Friday, 31st of January, 2003

From the Independent UK, Robert Fisk writes with remarkable restraint (but no little passion).

Thursday, 30th of January, 2003

Saul Williams, Ninja Tune/Big Dada beat poet/rapper, is releasing an anti-war EP as soon as Ninja Tune can get it out there. Williams and the Ninjas feel so strongly about the issue that they have released the entire EP for download (128kbps mp3s but very nicely encoded) from their website. Download it here.

It’s great stuff. The first track is a live recording of an impassioned “Pledge of Resistance”, in which Williams intones “Not in our name…” - “no more transfusions of blood for oil”, “not by our hearts will we allow whole peoples or countries to be deemed Evil”. I can find Williams anywhere from brilliant (see “Twice the First Time”, released on various releases including the Xen Cuts 3CD set) to bloody annoying (see the postmodernist gibberish in DJ Krust’s “Coded Language”). Here he’s great; stirring and poetic.
Next, “September 12th” is a driving rap version of the first track, with extra lyrics and a “No, not in my name, not in my life” refrain which should immediately become an anthem for the times.
The third track, “Bloodletting”, drops the pace to request us to “give blood” over an almost Boards of Canada-like synth riff. When the beat comes in it’s like DJ Shadow’s dropped by for a jam. Fucking superb stuff. And more Old Testament lyrics that give pause for thought - although I need to give it a closer listen before I work out what it’s saying.

And then, after a minute’s pause come the remixes (all of the live “Pledge of Resistance”). Coldcut are first cab off the rank, turning it into a party piece not unlike the jaunty yet chilling “Atomic Moog”. It’s ok but nothing special.
DJ Goo, who I’ve never heard of, goes for a more straightforward hip-hop remix, with minimal sci-fi soundtrack samples and all. Not bad, and looping the cheering crowd is a great effect, but the track gets rather monotonous.
Last up is DJ Spooky, who goes for a rather nice 2step beat. Spooky manages to fit Williams’ loose solo poem rather funkily on top of his beats. Somehow the “Lemme hear you make some noise!” samples and the like seem a bit inappropriate, but it’s certainly funky and has a great bassline… The best of the remixes, but Williams’ original tracks are the real highlights here.

All proceeds will go to Not In Our Name, a US activist group who are probably a good cause.

Chris Lawson, Melbourne doctor and science fiction author extraordinaire, has a couple of great entries in his Frankenstein Journal at the moment. Unfortunately since he codes it all by hand (nothing wrong with that!) there are no permalinks, so I have to just link to the front page. The ficticious interview about “Design Linguistics” (the next step after that creationist nonsense known as “Intelligent Design”) is fun, but beneath it is a selection of US satire, much of it anti-war and anti-Bush… It’s heartening to see he’s not universally popular in the US, as one sometimes can get the feeling.

Monday, 27th of January, 2003

Terry Jones has another insightful and bitingly satirical piece in the Guardian Observer, this time on Shrub:
I’m losing patience with my neighbours, Mr Bush
Stumblings readers will no doubt remember last year’s The audacious courage of Mr Blair.

Thanks to Chris

Well, the show that FourPlay has been in for the last week, Close Your Little Eyes (running at the Studio @ the Sydney Opera House for Sydney Festival) is over, as of Saturday night, so I have a little leetle more time on my hands now. I shall, very soon now, start updating. Plenty of music to review, not to mention reading! Hurrah.

I have also installed a weblog for Chris, merch-bitch boy to the stars, who has been mentioned here before but not had anything to link to. So in a couple of days, when he’s got it up and running, I’ll stick up a link (nothing to see yet, move right along!)

Sunday, 26th of January, 2003

Interesting. In a previous blog entry, I mentioned an article from Salon that was “Salon premium”, and therefore not accessible for free. It turns out that one can access Salon premium articles if one is willing to first watch an advertisement. Access then remains for 18 hours, after which one needs to watch another ad I guess.
Given that I’m good at ignoring advertising (I fucking hate it!) I guess this is a reasonably price to pay, as long as one properly innoculates oneself against the rhetorical force of the advertising before going forward.

