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I read an anthology of scifi published in 1950, and Well It was a different time. A really racist time. Also literally every story involved telepathy for some reason.
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Mar 15, 2024 00:28
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skasion posted:Clarke moved to Ceylon to do pederasty out of the public eye, zero question i remember reading something Asimov wrote about where Alfred Bester came up to him at a con and proceeded to do to him what Isaac would do to women at cons and Isaac briefly had a moment of self awareness before discarding it. https://jamesworrad.com/2021/09/08/asimov-got-his-rear end-pinched/
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Mar 15, 2024 00:33
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Tree Bucket posted:I read an anthology of scifi published in 1950, and Campbell's personal quirks and quack beliefs really set a lot of common SF tropes in place that only now is there a generation of writers starting to unpick them. The wiki page for Campbell's beliefs makes for...interesting reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell#Views And yeah, Asimov was a world-class creeper.
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Mar 15, 2024 00:43
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FMguru posted:And yeah, Asimov was a world-class creeper. Even as a 12 year old first getting into his books I realized pretty quickly that Asimov was an "ideas guy" and kind of sucked at writing actual characters. And would probably be a huge rear end in a top hat to interact with in person.
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Mar 15, 2024 00:56
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FMguru posted:The most influential SF editor of that era was John W. Campbell of Astounding (later Analog) and he was big into "psionics" as a totally real just-around-the-corner scientific discovery, and if you wanted to have any kind of career in writing SF, you needed to get Campbell to buy your stories, which is why so many stories of that era feature telepathy and psychic powers and suchlike. So you're saying... Campbell made the stories he desired come into existence with just the power of his mind? Wow! Psionics truly is the future! But yeah, that's really interesting- it seemed a weird coincidence that so many authors had the same themes at work. At first I suspected it was something to do with the hope that, in the wake of WW2, telepathy might allow for more understanding between nations; but it makes a lot more sense that one crank editor kept shoehorning telepaths into every drat story! e: that wiki section is, well, yes. Dude got involved in scientology, because of course he did.
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Mar 15, 2024 01:25
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I remember in another thread someone went 'Why is HP Lovecraft such a thing, surely there's a pulp sci-fi author who isn't weird about racism and sexism' and everyone is like '...how do we break it to em...' Like, Frank Herbert is legitimately doing well ahead of the pack for acknowledging material history, and having (some) women and implicitly nonwhite characters be intelligent and have agency.
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Mar 15, 2024 02:11
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I haven't read the books in decades, but a dumb meme had me wondering: Is there a reason Paul doesn't simply use The Voice in his duel with Feyd? I guess it would be like using a ladder to dunk: no one would be impressed, and the whole thing was a knife fight to impress all assembled that he should be White Boy Of The Month.
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Mar 15, 2024 15:34
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Owlbear Camus posted:I haven't read the books in decades, but a dumb meme had me wondering: Is there a reason Paul doesn't simply use The Voice in his duel with Feyd? His mom tells him there’s a secret password to shut off Feyd’s muscles and he’s like “I don’t want to use that”. Then when Feyd is about to stab him to death, he’s like “I won’t say it!” And Feyd just stands there with no idea what he’s talking about and eats a shank regardless.
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Mar 15, 2024 15:45
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A big thing with Paul is that even at that point, he's genuinely clinging to the whole idea of being on the Hero's Journey, and that he's in this to avenge his family, to protect himself and his people both original and newfound against genuinely wicked and monstrous enemies the galaxy is much better off without, the enemies he's been trained to fight and lead the fight against literally all his life. He's totally not just another despot goading on his armies with lies, performances, mind control and promises of blood and spoils. He's still an idealist, who wants to win or lose the fight in the right way- and of course, his visions suggest that not much would necessarily change if he dies at any point after declaring himself Muad'Dib, as all the material elements for the great galactic jihad are already there and in motion.
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Mar 15, 2024 15:57
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skasion posted:His mom tells him there’s a secret password to shut off Feyd’s muscles and he’s like “I don’t want to use that”. Then when Feyd is about to stab him to death, he’s like “I won’t say it!” And Feyd just stands there with no idea what he’s talking about and eats a shank regardless. It's kinda funny if you think about it because he used his voice anyway to defeat Feyd.
