Quote of the day

Animals, said the writer and naturalist Henry Beston, "are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

Quoted by Vandana Singh in her Strange Horizons essay, Living With the Other , well worth checking out. 

It made me think about my uncle, Bill Devall, often called the "Father of Deep Ecology in North America" for his eco-philosophical writings and Deep Ecology text used in Env 101 classes, as well as his teaching at Humboldt State U.  He died on the anniversary of Stonewall, a couple years ago now.  Sort of fitting, since he wrote one of the earlier sociology studies of gay men.  I had issues with some of the finer points of political philosophy, but a moment of non-anthropocentrism seems like a good way to start the day.

Jailbreaking

Today, after a long day of running a 5k, wandering Loring Park looking at cute dogs while waiting for the parade to start, clapping and whistling, joining the MN AIDS Project briefly to say hi to a co-worker, winding through Loring again, walking back down Hennepin to see the end of the parade, beers at Brits pub with a school board contingent and watching desultory lawn bowling, then walking dogs...  my very nice GF linuxed my box for me.

Yes, you read that right, the laptop I have been avoiding using for almost nine months after too many episodes of Vista fail is now a defector.  I can be very slow to make  decisions, and a new job put me off starting any complicated new projects for most of that time, but I finally bit the bullet. 

The combination of Cory Doctorow explaining how well Ubuntu works for him, a book finally being in the library when I was cruising the IT shelves, and the GF partitioning her old XP desktop with much success broke through my inertia.

Plus the Clarion West Write-a-thon made me realize it was probably time to get back on the horse.  I've been writing in longhand and on my Android, but taking a break from finishing and submitting, while trying to get up to speed in the day job.  No more excuses...

Amen

The best bumper sticker I saw today, a day of many slogans and costumes...

Enjoying the sun

Xcel energy is setting up some solar power display downtown, but one piece looks suspiciously like a space battering ram.  No signs yet that Pride weekend is about to descend.  Speaking of butterflies.  Happy Homo Day, as a friend used to say!

[Hit send, turn corner, look up, see flag]

Histories Within Histories

This latest Rain Taxi has some interesting reviews, as always, including one by Matthew Cheney of the Gwyneth Jones short story recently published by Aqueduct Press and a review of Lauren Beukes' Zoo City.  I just finished that and her earlier Moxyland and have to recommend them both.  A real review later...

Anyway, Rain Taxi has a long interview with poet Gary Snyder.  I originally turned to this because my environmentalist uncle wrote a lot about him and reprinted many of Snyder's poems in his Deep Ecology texts.  But there was also this, which makes me want to learn more:

"...I could describe a number of cases where somebody's work in poetry... has ended up making a change in public life.  For example, Robert Duncan's early essays and books about homosexuality. In San Francisco, one of the very first men to come out of the closet and speak about being gay in a calm, confident, unapologetic manner was probably Duncan...  This is not known historically too well."

Since, from another RT review, it appears

Duncan's collection just finally got published, I will have to go check it out.

 Rain Taxi 

Tinfoil and duct tape

It's amazing how flimsy these vehicles look when you see them up close.  Hand welds, improvised instruments, rows of toggles straight off the hardware store shelf, and rolls and rolls of tin foil, some ripped and blowing in the A/C drafts. 

At least Laika had no idea what he was being strapped into...

More Rocketry

A rocket test bench with hand painted dials, I think from the 40s.

Early Rocketry

Goddard trying stuff out.  Takes me back to sending model rockets up, up, and... onto the school's roof.

Field trip

I forgot how cool the National Air & Space Museum really is.  That the new exhibits included the Spaceship One, winner of the X prize, takes the cake.

William Gibson's trilogy is SF

Every Wiscon of late, on some panel someone mentions William Gibson and says his latest books aren't science fiction.  (I've read this elsewhere. It's not just a Wiscon thing.  There's just something ironic about people at this con drawing the hard science line against him; a good bit of the discussion is about inclusive reading.

Reading this brain book, which dwelled a lot on the reasons why various social networks online have risen and dwindled, made me think about Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History, which I just finished.  People who say they're not SF tend to focus on how the setting is not 'the future.'  They miss how the story is hinged on science and technology, and about it.

Because it's 1) 'soft' science... sort of.  And 2) new science, in a category less recognized as science because non-traditional companies are employing it.  Advertising, fashion, the music industry... they're not science.  But they are employing, or deploying, both computer science and neuroscience quite effectively.  As the brain guy argued pretty strongly.  No coincidence one of the topics he covered was pattern recognition. 

