In Other Worlds by Margaret Atwood – Is Science Fiction Fantasy?

Is it time that we became atheists to the final frontier?

Tom Murphy at Do the Math has written “Why Not Space?”  His math is very convincing, because of the fantastic distances involved, the likelihood of space travel beyond the Moon is tiny.  We haven’t been beyond low Earth orbit since 1972 and there appears to be little public support or political will to do so again.

But it’s more than that.  I’ve just read In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood where she psychoanalyzes literature for the origins of science fiction.  The roots of literature are in the earliest of myths, but then so are the roots of science fiction.  The core of the book is about what is science fiction.  Atwood doesn’t like calling her science fiction like novels science fiction because she thinks they are realistic speculation about possible futures.  She feels science fiction is about far out stuff that can’t happen. Now hard core science fiction fans like me want to believe that science fiction is realistic speculation about possible futures, but I have to admit few other people think that way.  The public lumps any weird-ass story into the science fiction genre category and so it’s gotten the reputation for unbelievable stories.

atwood-in-other-worlds

Margaret Atwood says what she written is like what Jules Verne wrote, stuff that could happen, and that it was H. G. Wells who wrote stuff that couldn’t happen, citing The War of the Worlds as her prime example – and that’s what she calls science fiction.  Of course, there are those of us who believe Wells was speculating about something that could have happened, but his conjectures have been disproven by later science.

What Tom Murphy is saying, and there are many like him in recent years, is that human exploration of space might not happen, that it’s not practical, or even wise.  And wouldn’t that make Margaret Atwood right?  That science fiction is about stuff that can’t happen.  Which means science fiction is fantasy.

Normally, I would argue against that, because I still think we have a chance with space exploration.  Of course, I will admit that 99.999% of science fiction about space travel is patently bogus speculation and thus fantasy.  But I still hold out the possibility that humans will go into space, maybe even to the stars.  It just won’t be like what science fiction has predicted so far.

However, reading In Other Worlds made me think differently – not about space travel, but science fiction.  I’ve read other books linking science fiction to its origins in myths before, but this book is making me think about it in new ways.  Atwood links myths, religions, literature, comic books, science fiction and fantasy all into one human tendency to make up far out shit.  As a species one of our defining characteristics is we dream up fantastic concepts to think about, and its when you start studying this tendency as a whole, from the earliest times that we have records of human thought to the latest, that we see it’s all of one cloth.

I’m becoming an atheist to my own religion – science fiction.

Science fiction fans believe their stories are better than myths and fantasies because of the science and technology, and they believe their fantastic stories represented something new and different – and possible!  After reading In Other Worlds, I think we’re all smoking the same opium.  Science fiction, fantasy and comic books fuel the same need in modern minds that myths and religions feed to primitive minds.

What we need is a label that encompasses the whole kit and caboodle, that defines and explains our craving for the fantastic.  Until someone comes up with a definitive term, I’m going to call it all fantasy.  Evidently humans need air, water, food, friendship and fantasy to survive.

Now what’s fascinating about In Other Worlds, and why I encourage you to read it, is Atwood’s writing about her love of science fiction, especially the chapter on Ursula K. LeGuin.  Atwood loves both science fiction as she defines it and speculative fiction.  Her hunger for reading and fantasy as a child, adolescent and adult knows no bounds.  And as an academic, writer and savvy reader she traces our love of the fantastic back as far as history and anthropology can take us.

JWH – 10/23/11

Why Aren’t The Great Courses by The Teaching Company Online?

If you aren’t familiar with The Great Courses by the Teaching Company you should be.  That is if you enjoy learning.  The Great Courses are a series of college like courses done by well known professors for educational entertainment.  I’ve bought several over the years and have checked out others from my library.  Originally they came on audio cassettes, and since evolved to DVDs, digital audio downloads, and now video downloads.  But what I’m asking is why aren’t they available for streaming?  The Teaching Company needs to create a Netflix like service for their educational videos so I can watch them on my TV, computer, iPad or even iPhone.

I don’t like owning stuff like DVDs anymore. Netflix streaming has ruined me for that.  Nor do I like owning MP3s, Rhapsody and Rdio have ruined me for owning music.  I like to pay a monthly fee and just call stuff up when I’m in the mood.  If the Teaching Company offered their library for $7.99 a month I’d subscribe.

Online education is taking the world of higher education by storm.  Educational videos from the TED Talks, Khan Academy and iTunes U are also gaining popularity.  There’s a market for fun learning, or edutainment, especially when it’s convenient.  The Teaching Company videos have always been rather staid in production format, reminding me of educational TV from the 1960s, but they are slowly learning to jazz things up with multimedia to support the lectures.  What The Teaching Company needs to do is get away from it’s old fashion 20th century marketing concepts.

