A friend posted a list of the Academy award-winning and nominated movies, and I noticed that while I had seen my fair share in the 90’s and 80’s of the Oscar winners, I had not seen a single Oscar nominated film in the last five years, and had make no plans to see them. I mean, GRAN TORINO was not even nominated. I stopped paying attention to the Oscars the year BEAUTY AND THE BEAST lost to a second rate thriller about a cannibal murderer.

I wondered if it was the field, or if it was me. I suspect it is me. Turning from film to SF, I was curious to see how well read I was in award winning novels in my field. This is the list of Nebula-award winning novels. I have underlined the ones I have read. of course I make a comment next to entries — I am opinionated after all. You do not get to be a curmudgeon without being opinionated, or a philosopher, or both.

2008 The Yiddish Policemen’s Union / Michael Chabon—Who? Never heard of this author or this book. I was not competing with him because I didn’t write any novels this year.  Sigh.

2007 Seeker / Jack McDevitt—Go, Jack!  I was not competing with him because I wasn’t nominated for anything this year.

2006 Camouflage / Joe Haldeman—My own ORPHANS OF CHAOS faced this.  Mr. Haldeman’s THIRD Nebula, fanboys. No shame to lose to him. 

2005 Paladin of Souls / Lois McMaster Bujold—Never heard of this book. I don’t think I’ve read anything by Bujold.

2004 The Speed of Dark / Elizabeth Moon—Never heard of his book. I’ve read the first 50 pages of ‘Deed of Paksenarion.’

2003 American Gods / Neil Gaiman—haven’t read it. My wife read it. That counts.

2002 The Quantum Rose / Catherine Asaro—haven’t read it, haven’t read any reviews of it.

2001 Darwin’s Radio / Greg Bear—on my list of books to read. Mr. Bear rarely disappoints.

2000 Parable of the Talents / Octavia E. Butler

*1999 Forever Peace / Joe Haldeman —good book with a foolish ending.  Sorry, but my suspension of disbelief gets unsuspended when someone reveals that wars are caused by people not feeling each other’s pain, rather than by, say, fear or self-interest or honor (phobos, kerdos and doxa). I also thought the idea that cheap nanotech would lead to state regulation of goods was laughable.

1998 The Moon and the Sun / Vonda N. McIntyre—never heard of this book.

1997 Slow River / Nicola Griffith—Who? Never heard of this author or this book.

*1996 The Terminal Experiment / Robert J. Sawyer— A mediocre SF theme, plot, setting, and forgettable characters. Its not a bad book by any means, but why did this win?

1995 Moving Mars / Greg Bear—on my list of books to read. Mr. Bear rarely disappoints.

*1994 Red Mars / Kim Stanley Robinson —excellent book. This is what real ‘hard SF’ is meant to be, fanboys. Wished the sequels had matched it.

1993 Doomsday Book / Connie Willis—I was flagged away from reading it by reviewers.

*1992 Stations of the Tide / Michael Swanwick—pretty good, but not great. It might have been the best novel that year: Certainly it stands out in my memory, even among the other splendors on this list.

*1991 Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea / Ursula K. Le Guin —One of her weakest novels. This was a ret-con vote: the committee was rewarding her for other books in previous years that should have won.

1990 The Healer’s War / Elizabeth Ann Scarborough—Who? Never heard of this author or this book.

1989 Falling Free / Lois McMaster Bujold—Never heard of this book.

1988 The Falling Woman / Pat Murphy—Who? Never heard of this author or this book.

*1987 Speaker for the Dead / Orson Scott Card—Pretty good. Pretty solid book, realistic (painfully realistic) characters, good SF ideas, realistically nonhuman aliens.

*1986 Ender’s Game / Orson Scott Card—the short story was better

*1985 Neuromancer / William Gibson—a seminal work, revolutionary.  It could have been better (like, by having plot, characters, that sort of stuff.) 

*1984 Startide Rising / David Brin—I liked Sundiver more. Still, Mr. Brin (that I have read) has never written a stinker.

1983 No Enemy But Time / Michael Bishop—Never heard of this book.

*1982 The Claw of the Conciliator / Gene Wolfe—a classic, considered by me to be the best SF ever.

*1981 Timescape / Gregory Benford—Not a bad book, but not equal to others on this list.

