Dear white male science fiction author who shall remain nameless.
I don’t know if your now-deleted “Call for Civility” on your blog actually was expressing a desire for things to be just like they were in the 1950s when women and minorities knew their place, or whether that was just how it seemed.
But did it not occur to you that phrases like “Rabid jungle cats” used to describe some of your fellow writers who were neither white nor male might seem a teensy bit racist?
There is something about the very concept of single-payer healthcare that drives American free-market fundamentalists into apoplexy. It’s as much a hot button as gun control. The moment they start bloviating about taxation being “money extracted at gunpoint” I’m tempted to say I’d be quite happy to point a 2nd Amendment gun at them myself and demand they hand over their money to pay for other people’s healthcare.
“There is something distinctly galling about witnessing mainstream media commentators gushing about Glastonbury signifying the beginning of the British summer festival season. For those of us who enjoy music that allows for a touch more aggression and energy than Mumford & Sons, the true start of the summer comes with Download” – Dom Lawson tells it like it is. Never thought I’d read words like that in The Guardian.
Never quite sure when it’s better not to feed the troll, and when the situation is so bad it really needs sunlight and Dettol. Even by the standard of racist, sexist trolls in the bottom half of the internet, Vox Day (or by his real name, Theodore Beale) is a despicable piece of slime. The link doesn’t go to his own site (I’m not giving him traffic), but to that of Amal El-Mohtar, who is campaigning to have him expelled from Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, and contains screenshots of Beale’s offensive screeds.
I’m not even remotely a fan of hip-hop or rap. But you don’t need to be to recognise this piece as hilariously ignorant pieces of music criticism I’ve read all year. Pro tip; if you want to make a serious critique of “modern music”, you do need to listen beyond top 40 radio if you want to be taken remotely seriously.
Since it’s that time of the year again, it’s time to ask that same old question. Why does the BBC always give blanket television coverage to the indie-dominated Glastonbury and Reading Festivals, yet completely ignores festivals like Download, Cropredy or High Voltage? Do they never realise that rock, metal and folk fans are TV licence payers as well?
“Iain always insisted that he brought the same imagination to bear on his mainstream works as he did on his SF, and that conversely he lavished the same craft and care on his SF as he did on his literary fiction. The only difference, he said, was in the setting and scale. He likened writing literary fiction to playing a piano, and writing SF to playing a vast church organ” - Ken MacLeod, noting that too many eulogies to Iain Banks downplay half his body of work
As you will probably have noticed, I’ve redesigned the front page of the site. Let me know what you think in the comments…
Let’s face it, as Illuminati go, The Bilderberg Group are not a very good one. They’re not very good at keeping their existence secret, and they appear to be made from the people who actually do run the world anyway. Where are the alien lizards who really run things?
It may be time for a moratorium on new CD purchases until I’ve had the time to properly listen to all those I’ve bought over the past few weeks.