film clips, and multiple view of photos, so in a sense they are super-magazines. And some magazines actually reformat their content slightly to take advantage of tablets. So when you get to an article you page down to read it, rather than page right, for a few pages, and then skipping to page 79 to finish the thing. The magazines that use this feature tend to format their content in a larger font that’s easy to read without magnification – and that looks best on older tablets like the iPad 2. Other magazines just give you two views of a static page, one that fits the screen on the tablet, and another brought up by double tapping that is greatly magnified that you slide around with your finger to read.

I’ve been reading for weeks with my old iPad 2, and getting into this new method of magazine reading, all the while thinking about how it could be better. Mostly I thought about having to buy an iPad Air.

I then borrowed my wife’s Kindle Fire HD with a 7” screen and spent an evening reading my favorite magazines. The Kindle HD has much better resolution than the iPad 2, a pre-retina display model. Switching between the two devices, taught me something about reading magazines on a tablet, and made me realize that Apple no longer has a lock on tablet computers. Here’s what I learned:

Resolution matters – the more the better. Sometimes it’s nicer to read small fonts than to tap and magnify
7” tablets are much easier to hold and read for longer periods of time
10” tablets make the photos pop out more, so it’s more fun to look at pictures with a larger screen
If the magazine formats for the tablet, it’s much easier to read on a 7” screen
If the magazine doesn’t format for the tablet, it’s much easier to read on a 10” screen
An aspect ratio of 4:3 is probably better for magazines than 16:10, but not always
I have to use a reading stand with the larger tablet for long periods of reading
A 7” screen is more conducive of carrying around
I’d love to be able to print a whole article, or clip it to Evernote. The iOS version of Next Issue will let me AirPrint a page at a time.
If I could clip an article to Evernote (or .pdf) I could print it from Evernote
Tablets offer a way for magazines to offer more creative layouts, and even multimedia

Next Issue is far from perfect, but I still feel like I’m getting my money’s worth. I would be happier if I could find just the right tablet, if I could save articles, and if I could get a few more magazines. Of course this is dealing with two different issues. One, can I enjoy reading a magazine exclusively on a tablet and give up print copies? And two, does Next Issue offer everything I want to read?

Next Issue is a disruptive technology in the same way Netflix was a game changer. I essentially stopped buying videos after I adapted to Netflix. Will I give up buying magazines too? Next Issue has a nice selection of over 125 magazines, but it doesn’t have The Atlantic, Scientific American, Discover, Sky and Telescope, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The New York Review of Books, Linux Journal, and others that I like.

But like I said, that’s two issues when regarding whether can I give up paper magazines for reading magazines on a tablet. If I had a Kindle Fire HDX, either 7” or 8.9” screen, or an Apple iPad Air or Mini with Retina Display, or a Nexus 7 or 10, or Samsung Note 10.1 2014, I might be able to conclusively answer the first part of the question. They have the dots per inch resolution that will make tablets sharp enough to read small print. And they might even make photography stand out more. However, paper still wins on some factors.

If I can’t clip to Evernote or .pdf, printed magazines win on the “tearing an article out to save” factor. Also, for “making a photocopy” factor. They also win on “lending/giving to a friend” factor. But tablets win on “these magazines are driving me crazy piling up around the house” factor. Tablets also win on the “where the hell did I put that magazine” factor. They also win on the “I wish I had that magazine with me” factor because Next issue works from the smartphone and iPod touch.

It’s not hard to see the writing on the wall. Paper and printing will eventually go away. Whether magazine library subscriptions like Next Issue will become standard is still to be decided. Netflix hasn’t killed the DVD buying business, but it’s changed it. Netflix did kill off the local video store, and I wonder if tablets will do that to newsstands?

JWH – 1/5/14

How Academy Award Winning Films From 1927-1950 Are Remembered Today

As the years roll by, and older generations pass on, what they created and loved, disappears too. Below are the films that won the Academy Award for Best Picture before I was born. Unless you are a movie buff, or love to watch Turner Classic Movies, it’s not likely you’ve seen many of these films. Some have become so legendary that even some young people have watched them, but many are being forgotten.

I thought I’d check various kinds of lists and remembrances to see how these old movies are being retained in our public mind.

