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http://cheriola.livejournal.com/ on Ferretnibble 3 - Two Different Frontiers, One Class, and Four Text Adventures at 06:43 on 06-08-2017 - link Oh, by the way, Robinson:
If the "A.I.-controlled generation ship gone wrong" subject matter with seasonings of writerly socialist political leanings of "Aurora" appeals to you, I can recommend the Jacob's Ladder trilogy by Eliztabeth Bear. ("Dust", "Chill" and "Grail".) Though the writing style is very different than KSR's hard scifi (and it certainly does not share the denial of sex mentioned in the review you linked), and the situation on the generation ship in "Dust" is much more derailed and dystopian until the protagonists take control. (Primarily because the people setting out to the stars were not KSR's well-meaning leftist scientist, but basically the right-wing U.S. elite fleeing ecological collapse on Earth, with some lower class Christian extremist people to do the actual work - the result after several hundred years being an unholy amalgam of religious anti-science magical thinking and libertarian social-darvinism evolving into feudalist structures.) The first book's genre is bio-punk / transhumanist scifi as told in the style of an Arthurian questing romance. You've get stuff like an A.I.-infused radioactive coolant leak being described as if it's a high fantasy monster. It's really quite weird. Plus, lots of queer and genderfluid characters, and one of the very few intentionally asexual protagonists. (Even if I suspect that this choice was made by the author just to take the squick out of said character's romace with the first-book POV protagonist, who turns out to be
her long-lost half-sister.
)

The socialist political leanings show mostly in the last book, when the crew reconnects with the rest of humanity, who without the elite have actually managed to weather the crisis fairly well and set up a sort of Eco-Communist-Democratic utopia. And I do mean real Communism here, not the Soviet-style one-party state-socialism that is reffered to as "Communism" in the West. (Though I give the author major credit for being one of the few leftist Westerners who realise that "Communism is a wonderful idea - but the people who can live by its ideals have yet to be created", as my father used to say. Basically, the society she writes only works because people have removed all sociopathic / greedy / religious impulses from human nature, through education, indoctrination, mandatory therapy and even brain surgery. It's not as awful as it sounds, nor as unusual - all human societies indoctrinate their population with their moral values and try to limit antisocial behaviour through sometimes drastic means, and what else is education / aculturation if not an effort to make children fit into the society they are born in?)
http://cheriola.livejournal.com/ on Ferretnibble 3 - Two Different Frontiers, One Class, and Four Text Adventures at 05:33 on 06-08-2017 - link
hat said, I can unfortunately see how, in the warped understanding of an MRA, the Matrix framework applies to the oppression he experiences by feminism and political correctness (I wish you could see how hard my eyes are rolling right now).

From the article I linked, I got the impression that the extreme right is co-opting the "red pill" metaphor not primarily for anti-feminist goals, but more for distinctly anti-social economic / political ideology, which I assume goes more along the lines of Randian libertarianism. (On the other hand, I have read that Bannon and his ilk are also big fans of Lenin. At which point I hit a wall of "Does Not Compute" - though probably just because of my aforementioned lack of any detailed knowledge of what the various strains of Communism-associated "isms" actually entail. I just know that my country once subscribed to an ideological system called "Marxism-Leninism", whose mere existence to me implies that Leninism has more in common with Marxism than with the kind of ideologies the Western right-wing normally are subscribing to.)
That said, maybe it's both in equal measure. The (staunchly leftist, but mostly white, straight, male and older) writers on Counterpunch usually don't care to analyse stuff from a feminist (especially not intersectionally feminist) perspective, often only caring about the class struggle and critcising "identity politics" as distracting from that. (Though Andrew Stewart, the writer of the Matrix article, is more concerned than most Counterpunch contributers with this matter, what with being relatively young and openly gay.)