The Teaching Company would do well to model its distribution on Hulu Plus and Netflix.  The $7.99 all you can eat video services are the way to go.  That’s $95.88 a year, about equal to one of their 36 part courses.  Now I’m sure The Teaching Company fears giving everything away for the price of one course, but how many people buy more than one course a year?  And would they attract more customers if they offered their courses in a much more convenient and easier to pay fashion?

Sooner or later someone is going to bring edutainment to the Netflix streaming model.  Right now there are several companies trying to copy Netflix, such as Amazon Prime Video, but they tend to offer the same kind of content – movies and old TV shows.  The same thing is happening with music.  There’s are a half dozen or more streaming music services all with almost the same 12-15 million songs.  I would think the entrepreneurial action would be delivering new kinds of content, and I’m thinking online education would be popular for a niche market.

The Power of Online Learning

Look at this sample lesson from Educator.com for Cascading Style Sheets.  It’s quite slick, and it illustrates the value of studying at the computer or TV screen.  You can pause the lecture at any point.  You can have your own text editor in another window to practice the lesson as you watch.  You can have a third window open to take notes.  Educator.com charges $35 paid by the month, or $240 paid by the year, to access all its courses, which mainly focuses on tutoring kids for high school or some basic college courses.  That’s a good value if you’re going to school and want extra help, but a little high for edutainment.

Free Online Education

These sites are offering free courses in a variety of formats. You can go to YouTube and search on any subject and find videos to help you learn too.  The Teaching Company has a lot of competition from free sources.  But their video and audio courses are well produced.  I don’t mind paying for them, but I have to say there’s lots of good free content out there.  Look at this MIT video on linear algebra.  It looks like being back in school with a professor at the blackboard.

Another free approach is from the Khan Academy.  And that’s the cool thing about having a variety of courses – if you are having trouble with a topic, just find another teacher with a different approach.

Look at this link to Educator.com’s lesson on linear algebra to see even another approach.  It uses a multiwindow technique, with the professor in one window, the exercises on a whiteboard in another, and the course outline in a third.

I wished The Teaching Company had some sample lectures I could link or show.  But here’s a lecture at YouTube on How to Read World Literature.  It is has a rather long intro, but even that explains the value of the lecture.  Often this is what The Great Courses are like, a professor who is passionate about his subject just talking to a class.  The Great Courses are a bit more slick, filming the lecture without distractions with better sound, but it’s the content that counts.

I think The Teaching Company has done a poor job of advertising itself.  I’ve asked a number of professors I know if they’ve seen one of The Great Courses videos and many have not.  Over the years I’ve met a few other Great Courses fans, but I feel The Great Courses are an acquired taste.  Most bookworms read fiction, but if you love non-fiction they may appeal to you.  Even then, you can read a book by Bart D. Ehrman or James Gleick and ingest facts far faster than you can by watching lectures.  However, there is something different about having a specialist just talk to you, and maybe show some sample photos or film clips.  Listening to people lecture sometimes helps with learning.

One reason why I like The Great Courses is they enhance my personal map of reality.  For instance I watched From Monet to Van Gogh: A History of Impressionism and learned so much, that when I went to Washington DC looking forward to seeing the Air & Space Museum, I actually ended up more thrilled at the National Gallery.  And since then I’ve read books about the history of Impressionism and the artists, bought impressionism art books, and took in every visiting exhibit of impressionistic paintings that have come to town since. 

I’ve read three books by Bart D. Ehrman on early Christian history, and now want to get his lecture series from The Great Courses.  What happens is you take up a topic and start studying it just for fun.  There are no stressful tests, no homework, no writing papers.  It’s just learning because it’s fascinating.

That’s why I believe I would enjoy The Great Courses if they were available like TV shows.  Instead of watching an old episode of Star Trek on Netflix, I could watch a lecture on British literature, or one about cosmology.  Watching the YouTube clip above about world literature makes me want to read outside of my normal territory of the US, Canada and Great Britain.

