Friday, July 31, 2009

Science Fiction, Forbidden Planet

Tell us 'Your' Truth

Welcome to the site. This is, as the earlybirds know, a spinoff. We want you to be posters. You can either contact the source (you know how) or post a comment you'd like to be considered as a post. Just say in your comment "Please post." Sound fair? I'll be back later with a "Mission Statement" and some "Rules of Engagement." Now's your chance to offer input about what both of those should be.

9 comments:

  1. "Furian". Nice. I have actually seen Forbidden Planet. A serious role for Leslie Neilson; very strange. Okay, IP, maybe you're right; maybe there is more to talk about.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good first post. I'll write you a long bit about John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness" that will ensure my banniation from here, too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. My suggestions:

    For a mission statement, something along the lines of: 'about the possibility that pop culture phenomena like "Terminator" and comic books are where the human need for heroism, mythology, plot, and intense drama hide, or are preserved, when the official culture defaults its responsibilities to address these needs in the form of high art.' I read that earlier today and thought it was pretty good.

    Rules of engagement: I'd suggest "obscenities and pornications" should only be used if they serve a purpose -- if they serve as something more than a profane version of "um" or "uh" or "smurf."

    Another rule of engagement: the blog's definition of "science fiction" should be as broad as possible, both in terms of genre (e.g., horror, psycho-thriller, mystery, fantasy -- all of which my high school sci-fi teacher classified as subgenres of science fiction, and he was a good teacher, so there) and in terms of medium (movie, book, video game, multimedia experience, etc.).

    ReplyDelete
  4. This is Eduardo, btw.

    Question: is this going to be just about sci-fi or other elements of entertainment and pop culture? Not celebrity gossip, but things like music, other genres of books & film, general culture commentary, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Post if worth posting...

    Mission statement: To start at sci-fi, but to end at the rest of the Universe. Modern culture is worth thinking about and analyzing, but to think, we must talk -- there must be an exchange of ideas to create synthesis. This doesn't happen enough in Instapunk's comment rolls because of the intimidation factor, the desire to stop continually say 'yeah, me too', and the relative difficulty of keeping a conversation alive as current events push the daily posts down. Perhaps a new incarnation of the forum is what we need after all...

    Rules? I'm with Gug -- let's keep it as broad as possible (as if we could help it).

    ReplyDelete
  6. How about a discussion on the Foundation Trilogy? My all time favorite sci-fi novels.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Biology rules, or should rule, everything. It is only the brain that stands between reality and reason.

    Ominous musical drone.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I think hiroantagonist said it perfectly.

    ReplyDelete
  9. John C. Wright is a sci-fi writer whose blog I follow (I use Google Reader to keep track of them all). Haven't actually read one of his books yet, but the blog is always entertaining. Here's his latest post:

    http://johncwright.livejournal.com/269744.html

    Quote:

    It is ghastly to come across evidence of this narrowness of outlook in my own field: the one reason why science fiction can claim that it merits more than to be dismissed as juvenile wish-fulfillment, pulp fiction, and rubbish, is that it is imaginative. Science fiction peers across the crenelations of time, if only with the mind's eye, and sees what the world looks like from another viewpoint.

    But alas, even while they are congratulating themselves on their broadmindedness, a generation cut off from the past, the generation for whom it is always Year Zero, the year of the revolution, pictures only those futures that reflect their present political concerns and political correctnesses, as if the latest fad were eternal writ.

    I remember a story of mine set half a million years in the future being criticized on the grounds that it displayed insufficient sensitivity toward environmental issues.

    I remember a role-playing game set alone the time-road from Roger Zelazny's under-appreciated ROADMARKS. The moderator there introduced a character from an alternate time-branch of World War Two, and the player-characters saw a Negro officer in an SS Uniform. The master race was not the Aryans in that time-branch, you see. Well, one of the players asked in astonishment, "You mean the SS Officer is an African-American?" The moderator sardonically replied, "Well, no; obviously he is German."

    The player asking the question did not even realize he was speaking in jargon. He had never heard honest language in his life: he had only heard Newspeak, the special non-language of word-noises and nonsense-phrases chosen and used by those who think language is a tool of social engineering, not something with an innate integrity or worth.

    ReplyDelete