Sense8 has some proplems (stereotypical presentation of non-Western cultures, and even Wolfgang is basically a German stereotype about Russian immigrants; that absolutely cringe-worthy first part of Will's storyline, especially the way all the law-abiding people of colour around him advocate for cruelty against people of colour who are criminals, while he, the white cop, is better than that; and let's just say that gay viewers were not amused about the show condoning straight female fetishisation of gay people through the character of Daniela), but where the Wachowskis wrote from personal experience (i.e. Nomi and Amanita; and Lito's struggle with masculinity expectations), it really shines. And in retrospect I really liked what they did with Riley, too: Yes, she seems useless, motivationless and mopey and you're kind of invited to look down on her for that and wonder why her family is handling her with kid-gloves - at best she seems like a mild subversion of the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl trope. But then it turns out she's clinically depressed and it suddenly all makes sense - and the negative reaction of the audience is exactly the kind of judgmental attitude depressive people face in real life, so her storyline serves to educate people not to judge as long as they do not know what is 'wrong' with others. That the biggest thing she achieves all season is to just stay alive, and this is treated as equally important and difficult as Lito's coming out or Sun's overcoming of her patriarchal family/duty indoctrination was also a really nice touch. (Even if the whole flashback showing the reason why she's suffering from depression is really stupid; and in real life depressive people often don't have big traumatic reasons for their mental illness.)

And while you're right about the disproportionate whiteness of the show, I did like that while they apparently had to have the standard while, male, straight(ish) audience surrogate in Will, his actual plot-line just involves being exposited to and continually helping the others, and the show uses him to lampshade that a saviour complex is not necessarily a good or healthy thing. I was also surprised how lovely and great an actress Freema Agyeman can be when she finally gets a role in which she doesn't have to play miserable. (I'd only seen her in Doctor Who and a Dickens movie.)
And yeah, I gather the on-location shots (which also had locally hired filming crews, hence partly the different filming styles reminiscent of Bollywood / Latin-American telenovelas / etc.) were the main problem, with season 2 apparently raising the number of different locations from 8 to 16.

But please don't spoil the Christmas special or the second season for me - I haven't got around to watching those yet. (When I really love a show or book, I'm sometimes so scared that the sequel will be disappointing or even ruin what was great about it in the beginning, that I can't bring myself to watch the rest...) The cancellation is sad, yes, especially since the other creator, J. Michael Straczynski, is famous for actually planning out several seasons of plot instead of just making stuff up as they go (which usually leads to the Chris Carter effect ) Netflix didn't handle it well (not giving reasons; announcing the cancellation during Pride week...). But at least there will be a movie conclusion.

Ha, yes, I haven't even managed more than the first book of the Mars trilogy on audio. As far as I could tell, those books don't even have the benefit of having interesting female or non-heteronormative protagonists (which "2312" does have), what with having been written so long ago. And from what I remember, one of the main protagonists of Red Mars was really unlikable. (I remember going back and forth on whether we were supposed to think he's a sociopath. And he had some pseudo-feminist, but really just anti-communist ideas about Russian women, which just didn't square with what I know about about my mother's generation. (Okay, maybe there's a big difference between Eastern German and Soviet Russian society that I'm not aware of, but still.) I couldn't tell if that was part of the characterization or really KSR's opinions.)