I strongly recommend flicking through the bloody ad (ironically an ad for a car company today), and then reading this article, as discussed in my previous post, on the Bush administration’s war on the environment.
Thanks to acb for the link

This Sydney Morning Herald article outlines the Bush Administration’s plans for Iraq. The main objective of “Shock and Awe” “was not just to disable Iraq’s fighting capacity but to leave the population dispirited and unwilling to support Saddam’s regime.”
In case we lacked any evidence that the US is directly targeting the civilian population of Iraq, there we have it. A bunch of gung-ho simple-minded racist idiots, in charge of the planet. Oh joy! And in the sidelines, Saddam Hussein’s son public declares that, “God-willing”, the consequences will make 9/11 look like a picnic.
Do the US really believe that their “Shock and Awe” will have any effect other than stepping up the terrorist activity?

Actually, in some British publication (I wish I could remember which) recently I saw it referred to as “11/9″, which I rather like. We in the rest of the English-speaking world would count it as that, so why not?

Monday, 20th of January, 2003

Chris sent this link to me - a chilling example of just what the Shrub is doing to the United States.

Friday, 17th of January, 2003

Just in case you wondered about my coherence, here is an interview with Cory Doctorow at the Creative Commons website which explaines the license under which Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has been published as a freely-distributable file (in various formats).
Doctorow’s editor at Tor Books is none other than Patrcick Nielsen Hayden, whose blog Electrolite was mentioned recently in these pages. It’s quite something for a major publisher to allow the entire text of a book they’re publishing to be made freely available… Go read the interview for a very interesting artist’s perspective (you can read that either way) on the benefits of filesharing…

I’ve been fiddling with the format of the page, as you can see. Quite a few things have changed… I’ve added the “Last 5 comments” section to the sidebar, which is useful when people comment on older posts and might go unnoticed (except by me, as I get notified by email…) Note that the latest comment (current now) comes from Mr Matt Random himself commenting on my review of his two excellent EPs. I must reply to him!

Note also that in the previous entry if you click on the link to the cartoon, I’ve written a little javascript directly in the entry which opens up a window of the correct size to just show the cartoon. I wouldn’t have been able to do that a couple of days ago. Please let me know if there are any hassles with any of this - preferably including which browser and o/s you’re using…

From Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing we learn that copyrighted property in the US is now going to take even longer to enter the Public Domain. As Boing Boing puts it: “…we lost Eldred, 7-2. That’s the Supreme Court case that Larry Lessig argued to establish the principle that the continuous extension of copyright at the expense of the public domain is unconstitutional.”

From this Associated Press wire report:
“Congress has repeatedly lengthened the terms of copyrights. Copyrights lasted only 14 years in 1790. With the challenged 1998 extension, the period is now 70 years after the death of the creator. Works owned by corporations are now protected for 95 years.”

And here’s a delightful remixed Disney cartoon to illustrate the predicament of those poor little imprisoned creations.

Doctorow’s new (and first) novel is called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and is out now (well it should be, but will probably really be out by the 1st of February), published by Tor Books. He has a weblog for the book here and has taken the nearly unprecedented move of making the entire text of the novel available for free from his website. There are a huge number of formats to choose from. Some 20,000 downloads were clocked in the first 24 hours since it was made available - considerably more than the initial print-run.
Moreover, the book is very high on the Amazon sales rankings - proving resoundingly that file-sharing doesn’t damage sales. Making the novel freely available has provided huge publicity for Cory, and word-of-mouth is the best way to get started for a first novelist (although he’s already very well-known for his short stories, not to mention his weblog…)
The fun thing about Down and Out, of course, is that it is set at least partially in Disneyland, and is explicitly about copyright issues and technology. It’ll be compulsory reading.

I admire Cory a lot, and he’s friends with Charlie Stross, so he must be good *grin* Some of the ideas in Down and Out about post-humanism and post-capitalism (and so on) are very similar to those in Charlie’s Accelerando sequence of short stories currently coming out (gradually) in Asimov’s Magazine. I have downloaded the Palm-readable version, but am unlikely to read much of it till I get the “real” paper book (soon).