*1980 The Fountains of Paradise / Arthur C. Clarke—Not Clarke’s best work either. This was a ret-con vote.

*1979 Dreamsnake / Vonda N. McIntyre— Not a bad book, but not equal to others on this list.

*1978 Gateway / Frederik Pohl—Not bad, but not to my taste.

*1977 Man Plus / Frederik Pohl— Not bad, but not to my taste.

*1976 The Forever War / Joe Haldeman—Not bad, but you have to read some Heinlein or Pournelle to wash out a lingering peacenik taste from your teeth.

*1975 The Dispossessed / Ursula K. Le Guin—An excellent book, once you accept the magical anarchist premise. Maybe Tinkerbell distributes the goods and services. Nonetheless, as well written a book as you are like to find in any decade.

*1974 Rendezvous with Rama / Arthur C. Clarke—a classic.

*1973 The Gods Themselves / Isaac Asimov—a good book, not Asimov’s best.

1972 A Time of Changes / Robert Silverberg—never heard of this book.

*1971 Ringworld / Larry Niven—a classic. The original Big Dumb Object book. The Kzin and the Puppeteers are the most convincingly alien aliens since Worsel and Nadreck of Smith’s ‘Lensman’ books.

*1970 The Left Hand of Darkness / Ursula K. Le Guin—a classic, brilliantly executed, her masterpiece.

1969 Rite of Passage / Alexei Panshin—Never heard of this book. I did not know the author wrote fiction; I have read his nonfiction works on Heinlein and A.E. van Vogt.

1968 The Einstein Intersection / Samuel R. Delany—I read ‘Fall of the Towers’ and ‘Nova’ and that was enough Delany for one lifetime. He is not to my taste.

*1967 Flowers for Algernon / Daniel Keyes —The short story was better.

1967 (tie) Babel-17 / Samuel R. Delany

*1966 Dune / Frank Herbert—a classic, considered by some to be the best SF ever.

23 out of 42. Boy, am I outta touch. There are several Nebula award winners here that I have never heard of, never read a single word they wrote, and never read any reviews of their books. That is just outrageous. I used to be one of the best-read people I knew, back in the day when I was reading two books a day. Now I read maybe one book a month, or less, and more often it is history or theology than SF.

Hehn. Nothing by R.A. Lafferty on the list. Nothing by Jack Williamson, or A.E. van Vogt or Ray Bradbury. That is sort of like John Wayne never getting an Oscar while being, and continuing over decades to be, the most popular movie star of all time.

… And not just Melville’s version of him. For those of you old enough to remember Dirk Benedict, NRO has an article on him here and Big Hollywood posts a recent screed against antimasculinism (if I may coin the term) here titled ‘Lost in Castration.’

Apparently he was as taken aback as I was to have Starbuck ‘re-imagined’ from a gallant cigar-smoking man to an angry cigar-smoking woman in the revised BSG.

(I was not taken aback because the pilot was female, merely because she was unfeminine. By ‘unfeminine’ I do not mean she was wearing trousers, I mean that the writers treated her like a pseudo-masculine caricature. There was one scene where hersuperior officer hits her in the face, something, I am sure, would be OK for Sergeant Rock and his Howling Commandos, but not something little girls want little boys to learn is honorable behavior. Considering the innate, inherent violence which lurks at the back of all masculine behavior, peeling away the safety feature known as chivalry, even in the name of so noble a word as equality, is imprudent, to say the least.)

Here are two quotes from the NRO article: 

“Even up in Montana I’ve spent the last 20 years defending the right of my boys to throw a frickin’ snowball, to climb a tree, to jump off a little cliff, to go out in the canoe off my dock without a life jacket,” he says. “All the little boys that refused to give into that were put on Ritalin. The future warriors of America are all on Ritalin in the second grade.”

During his recent appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, a wildly popular reality-TV show in the U.K., he was greeted by a snotty British punk-rock singer, who announced: “It’s Dirk [expletive redacted] Benedict.” Without missing beat, Benedict replied, “I seldom use my middle name.” It’s an unscripted quip more than worthy of Face or Starbuck.

Mark Steyn at NRO mentions that the Daily Star reports that some 4000 Britons (subjects of Her Majesty) have enlisted to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and hence, are shooting and being shot at other subjects of the Queen presumably more loyal to the Queen than the first group. Steyn interprets (perhaps jokingly) this as being evidence of a civil war.