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Mar 15, 2024 16:05
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Both combatants brought cheating devices into that fight. I'm kinda glad the book just glossed over it and made the battle interesting.
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Mar 15, 2024 16:06
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Owlbear Camus posted:I haven't read the books in decades, but a dumb meme had me wondering: Is there a reason Paul doesn't simply use The Voice in his duel with Feyd? That is literally one of the differences between Paul and Feyd. In a duel earlier in the book, Feyd is losing, but his opponent had been programmed with a codeword that would defeat him, and Feyd, being a coward, slammed that button like it was going out of style and then pretended he won legit Paul, in the same situation, chose not to. While you can view it as a "oh yeah Paul was a better guy", it was more that it was one of Paul's small attempts to resist becoming a true beast which is an ongoing thing throughout the book, with a major part of Paul's journey being some attempt to hold onto some element of his humanity in the face of the Jihad. By the time Paul had reached that point, the Jihad was inevitable and any action he took would just change the nature of it, and Paul loathed that. (When he first rides the Sandworm he realizes that even if he just hosed up and died there, they'd still just work it into the Messiah prophecy.) It's also implied to be what spared his life in that moment. Count Fenring was watching the entire fight and Paul had many visions of his own dead body, but never a vision of his killer, and he suspected Count Fenring, the failed K-H, would be that man. Paul's refusal to embrace the Harkonnen tactic at the very end was seemingly the point where Fenring decided to disobey Shaddam and spare Paul.
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Mar 15, 2024 16:16
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I like how they did a tribute to the lovely Lynch fight by having Paul trap Feyd's knife and kick him at one point. I was kinda hoping for some kinda jujutsu trick where Paul counters Feyd's pin with a knife to the brain.Ghost Leviathan posted:Like, Frank Herbert is legitimately doing well ahead of the pack for acknowledging material history, and having (some) women and implicitly nonwhite characters be intelligent and have agency. Owlbear Camus posted:I haven't read the books in decades, but a dumb meme had me wondering: Is there a reason Paul doesn't simply use The Voice in his duel with Feyd? Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Mar 15, 2024 |
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Mar 15, 2024 16:18
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Halloween Jack posted:defeating Feyd with the Voice would make him look like a creature of the BG "En guarde!!" "Stab Your Own Balls!!!" credits
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Mar 15, 2024 16:32
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It's also worth noting that Paul's constant struggle between his humanity and the needs and pressures of his prescience is a major part of his character and not necessarily in a good way. Paul's actions guided him towards the Golden Path but he did not want to take that path, nor was he willing to make the sacrifices necessary to fully take that path. The end result was that he started down it in a way that lead to countless horrors and atrocities, but could not make himself fully embrace the sheer horror of what he was doing 'for the greater good' nor was he able to endure the horror of what he would need to do to himself to continue down that path. That got shunted off to Leto II. So Paul retained his humanity but in a way that could be well viewed as a failure since he neither prevented Jihad nor was willing to accept the consequences of becoming the ultimate monster and tyrant in order to preserve humanity. It's probably the most interesting thing about Paul. When put to the final Gom Jabbar test, he chose to gnaw his leg off and escape, rather than endure pain so as to remove a threat to the species. By the B-G argument of the concept that means he wasn't a human, but it fundamentally depends on his humanity as a modern audience would view it to reach that point.
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Mar 15, 2024 16:33
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Halloween Jack posted:Instead he wins on his own merits and institutes a White Boy Summer that will last for 3,500 years. It's coming. A White Boy Summer spreading across the beaches like an unquenchable thirst for Zima. A party rock vibe that waves the beats speaker pounding Technotronic's pump up the jam. BILLIONS kicking off their boat shoes! Blanco ninios zooted; spiced out of their very skulls!
