Re: Incatena
Posted: Wed May 04, 2011 4:08 pm
Is that really so quaint?
Ah, those sex scenes that appear suddenly from nowhere, in the middle of the story... Anticlimatic. You can also find them in Larry Niven's Ringworld. It's a generational thing, maybe?finlay wrote:[...] It was the same when I was reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (still the last thing I reviewed on my blog even though this is now several weeks ago), which had occasional sex scenes jump out at you from nowhere. I ended up just grinning and bearing it... [...]
this reminds me of the scene where Sax, the diminutive rational physicist character is fucking Hiroko, the transrational goddess-ecologist character, and Robinson lovingly describes how he takes pleasure in sticking in sticking his sesquicentenarian hand in and out of her equally superannuated pubic hair and making it appear and disappearIzo wrote:Ah, those sex scenes that appear suddenly from nowhere, in the middle of the story... Anticlimatic. You can also find them in Larry Niven's Ringworld. It's a generational thing, maybe?finlay wrote:[...] It was the same when I was reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (still the last thing I reviewed on my blog even though this is now several weeks ago), which had occasional sex scenes jump out at you from nowhere. I ended up just grinning and bearing it... [...]
I immediately thought of that very scene when finlay first brought it up! The third book in the series pretty much went poo-flinging crazy in a lot of ways, but the tiny ancient man screwing the gigantic nympho Martian for no Goddamn reason was pretty bad. I still think the first book is amazing.Pthug wrote:this reminds me of the scene where Sax, the diminutive rational physicist character is fucking Hiroko, the transrational goddess-ecologist character, and Robinson lovingly describes how he takes pleasure in sticking in sticking his sesquicentenarian hand in and out of her equally superannuated pubic hair and making it appear and disappearIzo wrote:Ah, those sex scenes that appear suddenly from nowhere, in the middle of the story... Anticlimatic. You can also find them in Larry Niven's Ringworld. It's a generational thing, maybe?finlay wrote:[...] It was the same when I was reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (still the last thing I reviewed on my blog even though this is now several weeks ago), which had occasional sex scenes jump out at you from nowhere. I ended up just grinning and bearing it... [...]
that is all
exactly.brandrinn wrote: I immediately thought of that very scene when finlay first brought it up! The third book in the series pretty much went poo-flinging crazy in a lot of ways, but the tiny ancient man screwing the gigantic nympho Martian for no Goddamn reason was pretty bad. I still think the first book is amazing.
In many aspects Blue Mars was a lengthening rather than a continuation of Green Mars. While Red Mars has that distinctively flavour typical of the adventure fantasy novel it is, the last two books are more quiet, as well as philosophical and utopian-centered, with all that political-social-economical struggle and all those ideas so typical too of science-fiction (longevity, far space travel, etc), which is not bad per se but they're lengthened through two big volumes, which is a little too much.brandrinn wrote:I immediately thought of that very scene when finlay first brought it up! The third book in the series pretty much went poo-flinging crazy in a lot of ways, but the tiny ancient man screwing the gigantic nympho Martian for no Goddamn reason was pretty bad. I still think the first book is amazing.Pthug wrote:this reminds me of the scene where Sax, the diminutive rational physicist character is fucking Hiroko, the transrational goddess-ecologist character, and Robinson lovingly describes how he takes pleasure in sticking in sticking his sesquicentenarian hand in and out of her equally superannuated pubic hair and making it appear and disappearIzo wrote:Ah, those sex scenes that appear suddenly from nowhere, in the middle of the story... Anticlimatic. You can also find them in Larry Niven's Ringworld. It's a generational thing, maybe?finlay wrote:[...] It was the same when I was reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (still the last thing I reviewed on my blog even though this is now several weeks ago), which had occasional sex scenes jump out at you from nowhere. I ended up just grinning and bearing it... [...]
that is all
Vassily Aksyonov does the same thing - in many of his novels people have sex every twenty pages or so, without it really being necessary for the story (IMO). My impresssion is that it's some kind of bug that infected writers who went through their adolescence during the 50s/60s.Izo wrote:Ah, those sex scenes that appear suddenly from nowhere, in the middle of the story... Anticlimatic. You can also find them in Larry Niven's Ringworld. It's a generational thing, maybe?
No we can't and if you think QM is saying we can, you've misunderstood it. Write a thousand times: "QM doesn't permit superluminal messaging".Ashroot wrote:How would quantum mechanics play into technology? Today we are at the door front of this technology. In a few years we feasibly can send faster than light messages with 100% encryption. Imagine 2000 years from now.