Yes, this was the same Mark Steyn that was hauled before a court in Canada to answer for being quoted in an Article in THE ATLANTIC magazine where he reported demography statistics; and yes, Canada is part of the same commonwealth, once known as the British Empire, that recently refused to allow a Dutch Member of Parliament, when invited to do so by the House of Lords, to enter England’s green and pleasant land, on the grounds that he made a film comparing paynim enormities to the Koran verses that inspired them, and Her Majesty’s Muslim subjects exercise a de facto veto over visits by members of the governing parliaments of foreign states.

On a perhaps unrelated topic, let me draw your attention to the opinions an observations of David Brin over at Sigma, who here relates that the move from a robust if amateur citizen-soldier army to a highly specialized and highly professional army implies an innate brittleness which speaks poorly to an ability to fight a no-front terror war.

My question for fans of science fiction (or anyone who likes, either seriously or as daydream, to think in the long term) is this: if the nation-state should pass into insignificance, what political and social structure is likely to replace it?

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I am sitting with my very own uncorrected advance copy of SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH in my coldblooded  Vulcan hands, complete with the gorgeous cover illustration by Tom Kidd, who also did the interior illustration. The headpiece of the page for ‘Guyal the Curator’ (my own modest offering to this feast of splendor) has a Tom Kidd illustration, showing Magnatz the titan looming over the hills of Sfere.

The first story in the book is by Robert Silverberg, and the final story is by Neil Gaiman. In between, are tales by Dam Simmons, Mike Resnick, Kage Baker, and Tanith Lee. Yes, that Kage Baker, who wrote the ‘Company’ stories; yes that Tanith Lee, who wrote everything from ‘Tales of the Flat Earth’ to ‘Silver Metal Lover.’ 

As a fan, not merely as a huckster hawking his wares, I assure you this is the most impressive, the most lumenous, the most astonishing line up of famous names I have ever seen in an anthology: and the tales all take place in Jack Vance’s crytpical, over-refined, puzzling, and morbid backdrop of eriee magnificance: the Dying Earth, where humanity sags beneath the pressure of a thousand forgotten eons, the sun flickers like an exausted ember, footpads and rogues haunt the twilight cities, and monsters gambol in the twilight forests, while magicians cram their brains with the extracted lore of polydimensional thaumaturgy.

For those of you impatient to read the next installment of George R.R. Martin’s GAME OF THRONES — and I am one of your number — please be patient. Mr. Martin both helped edit this anthology, and contributed a story to it. He had to do it. Dennis Lanning of the Legion of Time returning from the future aboard the Chronion, appeared in a time-vision to Martin and assured him that, unless this anthology was successfully printed this year, the utopia of far distant Jonbar would never come to pass, but instead the future be occupied by the subhuman Gyronchi, ruled by the demonic but beautiful Sorainya!

So, while you are waiting, rush out a get a copy of this, or else just reread his DYING OF THE LIGHT (which I recall as ‘After the Festival’ when it appeared in magazine form.) 

An article worth reading, especially for those who seek some measure of liberty from sin and self-imposed corrosion during this season of fast.  It is by that erudite, witty and penetrating thinker, David B Hart. From the nipple of Janet Jackson he deduces the Platonic nature of the Good, and rejects the notion of liberty as merely power without limit, power divorced from any consideration of what is truly good for human nature, and toward what end human nature is oriented. He calls this, and correctly, the merely libertarian view of liberty.

Nearly all the work of GK Chesterton is in the public domain, and therefore available to read on the Internet, if you cannot bestir yourself to go to your local library. A convenient place to start to find his works is here: http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/index.html

What to read first? I have no ability to restrict myself to one recommendation.

ORTHODOXY — because it is a lively an entertaining autobiographic look at the Christian faith, of interest to skeptics and believers alike (as I can personally attest, having read it first as one, then as the other).

MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY — because it is as odd as you can get without being actually science fiction. It reminds me of those English tv shows, like THE PRISONER or THE AVENGERS where increasing levels of oddness intrude into the read world. Worth reading merely to meet such individuals as the poet of the law, the philosophical policeman, the supreme council of anarchists, or the man in the dark room who hires secret agents whose only qualifications sought is a willingness to die.