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Mar 15, 2024 16:43
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I think it's also worth bearing in mind that the Kwisatz Haderach and the Golden Path are concepts invented by people, not some objectively existing thing just waiting to be discovered. They're more like, for example, Rosicrucian concepts of a monarch who would reunite Christendom and institute God's kingdom on earth. Was Paul a failed KH? Was Leto II the true KH or a corrupted KH? If a guy with no dick can be KH, should they have just put Fenring in charge? There aren't objective answers to these questions. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Mar 15, 2024 |
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Mar 15, 2024 16:56
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Halloween Jack posted:I think it's also worth bearing in mind that the Kwisatz Haderach and the Golden Path are concepts invented by people, not some objectively existing thing just waiting to be discovered. They're more like, for example, Rosicrucian concepts of a monarch who would reunite Christendom and institute God's kingdom on earth. Yeah, there's no solid answer to any of it. Except for the last one, Fenring's hum-language was the fuckin' worst.
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Mar 15, 2024 17:01
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ImpAtom posted:Except for the last one, Fenring's hum-language was the fuckin' worst. oh my GOD thank you.
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Mar 15, 2024 17:25
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Mister Speaker posted:Is it true the Giedi Prime scenes were shot in infrared? Someone told me that's what they did to really drive home the 'black sun' effect. Does that even make sense scientifically? Shooting in near infrared (i.e. what the sun makes, as opposed to what relatively cold objects such as your body emit) is easy. Cameras see it by default and specifically have a filter to block it out. Remove the IR filter, add a visible light filter, boom, IR camera. As for whether it makes sense to have an infrared sun, yeah. Our own sun's light is slightly more than half infrared. If you go for a much colder star, or a substellar object like a brown dwarf, you can get something that makes almost no visible light but still makes enough IR to make for a warm planet. Humans can't see that, though, but maybe space future humans are slightly modified. How it would look and whether it would be grayscale and whatnot is a question of how the brain would interpret it.
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Mar 15, 2024 17:26
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Scags McDouglas posted:"En guarde!!" “May thy dick chip and shatter!”
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Mar 15, 2024 17:52
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 If I saw this movie while I was a child this would 100% become my foundational fetish.
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Mar 15, 2024 17:55
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It's criminal. I had to settle for that lady in the first Star Trek movie. She wasn't even goth.
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Mar 15, 2024 18:02
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Joke Miriam posted:
Prometheus Engineer, Stephen Miller and alopecia Aphex Twin.
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Mar 15, 2024 18:19
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Soul Dentist posted:Not to grade things on a sliding scale but wasn't Niven's sex weirdness a lot... worse? I hope it's not too late to talk about how weird Niven is. I might be misremembering part of it because I read as much as I could of him when I was a kid, before I realized he was terrible. In his first published book, the main character is the coolest guy in the universe, a telepath with three testicles named Larry. Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex is actually a pretty well written pamphlet, and I see people independently come up with the same ideas in it all the time on Twitter and such. But it's still a very thoroughly worked out article on the scientific properties of Superman cum. If you want to know how Niven absolutely despises hippies and leftists at a truly Nixonian level, you can check out Oath of Fealty and Niven's Rules. Oath of Fealty has an absolutely disgusting Patty Hearst-inspired rape fantasy. I'm pretty sure Ringworld Engineers was typed out entirely one-handed. He also licensed out a spinoff Human-Kzin wars series to other writers that had a lot of sex crimes in them. There was an entire subplot in A World out of Time that revolved around a war between naked preteen boys and naked preteen girls. It is pretty amazing to me that books like Portnoy's Complaint get censored while Larry Niven, a man who had a completely different concept of "hard" SF from most dictionaries, flies completely under the radar. Edit: I want to come back to this to say that the OP's point about this being of its time is absolutely correct! I don't even think it's strictly conservative! The late 60s and 70s were a terrible, just awful time for sexual politics that it is worth remembering! NAMBLA was invented around then, Manson used the language of sexual revolution to be a straight up pimp, one could go on. I also remember the big plot resolution of one of Zelazny's books being where Corwin sexually assaults a passed-out woman until she wakes up and goes,  Frank Herbert was a weird dude, but of his time. Troubadour fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Mar 15, 2024 |
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Mar 15, 2024 18:26
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Troubadour posted:It is pretty amazing to me that books like Portnoy's Complaint get censored while Larry Niven, a man who had a completely different concept of "hard" SF from most dictionaries, flies completely under the radar. Older generations of moralists largely didn’t waste time trying to say which sci fi was immoral because back then it was hard to get people to take your moralism seriously if you were reading kid books about alien princesses swooning over red blooded spacemen at all. Whereas Roth was already considered a Significant Contemporary American Writer who was supposed (by psychopaths) to be writing about serious and morally edifying phenomena like Jewish people going to grad school. I’m trying to think what the first sff story was that sparked its very own moral panic and I’m not sure I can come up with it. There was a lot of early and mid century worry that pulps and comic books were corrupting the youth as such, but like…for detailed moral complaints, you actually need to read the books. So most of the censorship I can think of took the form of prude scifi publishers (about whom the wider world didn’t care) hacking up Theodore Sturgeon’s stuff to de-gay the aliens or whatever.