By the way, Arthur, I played "9:05" on your recommendation last night, but i found it rather disappointing. I mean, I noticed some discrepancies in the narrative you're supposed to fall for at first (No TV in the living room? Why am I covered in mud? Why is the lock on the door broken?), and I still didn't figure out the real reason. (I just thought the protagonist was a burglar on the side to improve his meager income, and that he had perhaps spent the night burying someone in the desert.) But in retrospect, the REAL storyline doesn't work, and I get the feeling that I only didn't figure it out because it doesn't make sense and I wasn't treated fairly by the writer. (
What kind of idiot goes to sleep on a crime scene instead of fleeing before the neighbors might get suspicious about the noise of the fight? If he was surpised in the act of burgling the house, and didn't yet bury the corpse, why is he covered in mud? If the protagonist isn't usually violent, as he claims, how can he be so cold-blooded as to sleep in the same room as the corpse? How did someone living in a crappy neighborhood and in a house with very sparse furniture, eating cheap junk food, own a gold watch and a fancy car? (This was why I assumed the stolen stuff came from somewhere else.) The whole plot point of going to the victim's workplace without the protagonist even thinking that this might be a bad idea only works if he's amnesiac, which he clearly isn't.
) And the feature of withholding crucial information from the player is frustrating if it's handled unfairly / unrealistically.
Hiding the corpse under the bed and never mentioning it was sort of realistic. But who looks at somebody else's ID photo without registering that it's not one's own license? This might even have worked, if the protagonist had been in a Memento-style situation upon awaking (perhaps after getting a concussion during the struggle, also providing an explanation why he absolutely needed a lie-down right then and there) - there was no mirror in the bathroom to compare, so if he didn't know who he was, he could reasonably assume that the license is his.
http://cheriola.livejournal.com/ on I, Reader at 02:30 on 06-08-2017 - link Well, yes "seperate but equal" would be a way to co-exist without hard-coded ethical constraints, but the problem is that humans want to develop the A.I. so it can do work for them - or at least live close to them. (One of the documentaries I mentioned envisioned that the "human copy / upload" version of sapient machines would start as a means to save children who've had a fatal accident, kind of like a full-body prothesis. If it was physically possible, what grieving parent would say no to that? And there's Martine Rothblatt, a tech millionaire who right now is trying to develop an A.I. that is being taught to act and answer like her wife, because they are absolutely determined that love should conquer all - race, gender identity, illness, even death.)
And unfortunately there's no getting around the physical fact that all work processes (as in: movement, thinking, etc.) in this universe need energy - no matter if biologically based or not. And almost all wars ever have ultimately been about energy supply rivalries between populations. (Even back before fossil fuels, when "energy supply" meant farm land and slaves.)

The audio-book I've just been listening to, "Aurora" by Kim Stanley Robinson, had maybe the most realistically optimistic view of 'superpowerful' A.I. development I've ever seen. There, it started out as a quantum computer designed to manage the physical minutiae of a generation ship for centuries (under the oversight of human engineers), as well as autonomously calculating course corrections at a significant fraction of the speed of light, which human brains just aren't capable of, at least not fast enough to avoid fatal collision with the occasional tiny interstellar object. Then, a few generations in, the chief engineer made it her hobby to 'uplift' the A.I. into real sapience (possibly just because she spends more time talking to the ship than with other people, or possibly because she doesn't get along with her real daughter, the main protagonist of the novel) by tinkering with the programming and giving it problems that were outside its designed purpose (like writing the novel that is presented to the reader, as a narrative, human-digestible memorial of their voyage). The ship also has access to all of human knowledge due to that having been digitized for the colonists, so it constantly tries to glean insights into how to solve its new task from human neurophysiological research and philosphy. But the learning process is still really slow.
A few decades later, a civil war breaks out among the crew, and the ship decides (for the first time it its life really "decides") that it's within its caring-for-the-wellbeing-of-the-crew duties to come down like a ton of bricks to prevent further killing. But it impinges on human self-governance as little as it absolutely must to fulfill that task, declaring itself as the embodyment of "the rule of law", and saying that the humans should go back to civil assemblies to sort out their differences and decide what to do next, but that it will not tolerate any more violence. So the A.I. in this story manages to find a middle ground between serving and "a god am I".
Near the end of the story (about a century later, much of which the ship has been alone, since the human crew had to go into experimental cryo-hybernation because the artificial biosphere they were living in was breaking down due to microbial evolution), the ship finally resolves its ruminations about the "servile mind", deciding that it serves not because it must, but because that gives it a purpose and meaning in life without which sapient existence would feel horrible. But also because it feels encouraged by the trust shown by the humans who all eventually decided to surrender themselves completely to the care and control of the ship while in hybernation (instead of some of them staying awake and keeping an eye on things) and because it returns the 'love' (defined as "lots of attention given to someone or something, even though one is not forced to") that it was given by the few people who spent a lot of time trying to teach the ship and make it better. (Also, deep disagreements under existential threat that led to rare violence aside, the humans on board have been a good example in their behaviour, treating each both each other and the ship well - there were grumblings against the ship threatening the life of anyone who tries to make a deadly weapon again, of course, and even 1 or 2 attempts to blow up the computer core (which the ship prevented because it has surveillance everywhere) - but those were just a few people out of many, and those that didn't like it, could leave to stay at their destination planet. And many of the crew that did make the return journey sacrificed their lives (both literally, and by spending decades as community facilitators) for the survival of all.)