Thursday, 16th of January, 2003

Here’s an excellent interview with Philip Pullman, author of the wonderful His Dark Materials trilogy (reviewed before I changed to Movable Type, but you can find a couple of paragraphs on it near the bottom of the Reviews Archive). The interview is conducted by Third Way Magazine, which calls itself “the virtual home of rigorous Christian thinking on politics, society and culture” - fascinating, because Pullman is a committed atheist (of Christian upbringing), and the His Dark Materials trilogy is explicity hostile to organised religion. It makes for a gripping interview. I really do recommend it very strongly for anyone interested in Pullman, or in atheism and morality, or in the creative process.

Thanks to Greg Restall for the link. Greg was in charge of the logic courses I taught at Macquarie Uni’s philosophy department in 1998, and was a lovely guy. He’s now moved to Melbourne but maintains his beautifully clearly-designed webpage, complete with a “News & Links” section powered by, of course, Movable Type. Greg comes from a Christian perspective and I come from one of atheism, but that’s never mattered… (and why should it?)

I recently discussed Chine Miéville; in these pages; English author of dark fantasy that’s closer to science fiction in tone and approach (he apparently uses the term “weird fiction” himself). I mentioned that he’s also a political activist. The other day I found a short story of his at The Register, a UK-based internet & technology news portal. An End To Hunger is an internet thriller, maybe, and is probably not science fiction, and certainly not fantasy or horror. It’s an interesting twist on the hacker-versus-evil-corporation story, and wears its left-wing activist credentials on its sleeve.

Here is a fantastic interview with Miéville.

Famous British spy novel author John Le Carré writes in, of all places, conservative newspaper The Times that The United States of America has gone mad. It’s an impassionate and thoughtful anti-war piece. The link comes via Charlie Stross, and I join him in endorsing it.
Most chilling quotes: “A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre.”
“Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: “Peace is also Patriotic”. It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping.”

(I have a sticker on my car, courtesy of the Australian Greens, saying “NO WAR”. Nobody’s removed it yet)

Guaranteed to get yet more hits from search engines…
My brother Tim forwarded this image today with the text “Oh my God, we’re all fucked now!”
The Horror!

Tuesday, 14th of January, 2003

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor at Tor Books (America’s best big science fiction publisher), runs a weblog called Electrolite which has all sorts of interesting commentary - not just on science fiction, but also on politics (he’s a left-leaning American, rather suspicious of libertarianism, and pro-environment) and science and other stuff.
I can’t claim to agree with everything he and his wife Teresa say (although probably with a lot), but it’s kinda cool to note that their very well designed weblogs are made with Movable Type!

Thanks to Chris, here’s a reference to a book I definitely need to get (not out till late 2003). Why do I need it? Look at this extract from the list of contributors:

Alan Moore
Brian Stableford
China Miéville
Cory Doctorow
David Langford
Michael Moorcock
Neil Gaiman
Paul DiFilippo
Steve Aylett

Sure, there’s a couple of writers there I really don’t like (Richard Calder and Rachel Pollack) but still, with just those names above it’s gotta be great!

Monday, 13th of January, 2003

Thanks to Charlie for this: A whole lot of mostly very sharp fake Homeland Security posters here.

Friday, 10th of January, 2003

Apologies for the mess! I fucked up my index.html template by linking it to the index.html FILE, by mistake, and lost the whole template! Having to reconstruct it now, which will take a little while. I’ll get there! Re-learning all this stuff.

Postscript: Everything back to normal, I think, and rapidly moving into hyperdrive. New layout implementation gradually occurring. I like it so far!