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Mar 15, 2024 18:50
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Scags McDouglas posted:"En guarde!!" Now I'm gonna do some pimp rear end poo poo and make your balls turn WHEEIIIITE!
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Mar 15, 2024 19:03
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Duncan Idaho is the real KH, and him giving a woman an orgasm just by climbing a cliff proves 1) it, and 2) that Jason momoa was perfectly cast
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Mar 15, 2024 21:33
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Eason the Fifth posted:Duncan Idaho is the real KH, and him giving a woman an orgasm just by climbing a cliff proves 1) it, and 2) that Jason momoa was perfectly cast This is a 100% factual statement for non book readers among us. Like not even subtext.
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Mar 15, 2024 21:34
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Eh, he's the cumming of the way or the shortening of the cum.
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Mar 15, 2024 22:18
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Troubadour posted:In his first published book, the main character is the coolest guy in the universe, a telepath with three testicles named Larry. Can't say he didn't start out strong. skasion posted:Older generations of moralists largely didn’t waste time trying to say which sci fi was immoral because back then it was hard to get people to take your moralism seriously if you were reading kid books about alien princesses swooning over red blooded spacemen at all. Whereas Roth was already considered a Significant Contemporary American Writer who was supposed (by psychopaths) to be writing about serious and morally edifying phenomena like Jewish people going to grad school. And like most moral panics those complaints were mostly based on poo poo taken out of context and hysterical lies. Though the final issue of EC Comics comes to mind where the Comics Code threw an absolute fit about an anti-racism story to the point where they gave up on comics for good. (There was even a Deep Space 9 episode based on that) Funny thing, that led to the start of MAD Magazine specifically as a middle finger to the Comics Code.
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Mar 16, 2024 07:46
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Yeah, I’m a Dunie. So what? 👍
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Mar 16, 2024 09:20
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Toxic Mental posted:Yeah, I’m a Dunie. So what? 👍 I thought that was an Australian dumpling? 
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Mar 16, 2024 11:12
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Eason the Fifth posted:This is a 100% factual statement for non book readers among us. Like not even subtext. 
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Mar 16, 2024 11:59
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nothing can survive on the south hemisphere, australia is clearly a myth implanted in our collective subconscious by the space witches
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Mar 16, 2024 12:03
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Bubblyblubber posted:nothing can survive on the south hemisphere, australia is clearly a myth implanted in our collective subconscious by the space witches fr though, what are they doing down there
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Mar 16, 2024 12:31
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skasion posted:fr though, what are they doing down there Don't worry about it. Just return to your villages and towns behind the shield wall and leave us alone.
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Mar 16, 2024 12:52
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The great-grandmas of Broken Hill would make great Fremen. Yes, it's 44C. My husband's head a long week in the lead mines; time to cook up a sunday roast in my oven, inside a house made out of corrugated iron sheets, while dressed in my comfortable and convenient dress that appears to be made out of roof insulation material and hessian. Brilliant.
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Mar 16, 2024 13:13
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Tree Bucket posted:The great-grandmas of Broken Hill would make great Fremen. Yes, it's 44C. My husband's head a long week in the lead mines; time to cook up a sunday roast in my oven, inside a house made out of corrugated iron sheets, while dressed in my comfortable and convenient dress that appears to be made out of roof insulation material and hessian. Brilliant. see also Cordwainer Smith’s “Norstrilia”
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Mar 16, 2024 13:47
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I finally had some time and was near enough to an Imax screen to see this and when I got there the whole building was shut over a water leak 
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