I will also recommend THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL for similar reasons. Reading of the epic adventure of a rather drab corner of London in the far off future days of 1984 (the book was penned in 1904) is quite astonishing. You will never look at streetlamps or watertowers the same way again.

THE EVERLASTING MAN — Chesterton’s work of apologetics, the one that influenced such men as CS Lewis. A masterpiece.

I would also hasten to add THE INCREDULITY OF FATHER BROWN — because nothing is better than a good murder mystery.

THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE — if your taste runs to epic poetry rather than to murder mysteries.

I might also recommend his biography of St. Francis or St. Aquinas, if your taste runs to biography.

As a public service, an in a fashion only too befitting the mardi gras spirit of fat Tuesday, I here present an excerpt, the opening in fact, of MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY, by G.K. Chesterton. This is particularly meant for those of you who have always wished to be a poet of the law:

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As a courtesy to Mark Shea, who asked me to weigh in on the question of Science Fiction’s track record predicting the future, I can think of no more efficient way to answer than to reprint my answer to a similar question posed by the worthies at SFSignal. Here is what I said then. (The answer applies equally to all science fiction, not merely to the Golden Age of SF): 

Science fiction is often accused of being The Great Predictor. Which predictions did Golden Age science fiction get right? Which ones were way off the mark?

The key to this question is to interpret what is meant by the "Golden Age." Rather than straining my brain for the answer, I will simply pull up a convenient list of the top ten science fiction books of all time as compiled by Jim Baen.

Now, your list or mine might differ, but our lists will not have any greater weight of judgment behind them than the one drawn up by one of the most famous and longstanding editors in the field. Let us look at the books and see which predictions came true, shall we?

Let us list the books and their predictions:

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If any of you, dear readers, have not heard of G.K. Chesterton, and have not read him, I urge you, to your immense benefit and pleasure, to correct the omission at once. Why have you not heard of him? I cannot find better words than those of Dale Ahlquist President, American Chesterton Society, whose essay I quote here in full, without comment and without further ado:

"Who is this guy and why haven’t I heard of him?"

I’ve heard the question more than once. It is asked by people who have just started to discover G.K. Chesterton. They have begun reading a Chesterton book, or perhaps have seen an issue of Gilbert! Magazine, or maybe they’ve only encountered a series of pithy quotations that marvelously articulate some forgotten bit of common sense. They ask the question with a mixture of wonder, gratitude and . . . resentment. They are amazed by what they have discovered. They are thankful to have discovered it. And they are almost angry that it has taken so long for them to make the discovery.

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A fascinating post to which a comment pointed me:
http://www.conversiondiary.com/2008/08/lost-children.html

The words below are hers, not mine. The indented paragraphs are her  (Jennifer F. from Conversion  Diary) quoting HOLD ON TO YOUR KIDS by Nuefeld and Mate. I have not read the book, I am merely passing along her comments without comment.

…authors Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate describe this dark new peer culture, and lay out their theory that the problem is "peer orientation": children using peers instead of parents as their compass point for orienting themselves in the world, for discovering their identity, morals and values. The authors write:

As children grow, they have an increasing need to orient: to have a sense of who they are, of what is real, why things happen, what is good, what things mean. To fail to orient is to…be lost psychologically — a state our brains our programmed to do almost anything to avoid. […]

What children fear more than anything, including physical harm, is getting lost. To them, being lost means losing contact with their compass point. Orienting voids, situations where we find nothing or no one to orient by, are absolutely intolerable to the human brain.

In adult-oriented cultures, where the guiding principles and values are those of the more mature generations, kids attach to each other without losing their bearings or rejecting the guidance of their parents. In our society that is no longer the case. Peer bonds have come to replace relationships with adults as children’s primary sources of orientation…Children have become the dominant influence on one another’s development."