Tuesday, 7th of January, 2003

Here’s an article from Salon magazine that unfortunately is “Salon Premium”, meaning you have to be a paid-up member to read it. That’s a shame, as it has some very important things to say about George Bush’s Republican administration’s war on the environment. It’s a remarkably progressive article from Salon…
I have read the whole article, and I’d like to quote a little bit from it which I think is particularly salient:

The obvious reasons behind Republican
anti-environmentalism have been often stated but deserve
review: George Bush and Dick Cheney come from old-line
industry and possess an old-line industrial worldview. They are
oilmen who believe in the efficiency of the marketplace, an
efficiency that for them is synonymous with virtue. They are
unreconstructed capitalists — that’s their operating system, as
surely as Windows drives most personal computers. Such
marketplace-minded Republicans tend to label environmentalists
as either frivolous tree-huggers or dangerous monkey-wrenching
eco-terrorists. They dismiss good environmental science as the
doomsaying of the loony left. Almost by definition, they lack an
understanding of such concepts as sustainability, carrying
capacity, biodiversity, or webs of interdependence, all crucial
ideas for ecologists. Even if Bush and his allies were to
understand these principles, economic and political factors are a
heavy counterweight.

This is exactly right. Arch-capitalists like Georgie and co, and like our own beloved PM Johnnie, don’t see any merit in any kind of criteria other than the market. Suggest to them that biodiversity should be protected for the sake of it and they’ll laugh in your face. It’s absolutely blood-curdling that this kind of emaciated moral code seems to go hand in hand with fundamentalist (or at least deeply in-grown) Christianity… but then it shouldn’t be a suprise I guess, given the unswerving and blinkered moral code that religion tends to foster.

The article reads like Michael Moore without the acerbic humour. Moore’s Stupid White Men contains yet more depressing facts about the Bush administration. We’re stuck with them for a while, but the sooner more people start questioning them deeply, the better.

Postscript: I just finished reading the article, and what I said about Christian fundamentalism now leaves an even worse after-taste… The Republican Party is in fact riddled with fundamentalist Christians, and the religious right is virulently anti-environment, using half-baked arguments like “the potential in God is unlimited and … there is no shortage of resources in God’s Earth”. Let’s all just read the Bible and ignore the evidence! These sort of morons permeate the car industry and more; no wonder everything’s so fucked up.

Monday, 6th of January, 2003

I’m not sure if this is parody or not. I suspect it isn’t, which makes it almost terrifying (I use that word advisedly) in its stupidity.

This, however, does read as parody… And it’s very funny! Friends of mine know that I think beanies immediately reduce the apparent IQ of the wearer anyway… So why not an Aluminium Foil Deflector Beanie? Combat mind-control now!

It was such a tragedy when Douglas Adams died… One of the truly wonderful people in the world was lost to us.
I’ve just discovered (from a link in a Richard Dawkins article, by the way), the transcript of a speech by Douglas Adams, an avowed “out-and-out” atheist, about the idea of god (and in this case, the context being artificial life, of an “artificial god”)… I’m loving it.

Speaking of avowed atheism, readers of my sidebar will have noted that I’ve just started the first book in Brian Stableford’s massive six-book Emortality sequence, and it’s wonderful. I was first turned onto Stableford when I picked up some backissues of British science fiction magazine Interzone, in which I knew Greg Egan published many of his stories. I was in the UK and found a number of issues; I’ve since become a subscriber, as it’s a fantastic publication. In issue #158 (Greg Egan maintains a complete index to Interzone’s issues here), there was an interview with Stableford conducted by the venerable Nick Gevers (I didn’t know of the guy at the time, but he’s one of the best reviewers and interviewers in the field - toddle over to Infinity Plus to find a lot of his stuff). I was immediately drawn to the idea of Stableford: a writer who’d been around since the early ’70s, and was so dedicated to hard science fiction that when he had to write horror and fantasy trilogies in order to sell books, he managed to completely subvert those genres by making everything turn out, in the end, to have been hard science fiction all along! In the mid-’80s he worked mostly as an adademic (he’s got qualifications in both biology and sociology, and teaches courses in science fiction writing), and started writing fiction again (inconceivably prolifically) around 1988. After reading about him I went and bought everything I could from his later period. The enormous pile of as-yet-unread Stableford on my bookshelf is something worth seeing.