JWH – 10/22/11

Aegean Dream by Dario Ciriello

Aegean Dream by Dario Ciriello is a memoir about Dario and his wife Linda giving up their good life in California and moving to the Greek island of Skópelos.  I bought this book because I met Dario back in 2002 at the Clarion West writer’s workshop.  We were part of a class of 17 wannabe writers that lived together on a 12th floor dorm near downtown Seattle while taking daily classes with science fiction writers and editors.  Most of the people were young, but Dario, Doug Sharp and I were all 50 that year.  I think we wanted to reinvent ourselves.  Dario, from Italian heritage but born in London emigrated to America in 1989, was one hell of a charming guy.  I envied his energy, grace and social skills.  He was an artist, craftsman and musician that wanted to be a writer too.  I wasn’t surprised when a few years later he and Linda moved to Greece because of his adventurous nature.  Years later, when I heard he wrote a book about living abroad I was anxious to read it.  Dario lives the way I dream of living, and since I’ve always fantasized about living in another country, this book was a riveting read for me.

Dario and Linda had visited Skópelos on vacation after Clarion West and had fallen in love with it.  Dario then convinced Linda they should move there, and they carefully planned, work to save money, got rid of possessions, and most of all, studied Greek to prepare for their trip.  I’m going to try and not tell too much of their story because I don’t want to spoil the book’s narrative as it unfolds, but I will say learning the language before moving to a foreign land paid off a 1000% dividend.

That’s lesson one for me.  I’m terrible with languages.  I got through high school German and college Spanish, but it’s all forgotten.  My friend Janis spends all her extra time learning Spanish to make her many south of the border vacations special, and so I constantly see how hard that is.  I tried studying classical Greek one semester and couldn’t handle the strange alphabet, so I’m very impressed with Dario and Linda learning Greek.  They met other British and Americans living on Skópelos that hadn’t learned Greek and making the effort to learn the language, no matter how comical the results were sometimes, allowed Dario and Linda to break the cultural barrier and make hordes of friends.

Lesson two is don’t move to another country with a shipping container full of belongings.  Dario evidently is a packrat, to Linda’s great distress, and has been moving from country to country his whole life with his family’s belongings on his back, so to say.

Lesson three is harder to explain.  It’s about being a craftsman and artist.   Linda went from being a highly paid office manager to wanting to make natural soap for tourists.  Even when you can make something beautiful that many people admire, it’s really hard to make money at it.  We live in a world where everyone wants everything to be cheap, and it’s hard to make a living making something beautiful that takes a lot of time to make.  There were many stories of small business failures in Aegean Dreams, and that’s a story in itself.

Lessons four and five are about marriage and friendships.  Dario and Linda have a wonderful relationship and it comes out in their story, and they both have the knack for making friends, even in a foreign land with people that don’t speak their language.

I recommend this book because I learned so much from it.  On one hand living in another country is like living here.  You have to shop for food, work, clean house, deal with leaky toilets, buy furniture, go to parties, the list of similarities is long.  What’s different is how people act, think and talk – all the cultural stuff.  And there’s a huge difference between the US and Greece.  And you wouldn’t know that unless you lived there, or the next best thing, read a memoir from someone who had.  Being a tourist in no way lets you learn what its like to live in another country, and this book illustrates that perfectly.

Aegean Dream is a memoir about how hard it is to be a stranger in a strange land and live by different rules.  Dario and Linda make amazing successes integrating into their new life, but had to swim upstream against a vicious current of bureaucracy.  Aegean Dream is great background reading why Greece is doing so bad now on the world’s economic stage.  Dario and Linda came to Greece just at the time when its citizens went wild with credit.  About a third of Greece’s citizens work for the government, and all have become addicted to governmental generosity.  Corruption and a snake pit of regulations make living in Greece impossible for outsiders and cruel for its own folk.

After reading Aegean Dream  I doubt I could live in another country.  The story completely convinced me what a wimp I am.  I could never have done what Dario and Linda did.  It would have crushed me.  And to be completely honest, I wouldn’t even have the balls to try.  I really admire Dario and Linda for their great adventure.  I wish my wife Susan and I could do something like that.  Aegean Dream also showed what it takes for two people to live closely together in their life, and I really admired that too.

The book describes Skópelos as a paradise of natural beauty, and parts of the movie Momma Mia was filmed near where Dario and Linda lived.  So if you got Greek island fever after watching that show, read Aegean Dream.  The movie will make you want to visit, but read the book before you plan to move there.

[You can read about Dario and Linda’s adventures and see photos at the blog he kept. But get the book for the whole story.]

JWH – 10/20/11

Blogging and Novel Writing

I’ve always wanted to write a novel but never had the focus or determination to complete one.  November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWrMo.  The goal of NaNoWrMo is to get would-be novelists to complete a first draft of 50,000 words.  Now that’s about the minimal length of fiction to be called a novel, and most editors usually want twice as many words if you submit to them, but the NaNoWrMo consider 50,000 a good writing marathon for one month’s writing.  Their goal is not for people to complete a polished novel, but just go the distance.  They’ve yet to make December National Novel Rewrite Month, but many bloggers have suggested it. 