First, I’m going to check The National Film Registry to see if they’ve been recognized there. Of the 23 films below, 14 are on the NFR, and three (Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives) were in the first year’s selection. The NFR began in 1989, so films closest to that date are among the most popular in people’s memories. The NFR selects up to 25 additional films each year, so given enough time probably all of these films will be added to the registry, but maybe not. Films selected from 1989-1993 are essentially the Top 100. 1994-1998 brings in roughly films 100-200.

Entertainment Weekly recently published what they remember as the Top 100 films of all time. Their number one film of all time is Citizen Kane from 1941 which didn’t even win the Academy Award that year – it lost to How Green Was My Valley. The editors at EW do honor films all the way back to the silent movie era, so it’s a good list to work from when you’re disappointed that you can’t find a movie to watch. Comparing the EW list and the Academy Awards from 1927-1950 shows the limitation of the Oscars of actually picking the best film of the year.

EW also picked 23 films from this same time period, but the two lists of 23 only have five films that overlap, It Happened One Night, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Best Years of Our Lives and All About Eve.

The American Film Institute (AFI) has their 10th Anniversary edition of 100 Years … 100 Movies. Strangely, or not so strangely, AFI only picked five of these 23 films too, and the same five as EW. AFI picked 25 movies from 1927-1950.

Over at American Movie Classics (AMC) they have a public poll with their Top 100 films. Such a poll reflects the collective memory of people on the street, rather than the film buff editors of the other two lists. This list can change, so I’m using the results of 1/3/14. Besides reinforcing the recommendations of the EW and AFI picks, the AMC actually picks two movies that haven’t been picked before, All Quiet on the Western Front and Rebecca. This leads me to believe that the voters in the AMC poll are quite savvy about old movies. 48 of their 100 movies were from 1927-1950. AMC viewers love their old movies.

Another site is Rotten Tomatoes (RT) and their Top 100 Movies of All Time. RT has a completely different way of remember movies, by counting movie review ratings. All these films received 100% positive ratings, and were reviewed by 31-162 reviewers. This list gives Rebecca it’s second listing, and All About Eve it’s fifth. 21 of RT’s 100 films were from 1927-1950.

So far this consistently shows this time period is remembered, but RT like EW and AFI seem to consistently pick other films. This shows the Academy isn’t very good at picking the films that will be remembered best.

Looking at IMDB’s Top 100 films from the Top 250 list finalized for 2013, we see another public voting system, with another list where Citizen Kane comes in at #1. But their #2 is Tokyo Story (1953) a film I don’t even remember ever hearing about. This is a much more diverse list than the others, and that might be because IMDB is world famous. Like the other lists it endorsed Gone With the Wind and Casablanca, but IMDB’s fans also agreed with AMC’s fans to pick All Quiet on the Western Front. That’s extra interesting because I just watched a Blu-ray copy the other night that I got from Classic Flicks. IMDB picked 27 out of 100 films from the 1927-1950 period. Staying consistent here. I wish I could do some major data mining to actual measure how soon the general population forgets pop culture artifacts from the past.

There are plenty of sites on the Internet like Life Hack, where they list 30 Best Movies of All Time, and not only do they not pick any of these 23 movies, they don’t even get close to picking any movie from that time period. Their oldest movie is 1974 – Young Frankenstein.

There are zillions of people making movie lists. But at Lists of Bests, I found Movie Definitive Lists. I wish I was some kind of master hacker where I could write a program to collect these 4,679 lists, but them into a database and create a single list which lists which movies had been on the most lists. Well, a project for when I get an infinite amount of free time. Unfortunately, many of these lists do not pick just 100 movies, and rank them in order, which is what I need to compare consistently with my other lists.

It’s sad to see many of these films aren’t remembered at all, and it’s pretty obvious which ones are widely remembered. One of my all time favorite movies, Grand Hotel is one of the forgotten films. The three most remembered Academy Award Best Picture movies from this time period, 1927-1950 are Gone With the Wind, Casablanca and All About Eve. If you read the other lists via the links, you’ll see many movies from this time period remembered better. For instance, I think fans prefer The Maltese Falcon as their favorite Bogie movie. And who could forget The Wizard of Oz, It’s A Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Double Indemnity, The Philadelphia Story, Sullivan’s Travels, Duck Soup, Top Hat, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Trouble in Paradise, 42nd Street, The Lady Eve, The Grapes of Wrath, Stagecoach, and so many, many other movies that the other lists do remember.

