Author: Anders Monsen (Page 65 of 90)

The vision of real politicians squirming from seeing themselves potryed in a bad light warms my heart. The fact that this is happening in Great Britain and that it’s Labor politicos makes me raise an eyebrow or two in surprise. Then you read further and you see the real cause –

“I didn’t mind a little betrayal of socialist ideals,” says Beaton, “but the war was it.”

Still a healthy dose of disrepect of public figures is always a good thing.

Note: I am far from pro-war, but I wonder if the motives had been non-socialist whether this would have reached the airwaves.

Interesting interview with a leading transhumanist, Nick Bostrom. According to conservative historian Francis Fukuyama, transhumanism is “the greatest threat to the future of humanity” so you know it has to be interesting and probably a good idea. It’s definitely a hot topic in modern sf, viz the novels and short stories of Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge, Chris Moriarty, and countless others.

Claire Wolfe recommends a book that I think I will need to hunt down – The Secret of Santa Vittoria.

This seems like a very interesting book.

The time is a very near future, whose features are only slightly stepped up from today’s. The war is still on, and even more misdirected; domestic anti-terror measures have increased to the point where roadblocks and searches are universal and national identification cards are mandated. (In a nicely absurdist sequence, armed agents so thoroughly ransack a Canadian of Middle Eastern descent on his way into a Mariners game that they deposit a whiff of ammunition on his clothing. When he leaves the stadium in the middle of a disappointing afternoon, he is searched again and the residue prompts the evacuation of 30,000 spectators. One dies of a heart attack.)

One character is “August Vanags, the Latvian-born author of a bestselling Holocaust memoir, is a vociferous libertarian whose charm and wit suggest a concealed degeneracy,” and the other personalities in the book range all over the spectrum.

A few years I wrote a short story along comic lines, that I called “Bubba Builds a Spaceship.” I passed it around at a writers’ group I where I attended two sessions and then left. I sent it to a writer friend, who recommended a total re-write along very different lines, with more drama. Instead, I turned it into a short screenplay, and changed the title to “Mars, the Redneck Planet.” I put it away and did nothing. Tonight my wife saw a trailer on TV for this movie, and said, “Anders, they made a movie out of your story!” I watched the trailer again, and it’s eerily similar, although this is a drama with a few funny lines, and my story was intended as humorous and totally unrealistic from the beginning.

I just placed an order for this book by Ken MacLeod, which collects some of his shorter work, both fiction and non-fiction. NESFA Press runs a nice business, but the cover looks a little low-budget this time.

The newsletter is back from the printer, and I’m busy attaching labels and stamps to mail it out over the next couple of days. I’ve already started collecting articles and writing reviews for the next issue, due out some time in April.

If you want to review a book or movie for Prometheus, please send me an email at editor@lfs.org – yes, in the internet age there are still a few print publications around.

I read last week that there are 140 million member of MySpace. I’ve only visited the site to listen to a pre-release version of a Robin Guthrie song. I believe David Louis Edelman’s piece is a major reason I see no use in joining the site. That, and I’d probably end up with zero friends and go jump off a bridge. Ha.

To hide my shame at not knowing how to link to YouTude directly, a nod to the fellow ERB fans over at Rebels of Mars.

This has to be The. Worst. Movie. Adaptation. Of. A. Book. Ever.

The fact that this was filmed in 1976, one year before Star Wars, speaks volumes for the horrible state of social effects at the time, but even the actors look woefully miscast.