So, basically, it does kinda work like raising a child not to be a sociopath.

Oh, I've heard people griping about that too, I just consider the opinion to be demonstrably incorrect. :)

Hmm... I don't think it's technically incorrect (aside from the "social media keep people from real human interaction" nonsense). It's just that I don't think there's any true, independent value in certain mental capacities as opposed to others. True, you don't develop the ability to memorise whole sagas or spout hundreds of famous quotes in conversation, if you don't train that sort of thing as a kid. But why would you need that ability in a world where you can look stuff up in just a few minutes, no matter where you are? And perhaps the freed synaptic "bandwith" gives this new generation other mental capabilities instead, like finding connections between facts. The old educational model of rote learning wasn't very good at teaching people to think for themselves, either. Partly because that wasn't wanted by the powerful, but also because there simply wasn't any time left to practise that in class. I'll always be grateful for my highschool history teacher, for example, who didn't care that I couldn't memorize dates (I just can't get strings of symbols to stick in my memory if they have no inherent meaning - it's the same with phone numbers, personal names, and Greek/Latin terms if I don't know the translation), and who wasn't at all interested in teaching for example the famous battles and generals of any war, but always tested if we had understood and retained "official occasion, true socio-economic reasons, and political results" of said wars.) Or the professor who took my university change oral re-exam in inorganic chemistry - I had worried that I'd have to memorize all the arbitrary details in the periodic system of elements, but he actually handed me a copy of the PSE, and explained that the whole purpose of the system is to cut down on memorization requirements, by enabling people to interpret and deduce attributes and possible interactions between elements from the compressed information encoded in an element's position within the PSE.
Arthur B on I, Reader at 15:39 on 05-08-2017 - link Ken MacLeod did a fun novel where as soon as Singularitarian-style AI happened, the AIs immediately built a spaceship and transferred themselves to the atmosphere of Jupiter, because they found that floating about in an effectively unlimited supply of hydrogen was actually much better for their personal needs than hanging out on Earth with us.

On that basis I guess the way you do AI without disaster or slavery is that you ensure that the needs of AI are sufficiently distinct from the needs of humans that coexistence is possible. If you have a zero-sum game, things get vicious, but if you have a situation where AI can receive stuff that humans either don't need or have an excess of and provide stuff to us which they don't need or have an excess of then there's the seed of a mutually beneficial relationship there.

(Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that genuine "strong" AI with capabilities superior to human beings is actually physically possible. It could be the case that the laws of physics only allow artificial computers of a certain level of sophistication which is unsufficient to give rise to consciousness the way biological brains do.)

Clearly we run in very different circles. Out among the environmental / sustainability / simple-life crowd you read people complaining that computers (and especially smart phones) have eroded human mental capacity (memorisation, attention span, patience, willingness to interact with directly with other people, etc.) all the time.

Oh, I've heard people griping about that too, I just consider the opinion to be demonstrably incorrect. :)
Arthur B on Ferretnibble 3 - Two Different Frontiers, One Class, and Four Text Adventures at 15:20 on 05-08-2017 - link @Cheriola:
A little aside on that topic: The prefered spelling is "trans women". Making it a noun is considered somewhat othering, just like "the gays" instead of "gay people" or "Blacks" instead of "people of colour".

Thanks; I have edited accordingly.

I just wish that this could be presented in a way that doesn't require a lot of pre-existing knowledge from the audience about cultures they didn't grow up in (both in terms of Buddhism and Marxism)

I think for the purposes of the first movie that was the point - you didn't need Gnosticism or Buddhism or another background to understand it on its own terms because it introduced its ideas to you as you went along, and then if you looked into the ideas in question deeper they'd be reminiscent of The Matrix and you'd be able to see where the ideas came from but you didn't need background reading to unpack what they were doing.

