Joel's humanistic blog

I recently discovered that the back cover of the 2007 Penguin Classics edition of A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs has a prominent blurb by Carl Sagan: "Might it really be possible—in fact and not fancy—to venture with John Carter to the Kingdom of Helium on the planet Mars?" Although the cover does not specify the source of the quote, it's from the "Blues for a Red Planet" chapter from Cosmos ; references to his being a fan of the John Carter books since first reading them as a kid appear scattered throughout Sagan's writings, including an anecdote about obtaining a related vanity plate (due to a limit of 6 letters per plate, he had to settle for "PHOBOS" instead of his first choice, "BARSOOM"). And this hasn't been the first time that Burroughsians have noticed Sagan; for instance, consider the Burroughs fansite ERBzine's lengthy tribute to Sagan. I'd be happy to see more Sagan blurbs on other science fictio...

Yet another public domain science fiction short story whose eBook I helped produce makes its debut on Project Gutenberg . Originally from Astounding Science Fiction May 1959, with illustrations by H. R. van Dongen, joining Herbert's "Missing Link" , posted last October. Yes, that Frank Herbert, and yes, it's really public domain ... 'nuff said!

On Sunday, February 24th, Turner Classic Movies will be airing Contact as part of this month's "31 Days of Oscar" , in which Academy Award-winning movies are showcased. Check out the TCM Movie Database entry for the film . Sean Axmaker provides an excellent overview of the film, from the production history to the issues and themes involved; Sagan is described as "one of the most effective spokesmen for the advancement of science and space exploration in the world", and the entry also includes a quote from Ann Druyan: "Carl's and my dream was to write something that would be a fictional representation of what contact would be like," explains Ann Druyan, Sagan's wife and collaborator. "But it would also have the tension inherent between religion and science, which was an area of philosophical and intellectual interest that riveted both of us." Each night's worth of movies is organized by a specific decade (all the way from the 192...

We have science-fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke providing cogent and brilliant summaries in nonfictional form of many aspects of science and society. — Carl Sagan, "Science Fiction — A Personal View", in Broca's Brain The revered science fiction writer (and science popularizer/futurist, and inventor, and humanist) Arthur C. Clarke — author of 2001 ( book and movie ), Childhood's End , Rendezvous with Rama , "The Sentinel", "The Nine Billion Names of God", "The Star" and many others — will be turning 90 this month. To mark the occasion, Thilina Heenatigala , a friend of Clarke's and the General Secretary of the Clarke-cofounded Sri Lanka Astronomical Association has started a blog to celebrate Clarke's 90th birthday . He is sending an open invitation to all Clarke fans to post birthday wishes as blog comments for. December 16th is the special date! Heenatigala is also a big Sagan fan: he organized ...

The science fiction short story "The Mississippi Saucer" by Frank Belknap Long (from Weird Tales , 1951) is now available at Project Gutenberg. As the title implies, an early take on the flying-saucer idea, it is brief enough (ten pages) that I'll avoid spoiling it by saying more about it ... so, read and enjoy!

This has been covered before on this blog , but since Martian Child is finally opening in theaters, I want to point out that Equal Time for Freethought 's interview with author David Gerrold is available, including a discussion of the novel of the same name that formed the basis for the film (as well as Gerrold's real-life childraising experience that formed the source for both).

Three new eBooks that I worked on have been added to Project Gutenberg : "A World is Born" by Leigh Brackett , from Comet magazine, July 1941. This short story is one of her "sword-and-planet" stories that took place in the rest of the Solar System; of course almost nothing was known about what the planets were like, so this provided the opportunity for writers to imagine what might be there. Brackett's versions drew upon existing genre tropes, but had a special quality of their own; the environments were vivid enough to almost be characters of their own. In this case, the setting is Mercury; Edmond Hamilton aptly described her version of it: The Brackett Mercury, lacking the glamor of Venus and the haunting sadness of ancient Mars—there is no history here, and no beauty—has a certain harsh authority even so. Nature is the chief villain, and a convincingly nasty one.... Leigh's concept of a world where tremendous mountains went up literally beyond the s...

I can't believe this. Last night, I stumbled upon the archive of the webzine Sci Fiction on the Sci Fi channel website for the first time — and saw that it was going to be taken down by the 15th! (The magazine ran from 2000 to 2005, but even when it stopped publishing, the archives were left up ... until now.) It's really too bad, as it has an impressive lineup of both new fiction, and classic reprints. The latter, with its truly old-school lineup of authors — Robert Bloch, Zenna Henderson, Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn, Manly Wade Wellman — brings back a lot of memories of hunting this stuff down in musty paperbacks, including one tale (Fredric Brown's "Mouse") where I was left hanging because the ending page was actually ripped out of the book! How did this never get on my radar? Note to self: how did I never, say, Google "Allamagoosa" ? The news has been picked up by bOING bOING after I submitted the link, where Cory is understandably upset ...