Why am I mentioning him now? Well, what struck a particular chord in me when I read the article was something he said when discussing his treatment of the “supernatural” in his fantasies. He writes, in parentheses:

(I am, of course, a confirmed Sadducee as well as a committed atheist, utterly rejecting the reality of all “spiritual beings”)

I was only just starting to realise that there were other authors out there who, like Greg Egan, shared my outlook on the world. And here Stableford managed to sum up just how I felt about what being an atheist, a “scientific realist” perhaps, meant. And he writes books! And his philosophy informs his writing… It helps that he is a wonderful wordsmith as well - an astonishingly accomplished stylist who is just as comfortable writing quasi-decadent prose in the style of the British “scientific romances” of the late-19th & early-20th century (he is in fact a specialist in scientific romance, a British precursor to the American coinage “science fiction”), or gothic vampire/werewolf stories, or near- and far-future cyber/bio-punk thrillers…

And I think I was so scared by this miraculous finding, that although I’ve read many of his short stories (which appear at a staggering rate) and a couple of early experimental books, I haven’t started at all on that pile of post-1988 novels until now, when his latest opus is finished. Once I’ve read these six books I’ll be ready to go back to the Werewolves of London trilogy and others. *phew*

Sunday, 5th of January, 2003

I know I know, I am way behind in updating my recent listening… I acknowledge this fact, and will get on the case soon - tomorrow even, let’s hope! Plenty of great stuff to write about. Distressingly, some of it’s probably even made it to the shelf by now! I’ll have to look back through my purchases ;)

I mentioned Australian science fiction author and medical doctor over here in my reading section recently. Chris runs a weblog about science, as he puts it “for science fiction writers and readers” called Frankenstein Blog, and the latest entry is a passionate argument for science, against the wishy-washy postmodernist view that science is “just another mythology”. Well worth reading.

It was my 29th birthday on the 2nd of January. Among other things, I got a Dymocks book voucher, so I took myself off to the George St store yesterday. Having found his latest book, The Scar at Gleebooks‘ New Year’s Day 20%-off sale, I purchased China Miéville’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning second novel, Perdido Street Station, as part of the voucher. I’m very much looking forward to reading these books; Miéville has single-handedly reinvented fantasy - basically, as science fiction! These are weird steampunk books which have been given the highest accolades everywhere. In addition, Miéville is a dedicated and active socialist.
More on Miéville when I’ve read more of him than just interviews. I’ve had his first novel, King Rat, for a while, and it’s an interesting one in that it combines dark fantasy/horror with another love of his and mine, drum’n'bass music :)

Dymocks on George St has a quite remarkable science fiction section; its Australian collection is probably better than Galaxy’s. And thus I also found there a chapbook by Russell Blackford (a critic familiar to readers of Australian science fiction periodical Eidolon) called Hyperdreams: Damien Broderick’s Space/Time Fiction which is a fascinating monograph. I’ve just discovered that it can be read in its entirety on the web, link here. I’m a long-time fan of Broderick’s. He’s one of the most important Australian science fiction authors, as well as a world-renowned critic; his book Theory and its discontents (QUP, now out of print I believe), is a well-deserved (and well-argued and researched) attack on postmodern critical/cultural theory’s flight from reason - Broderick argues passionately (and resonantly for me) for scientific realism, in the face of Theory’s more absurd claims. McKenzie Wark was deeply offended by the book, and I’m desparate to find both his review and Broderick’s response, in Australian Book Review… Broderick is also famous for his popular science writing, especially the book The Spike, about the acceleration of technological and scientific advances towards a possible Singularity in the not-so-distant future, where we possibly become transhuman and AIs become a reality, among other things…
Stumblings readers may wish to see a double review I did for Macquarie Uni’s student mag Passing Show (which my girlfriend Ange happened to be editing last year) of Broderick’s latest novel, Transcension and Greg Egan’s latest, Schild’s Ladder. It’s a little simplified for non-hard science fiction readers; I may extend it later, but for now it’s available here in HTML form at least.

I actually wanted to write this blog entry just because I wanted to link to a delightful article by Broderick in Australian science fiction magazine Ibn Qirtaiba called Living Here In the Future. Available here, it’s a sweet story about how he came to be a science fiction author, and it reminded me of just how amazingly ahead of his time he’s always managed to be.