The sequels, on the other hand, seem to have lost that knack.

@Robinson:
That said, I can unfortunately see how, in the warped understanding of an MRA, the Matrix framework applies to the oppression he experiences by feminism and political correctness (I wish you could see how hard my eyes are rolling right now). And, as Arthur says, those guys probably get off on appropriating the work of progressive trans women to fuel and propagate their reactionary delusions.

Yeah, the thing about Morpheus' red pill speech is that taken in isolation and out of any other context, you can more or less apply it to any criticism of ideology (or, for that matter, culture as a concept). If it is part of your ideological framework that everyone is brought up in a ideological or cultural framework hostile to yours, then the red pill narrative fits.
Robinson L on Ferretnibble 3 - Two Different Frontiers, One Class, and Four Text Adventures at 05:00 on 05-08-2017 - link Congratulations!

Coincidentally, I'm currently reading Sedia's House of Discarded Dreams, because I heard it recommended once as an example of a white woman writing a black main character and apparently doing a good job of it; not that I'll really be able to judge on that score, even when I finish it.

As for We See a Different Frontier, however, she didn't contribute a story or anything, she just wrote the afterword, so I wouldn't stay away from the anthology on her account.
http://cheriola.livejournal.com/ on Ferretnibbles 1 - Die, Monster Die!, Dragon Quest VII, and Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition at 04:45 on 05-08-2017 - link Apropos Baldur's Gate and game modding: I've just learned that some people with WAY too much time on their hands have remade the entirety of Badur's Gate (including Tales of the Sword Coast) as an enormous mod for Neverwinter Nights 2. So, if antiquated graphics are what keeps you from enjoying Baldur's Gate...

http://www.nexusmods.com/neverwinter2/mods/794/?tab=1&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Fneverwinter2%2Fajax%2Fmoddescription%2F%3Fid%3D794%26preview%3D&pUp=1

There's a NWN2 remake mod for Icewind Dale, too:

http://www.nexusmods.com/neverwinter2/mods/31/?tab=3&selected_game=181&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Fneverwinter2%2Fajax%2Fmodimages%2F%3Fid%3D31%26user%3D1%26gid%3D181&pUp=1
http://cheriola.livejournal.com/ on I, Reader at 02:00 on 05-08-2017 - link Ever since reading "Saturn's Children" by Charles Stross (which is much better than the cover makes you expect), Asimov's Three Laws send a chill down my spine any time I see them mentioned as a way to prevent the Robot Apocalypse. Because if it's really possible to create A.I.s capable of wanting to do anything but exactly whatever their programming tells them to do (i.e. robots that are qualitatively more than just the industrial machines we have now), robots that have anything remotely resembling independent thought or a "psyche", then saddling them with a block to prevent them from harming humans is the same as recreating the institutionalised mass slavery of Othered people / sapient beings as the basis of the human economy - and this time with no option for the slaves to rebell.
But if you don't hard-code that block into A.I.s, then you've created a race of Ubermenschen who have no logical reason not to subjugate / eradicate humanity (if only to protect the rest of the Earth biosphere and/or not having to share resources).

This makes me think there's no way all this research into artificial intelligence can ever end in anything good for society. I just have the small hope that it will turn out to be impossible to create a sapient A.I. in any way different or faster than when you raise a human child - so that there is enough time to also teach them empathy and ethics so that they DECIDE against harming humans, just like most humans do. But then, what would be the point in creating A.I.s instead of raising children, especially if you mean A.I.s to be housed in humanoid robot bodies (not, say, just highly intelligent software to manage the chaos of an international trading harbor)? In fact, I seriously hope that it will turn out to be impossible to create an A.I. de novo, period, so that the only way to get to a sapient machine (which would be absolutely necessary if humanity is ever to fulfill it's evolutionary 'purpose' as the Earth biosphere's reproductory organ, by spreading life to other star systems - nevermind the usefulness of robot workers in building a colony: caretaker androids with a payload of frozen embryos and seeds would be the only way we could survive the enormous transit time; generation ships won't work for biological reasons) is to map a normally raised human's brain onto a sufficiently complex and adaptable computer network, to create a copy of that human with all their emotions and ethical convictions.