Essentially this means knocking out 1,667 words a day of fiction.  I have no trouble writing as many words on a blog post, but fiction is different.  I love blogging and don’t expect to give it up for the month of November.  Blogging is therapeutic for me.  Writing about something that requires research exercises my memory.  And I definitely need help with my memory – it’s slipping away more every day. 

But I want to write a novel.  Of course I’ve been wanting to write a novel since I was in high school over forty years ago.  Rationally I’d think if I hadn’t written one by now I never will.  Well, I’m looking at NaNoWrMo as a shit or get of the pot test.  Either I’ve got to finish a novel now or give up thinking about ever writing one.  All my blogging indicates I like writing essays, which suggests I should work harder to polish that skill.  If I fail to produce a first draft in November that’s what I will do – but for now I want to give it one more try.

What I should do is publish my daily NaNoWrMo work here but that might screw up my chances of getting the novel published in the future.  I’ve read that most authors have to write several novels before the get one good enough to publish, so maybe I’m being too protective of my first first draft.  Also, I believe, and this might be naive, that I’ve got a unique science fiction idea and and I don’t want to spoil it by letting people read a first draft.  However, I might be willing to show versions of the opening here as a marketing research to see if anyone responds.

Working on a novel will seem strange though.  My blogging is about watching the world and reacting.  It’s about looking outward.  Novel writing is about looking inward and creating everything from scratch.  That might be why I’ve never been able to write a novel.  I’ve written about 30 short stories and even 5,000-12,000 words are an agony to produce.  I recently put my best effort online and it sank like a stone.  Writing non-fiction is engaging – writing fiction is lonely.

I haven’t signed up with NaNoWrMo yet, and I still might chicken out.  The idea of coming home from work every evening and turning off the world, shunning all my favorite hobbies to focus on one activity is scary.  I love my evening routine.  Writing fiction will be like working two jobs.  So why do it?  I don’t know.  I read a lot of fiction and I’ve always wanted to create a fictional work of art.  It’s like going to a party and always listening to everyone else talk.  Writing a novel would be like having my say.

JWH – 10/18/11

Occupy Wall Street v. The Tea Party

Occupy Wall Street protests have the reputation of being about diffused public anger with no real political agenda.  The Tea Party has always been rigidly focused on anti-taxes but defines itself around the Contract from America platform that its followers stick closely to in their political campaigning.  From their start in 2009 the Tea Party quickly organized into a grass roots federation of citizens that got many people elected around the country and in congress.  But the Tea Party isn’t 100% a single structure either, with several web sites using the Tea Party name and each having slightly different platforms.

If the Occupy Wall Street movement wants political success they too will need to organize across the country into a political movement.  First off, they need a better name, and second they need a political platform that will counter challenge the conservatives and define their movement.  And they need to coop the Democratic party like the Tea Party has taken over the Republican party.  Third parties just don’t work, unless they think Americans are ready for a complete change.  But looking at list of American political parties and their history makes this doubtful.

The phrase “occupy Wall Street” just doesn’t ring true for a long term political party moniker.  I’m not sure what these young new protestors want, but they sound like an Egalitarian Party because of their identity with the 99%.  Since the Occupy Wall Street protests quickly found sympathy with people in other countries they would do well to make it a world-wide movement.  The old phrase, Think Globally, Act Locally applies well to them because of their environmental demands.

In a world of global communications, global economy, global environment, why not a global political movement?  However, if they don’t stay focused on the critical issues they will bog down and divide their followers.  If you look at the various political platforms on the Tea Party sites you  see how they’ve broaden their anti-tax focus to other issues – for example look at the Non-negotiable 15 Core Beliefs at the TeaParty.org site that deal with guns, English and family values.

The Tea Party advocates a small government movement where individuals are expected to pull their own weight.  The Occupy Wall Street movement advocates economic fairness for all in a society that favors the rich.  Both are about money.  The Tea Party people want more money for their economic freedom by paying less taxes at the local, state and federal levels – thus the emphasis for a small government.  The Occupy Wall Street movement is about protecting the individual rather than the bottom line, and that means social engineering, big government and more taxes.  There is a direct conflict of goals.

Our society is politically polarized and getting more polarized all the time.  I fear this process is only going to get nastier.  The 2012 election will probably be a lot like the one in 1968.

JWH – 10/18/11