1927/28
	NFR-1997
1928/29

1929/30
	NFR-1990 AMC-#58 IMDB-#73
1930/31

1931/32
	NFR-2007
1932/33

1934
	NFR-1993 EW-#48 AFI-#46 AMC-#54
1935

1936

1937
	NFR-2000
1938

1939
	NFR-1989 EW-#10 AFI-#6 AMC-#8 IMDB-#72
1940
	AMC-#19 RT-#44
1941
	NFR-1990
1942
	NFR-2009
1943
	NFR-1989 EW-#3 AFI-#3 AMC-#8 IMDB-#19
1944
	NFR-2004
1945
	NFR-2011
1946
	NFR-1989 EW-#64 AFI-#37 AMC-#57
1947

1948

1949
	NFR-2001
1950
	NFR-1990 EW-#86 AFI-#28 AMC-#30 RT-#22

JWH – 1/3/14

The Speed of Knowledge versus Copyright

No one yet knows the real impact of the Internet on human society. If it wasn’t for copyright laws, the Internet could be the ultimate library. A dazzling library that it would surpass all existing world libraries and all libraries in history. Even now, most people get more information from the Internet than they ever gotten from a library, or for that matter, from books, magazines, journals and newspapers. Yet, the Internet is severely hobbled by copyright.

Writers need to make a living, and publishers need to make a profit, so it’s understandable that copyrights should protect intellectual property. I don’t resent the need for writers and publishers to make money. I do resent that making money impedes the flow of knowledge. It’s a shame that the current distribution systems are so inefficient at spreading commercial knowledge.

Take for instance the article I just read in The New Yorker, “The Gene Factory” by Michael Spector. If you follow the link you’ll reach a teaser section of the article and information about how to subscribe. This does not let you quickly read the article, which means you probably won’t. If you’re already a subscriber and have set up your digital access, or can just grab your latest copy of the magazine, then reading is a little faster, but not quite as convenient as following a link. Please make the effort, the article is worth it.

Many journals and magazines do offer to let readers buy an immediate reprint, usually for several dollars. This is step in the right direction, but their pricing structure usually causes web users to skip the article. Now I would prefer that the content of all magazines, journals and newspaper be free, but I’m no old hippie, and can understand the need to charge. What I suggest is to make selling articles easier and price them at impulse buying fees. What we need is a good micropayment system so publishers can charge 10-99 cents an article.

“The Gene Factory” by Michael Spector is an article that most people should read, but especially people worried about America’s future and science fiction writers. If you’ve ever seen the movie Gattica then you’ll know what this article is about. Then again, if you’ve ever been fascinated by the decline of the British Empire and wondered when and how the American Empire would start declining, then again, this article is for you.

“The Gene Factory” is specifically about Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), but also about the impact of gene sequencing on human society. The New Yorker article is very long and full of wonderful details and speculation, far more than I want to paraphrase here. Which is why our society would be so much different if I could just provide you a link and you could go read the article. Then if the article also included links to all the research that Michael Spector put into writing the article, we could all study what he has to say in depth.

Now, wouldn’t that increase the speed of knowledge? And if you don’t feel the need for such speed, then again, I recommend you read the article.

Some magazines like The Atlantic and The Smithsonian put much of their content online for free. I wonder if ideas in their content is spread faster and further throughout the world’s population than paywall controlled content? That has to be the case, but I’d love to see the numbers. Wouldn’t it be lovely to see public hit statistics for every article on the web? Wouldn’t it be very cool to have a place on the web to see what people are reading, the Top 100,000 for the last hour, day, week, month, year and decade? Think about the data mining possibilities!

Even cooler would be a raw hit score, plus a weighted score from people voting reading value. So much more could be done for the Internet. I feel like I’m thinking about television technology in 1939 and wondering what its real potential will be.

By the way, I use the Internet service Next Issue to subscribe to over 125 magazines for $15 a month. It’s a quick way to get access to The New Yorker and many other magazines. Next Issue might be worth trying just to read “The Gene Factory.”

