Boy, Is My Face Red

I confess - I was wrong about the photo on the previous post being taken from the ISS, and Al Reynolds proved it (see the discussion thread for details). And from the thread on digg.com that Al Reynolds ferretted out, courtesy of CubicZirconia, these are the guys who took the photograph from their WB-57 reconnaissance plane. They look more like astronauts than astronauts. More links to cool pictures on that site by the way...

Why I Write, Part 12

I pulled this down from one of the message boards where I lurk. I think it came from NASA via Warren Ellis’s site, but I’m not privy to the latter and can’t locate it on the former. Anyway, it’s beautiful: a shuttle launch photographed from the International Space Station.

Revenge of the Dorkofascist Galacticons

Via Jack Womack: Why the right wing fell in and out of love with Battlestar Galactica, or, what’s really wrong with US science fiction right now.

Down with skool!

Lucy Ellmann, in a review of Elfriede Jelinek’s Greed, starts testifying:

What is killing the novel is people’s growing dependence on feel-good fiction, fantasy and non-fiction. With this comes an inability or unwillingness to tolerate any irregularities of form, a prissy quibbling over capital letters, punctiliousness about punctuation. They act like we’re still at school! Real writing is not about rules. It’s about electrifying prose, it’s about play.

Amen, sister! Amen!

As in mainstream fiction, so in science fiction. Why have we allowed the commissars of correctness to stamp their boot on what should be one of the most vital, playful and imaginatively transgressive genres, turning it into a bland prose factory churning out product by the yard?