More on this later.

The Internet as a brain

Currently finishing the book How the Brain is Shaping the Future of the Internet, by Jeffrey M. Stibel, 2009.  The most interesting part so far is straight from this article about Google and the power requirements of the server farms of the 'cloud.'

 George Gilder in Wired 

Old now, but I hadn't run across it.  More interesting in light of the Sunday NYT front page article about suitcase wireless and alternate cell service provision. 

But mainly the brain book posits that the internet is growing like a brain and to understand how it will develop one must understand how the brain develops and works.  A lot of extra verbiage for not so much content, but an interesting read so far.  I in the end he's gonna explain why the brain implants in Melissa Scott's Trouble and Her Friends are on the horizon, so I will read (or skip) to the end.

Lazy urban gardening

Yes, the trashcan is a composter.  The raccoons haven't figured out how to get the lid off yet.  Honeybees may be disappearing elsewhere, but my raspberries manage to keep a large swarm happy.  Plus rabbits use them to hide from dogs, forgetting dogs will *make* a hole for themselves if one does not already exist or is not big enough...

Flour mills turned condo

Beat by a wheelie dog

The Dog Day 5k.  My three-legged dog  with spinal arthritis is now angry I left her at home, except she hates having her back legs off the ground even when she can barely walk.

Running shoes

Another bandwagon.  It's a technology issue.  For too long, shoes have been made in ways that don't recognize how the human foot was made to work.  Yet the fact that REI and gearheads are all about the vibram five fingers and these type of minimalist shoes has left me feeling curmudgeonly, despite the fact my partner in knee crimes has been running barefoot for years now. 

It took the giddiness of Wiscon weekend and a sale to make me buy these at the running  expo.  And yes, they do make my cranky feet happy.  Why did they make so many shoes with complete disregard for foot mechanics? ... Oh.  Yeah.

Grain elevator

Still in use, though the other nearby ones are being torn down or rusting.  This neighborhood economy now rests on coffee, yoga, and wine bars, amidst lumber yards and auto body shops.  These coexist surprisingly well, compared to other cities I have dwelled in.  The train usually sports a snazzy throw-up.

Minneapolis = Skyways

Minneapolis from the library

Really from the Dunn Bros. coffee shop, my haven for writing before work.

Moxyland

Among other books, mostly research and more boggy, I am reading Moxyland by Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot Press).  It's a near future South Africa with activists, graffiti artists, street kids, up and coming photographers, and slacker dudes all hooked into the corporate system by sponsorship, employment, surveillance, and as the price of gaming and nanotech.  So far it's very interesting.

I'm reading it mostly on the light rail during my commute, so it's taking longer than I usually need to devour something tasty.

The book design is awesome -good looking and the print is readable at arms length yet not that Potter-sized letter thing that wastes paper to make it seem longer.  The plot moves along but there's a lot going on in terms of political analysis, social forecasting, and neat gadgets.  More when I'm done.

Metrospeculative is a state of mind

I have a fondness for stories about gadgets, computers, and technological wonders, yet I lag badly in adoption of the most basic items such as cell phones and a non-dialup server.  And blogging.  I am cheap.  And lazy... er, busy.  So here I go, running after the bandwagon when it has already jumped solar systems.  Anyway...

I love near-future science fiction in urban settings extrapolated from present day cities, especially the ones that mix high tech and the grungy underbelly of (post-?) capitalist expansion.  Blade Runner aesthetics as cheap thrill and guilty pleasure.

Guilty because often the political analysis behind such world building is either subtly conservative or what I think of as "80s liberal," trying to be down with the oppressed masses but missing some of the finer points of the big picture where economic structure meets culture and intersectionality is a theory with some meat on its bones.

Like the way Blade Runner posits a racially diverse society where everyone is pretty equally skroozled, except blonde/Aryan post-humans are the truly oppressed.  Or something. 

And the gender politics of cyberpunk often makes me scratch my head, as much as I love many of the classics.  There are only so many times I can reread Melissa Scott's back catalog and Nicola Griffith's Slow River, and the few lesbian-flavored novels have their issues too.

In this blog I plan to pick away at issues of world building and plot development from a feministic angle with an amateur sociologist's hat on.  Feministic because the standard term is so loaded, and larded, and my card may have expired back in the late 90s when I became a jaded divorce lawyer, I dunno.  Anyway.  I will talk about books, science fiction and fantasy and whatever else strikes my fancy at the moment, and try to puzzle through the questions of whether what gives aesthetic and/or narrative pleasure is really healthy for all living things or just for some.