JWH – 1/2/13

What Would Be The Bible of Science?

Christians have only one book to explain reality, The Bible. What one book is there to explain science for scientific believers?

That’s a hard question to answer, because to truly understand science requires reading dozens, if not hundreds of books. There are many books that survey the history of science, but often they don’t convey why science works, or how scientists think. For most of my life I’ve thought of myself as a scientific person, but I don’t understand science at the working scientist levels, or even understand it well at its philosophical levels, and I have read hundreds of science books.

I’m currently reading a book that could be the bible for scientific thinking.

Now David Deutsch doesn’t intend his book The Beginning of Infinity to be the bible of science, I’m just nominating it as one possibility. It has one major strike against it though, I’m not sure anyone reading it that doesn’t have a decent grasp of science and philosophy already, will understand it. The reason I nominate The Beginning of Infinity as the one book to study to grasp the scientific mindset is because it works to explain the why of science rather than the how. David Deutsch is the Plato and Aristotle of the early 21st century.

I am only halfway through reading this book and it’s inspired me to buy three editions of it to study, the hardback, the ebook and the audio edition. I will not comprehend this book in one reading, or ten. And the reason why I’m writing about it even before I finish it is because I need to struggle with writing words about it to understand it as I read it.

Deutsch believes techniques humans developed during and since The Enlightenment are our best tools for exploring and explaining reality, but to understand these techniques requires more than understanding the scientific method. What we want are good explanations that stand up to rigorous criticism, so science needs the best philosophical tools to constantly hammer away at the results of our scientific experiments. Ultimately, Deutsch is writing about knowledge creation, and the impact of this knowledge on reality. Deutsch goes beyond understanding reality into the science fictional area of shaping reality.

As the physicist Richard Feynman said, ‘Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.’ By adopting easily variable explanations, the gambler and prophet are ensuring that they will be able to continue fooling themselves no matter what happens. Just as thoroughly as if they had adopted untestable theories, they are insulating themselves from facing evidence that they are mistaken about what is really there in the physical world.

Deutsch refers to gambler and prophet here because they both try to predict reality. Religion is an authority based knowledge that attempts to explain reality with easy explanations – God did it – that fail to explain reality at all. A gambler is someone who thinks they understands an aspect of reality and bets on future events. Followers of religious thinking also bet on future outcomes. The trouble is we can’t know the future, and at best, we can only explain what has or is happening with explanations that hold up to rigorous criticism.

Deutsch explains why religion and most of philosophy are miserable failures at explaining reality. The trouble is religious and philosophical thinking so cloud our thoughts that it’s almost impossible to clear our thinking of their faulty logic. Science is more than evidence based thinking. It’s more than the scientific method and experimentation. Science has to be critical thinking. This is why an understanding of philosophy, logic and rhetoric is important to understanding scientific thinking.

The quest for good explanations is, I believe, the basic regulating principle not only of science, but of the Enlightenment generally. It is the feature that distinguishes those approaches to knowledge from all others, and it implies all those other conditions for scientific progress I have discussed: It trivially implies that prediction alone is insufficient. Somewhat less trivially, it leads to the rejection of authority, because if we adopt a theory on authority, that means that we would also have accepted a range of different theories on authority. And hence it also implies the need for a tradition of criticism. It also implies a methodological rule – a criterion for reality – namely that we should conclude that a particular thing is real if and only if it figures in our best explanation of something.

Time and again Deutsch references The Enlightenment. Most historians believe the Enlightenment was a time in our past, but I believe until religious thinking is removed from the world, we’re still fighting Enlightenment battles. Yes, we live in a technological and scientific age, but most people still think by ancient thought patterns. Deprogramming ourselves of these thinking habits that give us faulty explanations about reality is very hard, including the most scientific among us. Even life-long atheists have a hard time thinking completely clearly.