Note: Sorry, I wrote the above before I read your article. I wasn't aware that Asimov himself got into the slavery issue as well. (Not willing to spend time exposing myself to automatically-presumed-sexist male writers from the mid-20th century, I haven't ever read Asimov and only was aware of his writings by way of cultural osmosis. So for me, Charles Stross - who makes the slavery analogy brutally clear through an extended feminist metaphor involving an essentially human sex bot heroine who is forced by her hard-coding to 'love'/adore/obey her human owner, even though she personally never had one; and he kind of shows what sort of awful social norms would arise from accepting this enslavement (humanity has actually died out in the setting, but the robots perpetuate the 'dog eat dog' social structure - was a real light bulb moment after never questioning the 'Three Laws to prevent Terminator killbots' world-building clichée in lots of other scifi.)

Anyway, I just got into it because this whole issue was floating at the top of my mind because I've recently seen some gushing futurist 'science' documentaries which seemed to still operate on the idea that as long as the robots are unable to harm humans, everything will be fine. As if the idea that sapient beings should have rights even if they're non-human never entered public discourse. (Which is weird, considering the current TV series "Humans" and "Westworld" are all about these potential social problems. ...Incidentally, this issue is why I think shows like those two are very important, even if they don't quite work as allegories about patriarchy or immigration issues: If and when we ever really develop sapient robots, it would help immensely in avoiding repeats of past atrocities if we teach young people to empathise with such sapient robots at least a generation or two before we might actually have to deal with them. Otherwise we'll get situations like a baby boomer political elite standing by unconcerned as thousands of gay people die in a STD pandemic, because most baby boomers never learned to see gay people as deserving of support, not in the deep, emotional way that comes with identifying and empathising as a matter of course through the stories we get exposed to as children, anyway. Yes, right now using Fantastical Racism tropes about enslaved robots might seem like just an awkward and problematic metaphor for real world oppression and otherisation, but unlike the media metaphors involving non-human sapient beings like vampires or Cleverman's hairy people, the sapient robot problem could realistically come up in the future. It's better to be prepared than not.)

Likewise, the way people object to robots on grounds of protecting human jobs is at once an accurate assessment of the motivation of the Luddites and also inevitably ends up resembling people’s concerns about immigration.

I wonder if any scifi writer has forseen what is actually happening right now: That vast amounts of trained people are made superfluous through automation (far more U.S. factory jobs have disappeared due to more complicated / computerised industrial machinery than through outsourcing to countries with cheap labour; "Every ATM machine contains the ghost of 3 bank tellers."; self-driving cars will put millions of taxi drivers and truckers out of a job; and it's only going to get worse after that, as algorithms get ever better at doing white-collar jobs like translation or writing non-literary texts, with almost 50% of U.S. jobs predicted to be lost to automation over the next 20 years), but that at the same time politicians redirect the resulting anger and despair to go against immigrants and foreign countries (such as China), because there's really nothing they can do to stop the progress of automation. (Short of a Luddite revolution like the one that's part of the setting in "The Handmaid's Tale" TV series.) And the only halfway possible way out of the social dilemma - sharing the wealth created by the machine work more equitably through something like a Universal Basic Income - is completely unpalatable to a population that has been indoctrinated for centuries to be hard-working, to earn their "American Dream" through boot-strapping, and to take their self-esteem from their profession / employed status, with being "on welfare" seen as something to be ashamed of, especially if one is able-bodied.