Why would you even need to cloak an interstellar ship - space is huge, no one is going to detect it. If you're afraid of getting detected, cooling it down to a bit over 3 kelvin is what you should go for. No fancy complicated optical illusion.Couldn't you cloak an interstellar ship though meta-materials?
Delany's Dhalgren. It's not just that there's a sex scene every twenty pages... it's the goddamn ten-page-long gangbang scene. I mean being an innocent English boy, my first reaction to these scenes is mild embarrasment, and then 'no, well, there's no reason to be embarrassed, this is a perfectly legitimate thing for authors to want to write about, it's not as though it's here for titillation or anything', but then it becomes "oh dear god can we not please get on with the plot, this is soooooo boring!". Now, admittedly the sex scenes are in keeping with the rest of the book, and, also admittedly, the fact that the ten page gangbang is kind of boring and pointless is probably the point of that scene, but it's not very fun to read through!hwhatting wrote:Vassily Aksyonov does the same thing - in many of his novels people have sex every twenty pages or so, without it really being necessary for the story (IMO). My impresssion is that it's some kind of bug that infected writers who went through their adolescence during the 50s/60s.Izo wrote:Ah, those sex scenes that appear suddenly from nowhere, in the middle of the story... Anticlimatic. You can also find them in Larry Niven's Ringworld. It's a generational thing, maybe?
I haven't read the book, so what I will say here is just a thought.Civil War Bugle wrote:So socionomics works nicely in the whirling world of AD 4901, where it's had a nice amount of time to be thought up and be implemented, and is supposed to be based on the past (at the time of the novel) 3000 years of humanity's high tech industrial culture. It's mentioned that colonies don't necessarily instantly implement the full socionomics program, but that may be because of peculiarities related to being interstellars colonies. Which invites the question, how high tech does your culture need to be, for socionomics to work well for you, assuming you have the political will to implement it? And somewhat relatedly, on what geographic scale do you need to implement it? It exists in a culture where people can connect to the internet via their brains and where very intelligent AI exists, and where we have a nice interstellar economic zone. I assume that if all economic interaction between the different stellar systems inhabited by humans stopped in 5000, each human planet could get by on its own easily enough with a nicely functioning socionomic economy without much lose, but what if you take a Socionomics 101 textbook and send it in a time machine to the ancient past?
If some dudes have socionomic knowledge and sufficient political will behind them, how well could you implement socionomics today, or in 1950, 1900, or 1850? Any interesting things about trying to implement it earlier than that? I have the telegraph in my mind as the earliest point at which real data of real usefulness to the real development of socionomics started to be available, since it allows somewhat fast communications, and is at about the early times of human industrial development. But could socionomics be applied usefully in 1850 on a worldwide scale, assuming sufficient political will to force it through, or is that too early?
And if not on a global scale, how easily can it be applied in one country or a group of countries in the present or recent past? Could the USA or the USSR, or Nato or the Warsaw Pact, suddenly decide to implement it and have it function properly while having a good chunk of the planet not following this sudden new ideology? Could some lower subnational polity do so, such as the state of California or the city of Chicago?
Or, even if the world or nation or whatever wanted to do so, is socionomics dependent on also having a given level of technology or development like how you couldn't build a nuclear bomb in 1700 even if you had a perfect understanding of 2013 physics?
EDIT: And to be sure, this is distinct from the question of whether, in actual practice, you could get the political willpower to implement it in the first place, in 2013 or the past two centuries. Or, for that matter, whether socionomic would work among Almeans who are receptive and at the right tech level, or whether socionomics needs to be tweaked for non-humans.
It's like the exact opposite of everything zomp has ever written on his blog and website. I couldn't imagine him making a novel and having a Trotsky-like idiot forcing something of that kindCivil War Bugle wrote:I guess this is more or less what I was expecting, although I was hoping to amuse myself with thoughts of Trotsky implementing socionomics with an iron hand, haha.
The Trotsky reference was a joke, of course.Yiuel Raumbesrairc wrote:It's like the exact opposite of everything zomp has ever written on his blog and website. I couldn't imagine him making a novel and having a Trotsky-like idiot forcing something of that kindCivil War Bugle wrote:I guess this is more or less what I was expecting, although I was hoping to amuse myself with thoughts of Trotsky implementing socionomics with an iron hand, haha.
?Pthagnar wrote:yeah, so what?
NE: also epicureanism isn't about living doped up! that isn't happiness, because you're not in any fit state to do philosophy! and being "cut off from the world" is the last thing epicureans want. junkies have precious few friends in the first place, but isolation would just make it worse.