This was the part I found particularly interesting. When I read the author’s description of a small town in France that has a traditional, multigenerational, family-oriented culture (the type of culture that always existed in America until the breakdown of lifelong communities over the past 60 years), it became glaringly obvious that our society is nothing like that today, and that that is not a good thing:

[In Rognes, France] children greeted adults and adults greeted children. Socializing involved whole families, not adults with adults and children with children. There was only one village activity at a time, so families were not pulled in several directions…Even at the village fountain, the local hangout, teens mixed with seniors. Festivals and celebrations, of which there were many, were family affairs. The music and dancing brought the generations together instead of separating them…One could not even buy a baguette without first engaging in the appropriate greeting rituals. […]

The attachment customs are the village primary school were equally impressive. Children were personally escorted to school and picked up by their parents or grandparents. The school was gated and the grounds could be entered only by a single entrance. At the gate were the teachers, waiting for their students to be handed over to them. Again, culture dictated that connection be established with appropriate greetings between the adult escorts and the teachers as well as the teachers and the students…When the children were released from school, it was always one class at a time, with the teacher in the lead…Their teachers were their teachers whether on the grounds or in the village market or at the village festival. There weren’t many cracks to fall through.

I don’t think I need to detail the differences between this and our own culture today.

Its seems that Mr. Gaiman, Waldrop and Martin  finally submitted his story for the volume. So the table of contents for SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH, Edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois reads as follows:

"The Green Bird" by Kage Bager
"The Good Magician" by Glen Cook
"The Copsy Door" by Terry Dowling
"The Last Golden Thread" by Phyllis Eisenstein
"The Return of the Fire Witch" by Elizabeth Hand
"Grolion of Almery" by Matthew Hughes
"Evillo the Uncunning" by Tanith Lee
"An Incident in Uskvosk" by Elizabeth Moon
"Inescapable" by Mike Resnick
"Sylgarmo’s Proclamation" by Lucius Shepard
"The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale" by Robert Silverberg
"The Guiding Nose of Ulfant Banderoz" by Dan Simmons
"The Final Quest of the Wizard Sarnod" by Jeff VanderMeer
"The Traditions of Karzh" by Paula Volsky
"Caulk the Witch-Chaser" by Liz Williams
"The Lamentably Comical Tragedy (or The Laughably Tragic Comedy) of Lixal Laqavee" by Tad Williams
"Abrizonde" by Walter Jon Williams
"Guyal the Curator" by John C. Wright
"A Night at the Tarn House" by George R.R. Martin
"Frogskin Cap" by Howard Waldrop
"An Invocation of Curiousity" by Neil Gaiman

Man this is going to be good. I wonder if I get a complimentary contributor’s copy?One may pre-order from Subterranean Press here:

http://www.subterraneanpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=martin07&Category_Code=B&Product_Count=78

The ever-lucid Mark Shea wonders about the contrast between Madonna the rockstar and WNBA star Candace Parker. http://markshea.blogspot.com/2009/02/more-of-those-western-values-we-are.html here is his comment and link:

Myself, I wonder about the contrast between the alleged benevolence of the new socialist America under our New ‘New Deal’, and the cool ruthlessness to be shown to the graying baby boomers as they age.
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I have often repeated the story of my conversion to anyone who cares to hear, but I have never mentioned that first snowflake with started the avalanche.

Back in the happy blindness of my atheist days, one of my innocent pleasures was to sit around with like-minded friends and blaspheme, mocking the foolish Christians and their endlessly foolish God. No jest was too coarse for this pastime. Those of you who cannot comprehend the pleasure involved, it was the pleasure an iconoclast gets from smashing idols. It did not matter whether any real Christians were in earshot or not, because we were not especially mocking them, we were mocking an ever-present idea that was equally open to mockery when we were alone. (It also did not matter because no Christian was so rude as to voice a defense against our slanders and jibes, or even to request common courtesy from us.)

After graduation, one of my blaspheming friends became a neopagan, or, to call things by their right names, a witch. Yes, a sky-clad, tree-hugging athame-wielding  warlock, complete with muttering and peeping and a big purple cloak. When we sat blaspheming, he did not seem to realize that, in my arch-rationalist atheist eyes, his devotion to his make-believe little gods and hocus-pocus make-believe powers was no more worthy of respect than the very beliefs he joined me in mocking.

Once upon a time I asked him, whether, in his religion, he believed in an afterlife or reincarnation. The question caught him by surprise, and he had no answer for it. During the same conversation, I asked him whether he had a metaphysical explanation for ethics, that is, whether his moral code had objective existence due to the divinity of his gods. The conversation was soon tangled in insurmountable confusion. He had never thought about it.

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As modern men and women–to the degree that we are modern–we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives. Or, to phrase the matter more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very comfortable nihilism.

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