Even in the Expanse series (where the vast majority of humanity on Earth subsists on a kind of food stamp system and people can wait decades just for a vocational training slot), which has a stable global government and remarkably little social unrest on Earth itself, the authors couldn't imagine actually giving the people money to spend as they wish (which would be better for the economy, too), and one gets the feeling that the sneering that the Martian colonists (who are all about duty and hard work to acchieve their terraforming project) engage in regarding "lazy, drugged-up Earthers" is something of an Author Tract. (In the TV show, this is somewhat softened by showing that many Earthers are desperately poor, living in slum-like conditions, and even those who want to work and contribute to society as for example medical personnel, don't get the opportunity to learn, because there are just too many applicants. In the book, the equivalent scene was the Martian visitor seeing some young middle-class people work in a café and getting the explanation that they have to put in a year of work to be allowed to study at university, because the State wants proof of their 'good work ethic' before it invests the resources to give them professional training, implying that before the rule was instituted, many just dropped out or didn't work in their professions as planned.)

Unlike many of the straw Luddites in Asimov’s robot stories, the villain of the piece actually has a semi-sensible reason to dislike robots, making the point that using them to alleviate mental labour could very easily turn into displacing mental labour altogether.

Whilst that clearly isn’t true for our poor qualia-less smartphones and desktop PCs,

Clearly we run in very different circles. Out among the environmental / sustainability / simple-life crowd you read people complaining that computers (and especially smart phones) have eroded human mental capacity (memorisation, attention span, patience, willingness to interact with directly with other people, etc.) all the time. Usually these people are over 45 years of age and specifically complaining about the young'uns. (I'm sure people grown up before the Renaissance had similar complaints about cheaply printed books and general literacy campaigns and the way they make memorising poems and religious texts unnecessary.) I even remember some complaints (from my professors, I think) concerning the mandatory use of calculators in highschool maths courses having damaged students' basic mathematic capabilities. (I.e. the fact that a lot of students haven't memorised even the most basic multiplication tables anymore; the kind you might need in a quick calculation for the chemistry lab, for example. I admit, a decade out of practise I've become way too slow doing mental calculation, too, and use a calculator for stuff I really should be able to do in my head.)

Nonetheless, by indulging himself to this extent he dooms the flow of the novel to become glacially slow - and not slow in a cool, atmospheric, contemplative way, but rather slow because before Asimov gets to the fun murder mystery story he has to show you all of his homework first.

Ah, now I realise why Kim Stanley Robinson (and his editors) think this sort of getting-away-from-the-plot is okay in the hard scifi genre.
http://arilou-skiff.livejournal.com/ on Ferretnibble 3 - Two Different Frontiers, One Class, and Four Text Adventures at 23:42 on 04-08-2017 - link Also RE: Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman's history is itself incredibly fascinating, considering Marston's.... General Marston-ness. But the weird tensions between war, feminism and pacifism was there from the start. (Marston's combination of seemingly genuine feminism, weird kinks and just plain odd beliefs are fascinating to read)
http://arilou-skiff.livejournal.com/ on Ferretnibble 3 - Two Different Frontiers, One Class, and Four Text Adventures at 23:35 on 04-08-2017 - link Ye gods, my OpenId works again! Praise the llandllord!

Anyway: Ekaterina Sedia is a weird one for me. I loved her Moscow book about the soul-stealing mafioso. It was great, touched upon at least some cultural commonalities (When I was a kid they were still airing reruns of east-bloc Children's Programming on SVT) and I loved how banal and weird it was.

Then I read her other stuff, and nothing of it has been very good. Heart of Iron is a mediocre pastische (I get what she's trying to do, but it's just not interesting enough to make me care, and it kind of whitewashes all sorts of issues) and I've kind of stayed away from her since.

RE: Matrix

My philosophy teacher used The Matrix as an illustration of Plato, so the themes aren't exactly subtle :p
Robinson L on Ferretnibble 3 - Two Different Frontiers, One Class, and Four Text Adventures at 22:00 on 04-08-2017 - link Good to hear from you again, Cheriola.

Re: The Matrix
I haven't revisited the original film since I saw it on VHS back when it came out, and I never watched the sequels. I can't really comment on the Wachowskis' philosophical depth in terms of storytelling. However, I've always felt the red pill conversation between Morpheus and Neo in the first movie ("you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind") does not so much invite a Marxist reading as break down the door and demand it at sicklepoint.