Long before the Enlightenment, there were individuals who sought good explanations. Indeed, my discussion here suggests that all progress then, as now, was due to such people. But in most ages they lacked contact with a tradition of criticism in which others could carry on their ideas, and so created little that left any trace for us to detect. We do know of sporadic traditions of good-explanation-seeking in narrowly defined fields, such as geometry, and even short-lived traditions of criticism – mini-enlightenments – which were tragically snuffed out, as I shall describe in Chapter 9. But the sea change in the values and patterns of thinking of a whole community of thinkers, which brought about a sustained and accelerating creation of knowledge, happened only once in history, with the Enlightenment and its scientific revolution. An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole. And the progress made by that multifaceted culture, in turn, promoted those values – though, as I shall explain in Chapter 15, they are nowhere close to being fully implemented.

This is why I’m reading this book. This is why I’m going to study this book like no other. I plan to read The Beginning of Infinity several times this year. But this is only preparation for what Deutsch is setting up with his book, and what is explained by the title. The book is really about the impact of human generated knowledge on reality. He compares it to forces of nature, like gravity. Biology has already been collecting and processing knowledge for billions of years, but it is unaware knowledge. Where we’re at is the beginning of aware knowledge.

Here is a short video by Jason Silva that explains the impact of The Beginning of Infinity in another way, a visual way. Please watch it full screen with your sound cranked up.

I’m promoting reading The Beginning of Infinity in the same way the faithful promote reading of The Bible. I’m not sure the faithful will understand it, but I believe atheists need to study it. Strangely enough, I think science fiction fans and computer geeks will love it because it will resonate with their kinds of thinking.

You can read more at the book’s website, including an excerpt.

JWH – 1/2/14

Why Were The Two Most Famous Science Fiction Novels of the 20th Century Not Written By Science Fiction Authors?

The two most famous science fiction novels of last century were Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Now I didn’t write that to generate a flame war among science fiction fans, or as a slight to genre writers, but because I believe it’s true, especially if you ask people who don’t normally read science fiction. I’m actually wondering why the two biggest successes using science fiction as a writing technique weren’t penned by writers who specialized in writing science fiction? Huxley and Orwell were straight ahead literary guys – total amateurs at speculative fiction. They probably never heard of Hugo Gernsback or John W. Campbell.

And, the two most famous science fiction novels of the 19th century, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, were not written by a genre writer either. H. G. Wells existed before the science fiction genre was established. Nor were his books written for the genre reader of his day, which did have a lot of science fiction, even though it lacked the label. In the 21st century, when science fiction is a well established, and a well loved genre, it bizarrely seems that the people who aren’t science fiction writers have the biggest successes with the technique. Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood are two good recent examples.

What are these non-SF writers doing that SF genre writers aren’t? I just got through rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four and I thought about this the whole time I was thoroughly enjoying the book. Nineteen Eighty-Four is so different from the genre science fiction books I normally read that I’m tempted to say it’s not science fiction. Many literary writers and English profs claim just that, but they would be wrong. Insanely wrong. George Orwell might not have written for Campbell’s Astounding, and probably never even read the famous pulp, but Nineteen Eighty-Four would have fit comfortably in that magazine as a serial. No Astounding reader would have made one objection as to it not being science fiction. And I’m quite sure readers would have voted it the best story of the issue, even if Heinlein had had a story in that issue too.

Not long ago I reread Beyond This Horizon by Heinlein and I felt pretty sure that Heinlein wrote it hoping it would be another Brave New World. Heinlein was savvy enough to know that Huxley’s book sold far more than pulp fiction, and at the time, very little science fiction was even being published in hardback, or that new format, the paperback. Here’s an early paperback cover for Nineteen Eighty-Four – looks just like a science fiction novel, doesn’t it?

While reading Nineteen Eighty-Four this time I was blown-away by Orwell’s world building genius. World building is an essential feature of SF/F, which books like Dune and The Lord of the Ring illustrate. J. K. Rowling is a billionaire for her world building, and deservedly so. Does that mean Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world is just better painted than all the other genre stories working with the same idea? Does The Handmaid’s Tale just out dystopian run of the mill SF writers? Maybe so, but why?

It’s pretty obvious that more people on Earth can understand what the implications of Big Brother are over philosophical implications of Arrakis. Too many hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century encountered a totalitarian state first hand, or fought against them in wars, or spent years hearing about them in the news, not to understand the brilliant portrayal of Big Brother and the savage criticism of them with the creation of Newspeak.