Science fiction critic/editor/fan John J. Pierce is at it again. For the second time this year, he's gotten a letter to the editor about science fiction published in The New York Times . Last January, as previously seen on this blog , he weighed in on Heinlein's ever-controversial Starship Troopers . Today, the NYT printed his response to a snooty article on Philip K. Dick. The article was one of many that take the "science fiction for people who hate to admit that worthwhile literature is science fiction" tack: take a single science fiction author (Bradbury, le Guin and Vonnegut are common examples) and proceed to argue that the author has some special talent that is completely different from the bulk of science fiction authors, and that their literary value is mutually exclusive to the science fictional aspects of their work. So, this article will note Dick's origins in pulps and Ace Double paperbacks, and then follow it up with "you don't read M...

Science fiction is the most subversive of all literary genres. You can get away with stuff in science fiction that you can't get away with anywhere else, because half the time, the people you are holding up to the light don't even realize that you're doing it. —David Gerrold Three new transcripts I did have been added to the Equal Time for Freethought archives . David Gerrold interview with Barry F. Seidman, August 7, 2005 This is an informal chat with the renowned science fiction writer, touching on his experience with Star Trek , and his novels such as The Man Who Folded Himself , When H.A.R.L.I.E Was One , the War Against the Chtorr series, and The Martian Child , together with his real-life parenting experiences that formed the inspiration for the novel. As it so happens, the latter is the basis for a movie that's coming out this June. I wrote about this show when it first aired, in one of the earliest posts ever on this blog . two Robert M. Price interviews wit...

This weekend, the New York Times book review had a couple of letters in response to a previous review of John Scalzi's novels which commented on one of science fiction's most perennially controversial novels, Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. One of them is by John J. Pierce, who points out the long history of contention over the book and how Heinlein liked Joe Haldeman's The Forever War despite the latter being a direct critique of his book. It's an example of how irreverent and open debate is encouraged in the genre; as Gregory Benford put it, while in "serious fiction ... proceeds from canonical classics that supposedly stand outside of time, deserving awe, great and intact by themselves", science fiction books constitute "immense discussions, with ideas developed, traded varied; players ring changes on each other — a steppin'-out jazz band, not a solo concert in a plush auditorium." Pierce is recognized among science fiction fandom...

Two weeks ago, one of the great classic writers of science fiction passed away: Jack Williamson. His famously long career spanned from the Gernsbackian beginnings of the modern genre in 1928 to a final novel, The Stonehenge Gate , published in 2005, and was already a nonagenarian when I started reading him in the late 1990s. I've enjoyed a great deal of his science fiction, which is always marked by a sense of adventure and imagination. The early The Green Girl sends its heroes beneath the sea in a Verne-inspired "omnimobile". The Legion of Space and its sequel The Cometeers were some of the most entertaining of the early "space operas". The dystopian "With Folded Hands" and the subsequent The Humanoids contain a famous treatment of robots which was influential on both the field and actual AI researchers like Marvin Minsky. Hal Clement thought that The Legion of Time was "the best time travel story ever written"; not only was its tre...

A few days ago, less than a week after reading Keay Davidson's biography of Carl Sagan, I was browsing through the library and randomly came across a science fiction novel by Carl's son Nick Sagan (the third of Sagan's five children). Although I had heard of Nick's career as a TV writer (including, appropriately, for Star Trek series The Next Generation and Voyager ), I had no idea that he wrote science fiction books. In fact he has written two SF novels so far: Idlewild (2003) and Edenborn (2004). I can't opine on the novels, not having read them, but I'm pretty sure that Steven Baxter is right when he says that Nick "has a sense of wonder in his DNA." ;) So I checked his site (see the pictures page for some photos of him with Carl!), and he has a brand-new blog that just debuted earlier this week! In fact, it debuted on Halloween and in his first post he weighs in on his favorite holiday (mine too; in fact, I found my own way to tie it in wi...

Roderick T. Long's recent post about the merits of Jules Verne reminded me of this. I recently was pretty shocked to find out that the most widely available English translations of Jules Verne's books are totally mutilated and inaccurate. As much as 1/4 of entire books are cut, including in particular much of the social and political material, giving the impression that Verne didn't deal with those issues. For example, the most available translation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was done by a clergyman who decided to omit all mentions of Darwin. Much of what is kept doesn't fare much better: in that same translation, Nemo's figure for the density of steel was confused to make it lighter than water. Most of these hack translations were done in the 1800s, but are still widely reprinted today, with little awareness about them. In contrast, the translations into other languages are generally okay, and in the non-English-speaking parts of Europe the sophisticated asp...

Today's New York Times book review section has a fantastic article , "Heinlein's Female Troubles" by Mary Grace Lord, about feminism in Robert Heinlein's science fiction.

Two weeks ago, the humanist radio show Equal Time for Freethought (on WBAI in the New York City area), for which I'm on the staff as a researcher, celebrated its third anniversary. Given that tonight's show featured science fiction author David Gerrold, I think a reference to Theodore Sturgeon's famous short story is appropriate. Given how marginalized the show's philosophy of "secular humanism and scientific naturalism" is in our society and (especially) the mass media, I'm proud it's been on for so long. In fact, when I started listening to tonight's show I suddenly got a gut reaction of surprise to this — hey, humanism is coming from the radio! It may be a relatively small step towards getting the message out (especially in the constraints of a half-hour format) but it's still significant. Tonight's discussion was interesting, since I'm a longtime science fiction fan (as, of course, is interviewer Barry Seidman). Some of my favorit...