The reason why Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World are so well known in the 20th century is they describe so clearly the quintessential fears of the 20th century. All stories set in the future are about the present, and I guess the better they are about exploring the present, the more copies they will sell, and the better chance they will be part of the curricula in high schools and colleges.

The entire time I spent reading Nineteen Eighty-Four off my Kindle I was amazed by how relevant this book written in 1948 was to 2013. To write that Orwell was brilliant is an undeserving understatement. We live in a society that worships freedom, yet we live with constant NSA surveillance, continuous war, Homeland Security, and the sun never sets on our drone airspace. Our paranoia knows knows no bounds. In terms of political psychology and insight into the human heart, Orwell runs away with the prize for applying science fiction techniques for writing about the future to say so much about now. Nor has any science fiction writer ever attempted to explore the linguistic territory of Newspeak, which is the real science that makes Nineteen Eighty-Four great science fiction.

I haven’t reread Brave New World recently, but I plan to. Brave New World was written in 1931 and I just finished a book, One Summer: American 1927 by Bill Bryson that is the perfect companion to the Huxley book, because it explained the world Huxley was living in when he wrote his classic. It’s a time when many U.S. governors and mayors belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, where many prominent Americans publically espoused beliefs in eugenics and extreme racism, where many states had passed eugenic laws, and racism was the law of the land. The twenties was the decade that mass production and mass communication really got massive. It was a decade where America began the Americanization of the world. That scared Huxley. Huxley was afraid of America in 1930, and Orwell was afraid of Russia in 1948.

Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are true dystopian novels – they are anti utopian, written in response to intellectuals promoting utopian solutions to world problems. Huxley and Orwell understood the world in which they lived, and wrote books that showed off that knowledge in deeply insightful ways. They both used science fiction as a literary device to philosophize about ideas if written as nonfiction would have been entertaining to few, and boring to many, but because of those techniques, wowed millions. Readers still study and reference their work. And those novels would not have had the impact they did without the science fiction.

Huxley and Orwell, and other literary writers, use science fiction to bring political, ethical and scientific ideas to the masses. Why don’t more genre writers attempt this? Heinlein tried, especially with Stranger in a Strange Land, his most ambitious novel. So, why did he fail? I think for two reasons. First, it included ESP, or PSI powers, that aren’t scientific or believable, and second, it promoted his personal ideas about freedom, especially sexual freedom, nudity, and group sex, which few people beside the hippies of the 1960s shared.

Ray Bradbury hit one out of the park with Fahrenheit 451, but it’s never achieved the popular acclaim that Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four has. Maybe because it wasn’t nearly as ambitious as those two. And dare I say it, maybe the target, those people who would give up reading for mindless television, were insulted rather than inspired to canonize literacy?

John Brunner also tried several novels of this type, using science fiction to make political statements, especially Stand on Zanzibar. Zanzibar was an experimental tour de force that was hard to comprehend or read by the general reader, but dazzled the exceptional reader. It should have been a contender. It should be better remembered. Both Fahrenheit 451 and Stand on Zanzibar are shining examples of what pulp writers can do when they aim high.

I think the genre writer that comes closest in writing ambitious science fiction for the non science fiction reading masses was Orson Scott Card and his book Ender’s Game. It was obvious targeted at genre readers, but it was widely read outside of the genre. It was never as sophisticated as Huxley and Orwell’s books, and didn’t deal with broad contemporary issues, but it dealt with xenocide in a way that made it relevant to the average reader who could translate it into commentary on genocide, or commentary on science fiction. Unfortunately, the recent movie version of the story targets Ender’s Game at the lowest common denominator video game player, whose kill anything that moves instinct means they have deaf ears for the ethical insights.

The 2014 Earth is just as fucked up as the 1948 Earth, even more so, so why aren’t we reading novels that targets our political, social and ethical failures like modern science fictional smart bombs that are literary descendants of Huxley and Orwell? Is it because serious thinkers no longer believe that science fiction is the proper tool? Has decades of fun science fiction dulled the edge of sharp science fiction? Or maybe we don’t have political and social thinkers like Orwell or Huxley anymore, because those writers work for the New York Times or Fox News. Let’s hope it’s not that times aren’t bad enough yet to be muses for such writers.

JWH – 12/31/13