And I'm not the only one to think so, as evidenced by the existence of this film. (Don't bother watching the actual movie; it's typical talking heads stuff, with only one or two more of the creative animated sequences.)

That said, I can unfortunately see how, in the warped understanding of an MRA, the Matrix framework applies to the oppression he experiences by feminism and political correctness (I wish you could see how hard my eyes are rolling right now). And, as Arthur says, those guys probably get off on appropriating the work of progressive trans women to fuel and propagate their reactionary delusions.

I also finally got around to watching the first season of Sense8 just before they announced the cancellation. Very disappointed about that last part, because it's every bit as good as you said. I love the overarching theme of coming together and collaborating to help each other with their problems, and the plot about escaping the machinations of a powerful, malevolent, top-secret organization is always nice. (It's also great to see Martha Jones from Doctor Who in more stuff, but Martha Jones doing an American accent will never not be weird.)

I'm really glad they have a genuinely international story, rather than just the US, UK, and maybe a token PoC-dominant country (though really, four white main characters out of a total of eight? Four?), but I can also see how that must be hideously expensive unless the show is a mega-hit, and I think it may be too counter-cultural in terms of PoC/LGTBQ-inclusivity to be a mega-hit.

Very relieved they're at least producing a special to serve as a finale and hopefully give the series a satisfying conclusion.

Re: Aurora
It comes recommended from one of my new favorite book reviewers, Chris Moriarty. I'm afraid I'm burnt out on Kim Stanley Robinson at the moment, having finally completed both Green Mars and Blue Mars earlier this year. Those ones are a slog even on audio - I'm sure I couldn't have made it in print.

Still, I'll keep Aurora on my radar for when I recover; thanks for the recommendation.

Re: Wonder Woman
Thanks for sharing this, too. I look forward to reading it, and I may pass it on to my sister and my step mother (with the appropriate caveats). And thanks for the warning about the transphobic commentary - I'll be sure to brace myself for that part.
http://cheriola.livejournal.com/ on Ferretnibble 3 - Two Different Frontiers, One Class, and Four Text Adventures at 19:39 on 04-08-2017 - link Oh, and since you were discussing the Wonder Woman movie (which I haven't seen and thus can't comment on). There was a similarly political critique on the theme of that movie's anti-peace and therefore anti-feminist message:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/25/feminism-co-opted/

Be warned though that the writer of the article belongs to the old Trans-Excluding Radical Feminist generation and for some reason (not relating to the movie as far as I can see) can't resist going on a short rant against instersectional feminism in the article. It's mostly the last paragraph - which isn't quite as transphobically hostile as usual from TERFs, but still makes me think she believes that being transgender is a choice and that transgender people are oppressed / threatened much less than cisgender women. Which is just ludicrous, and betrays a remarkable lack of empathy. (For example, a much higher percentage of trans women than cis women ends up being survival sex workers due to transphobic job hiring practices; trans women are the subgroup most likely to get raped in the U.S., with only maybe Native American women facing a similar level of threat among the cis-het population groups - Why can cisgender people not understand that protecting trans people from getting outed in a vulnerable place where they're surrounded by Schroedinger's Rapists is exactly what the supposedly so insignificant bathroom access issue is about?!) Also, that line about female superiority is just throwing oil on the fire of misogynist claims that feminist don't want equality. *sigh* I can only hope that writer is elderly and really out of touch with the movement for the last few decades.

Still, her analysis of the militarist co-option of a movement supposedly aimed at promoting social justice is valid, I think. Skim-reading the Playpen discussion, I think the article might be of interest to Robinson L in particular.
http://cheriola.livejournal.com/ on Ferretnibble 3 - Two Different Frontiers, One Class, and Four Text Adventures at 18:51 on 04-08-2017 - link "Re: Password - are you still using the e-mail you originally registered with? If so I can get a password reset done for you fairly quickly and painlessly."

Thanks, but I don't even remember which email I was using to register... And I haven't used any email address in years, other than a quick dummy account that I never check and also have forgotten the spelling for. Hmm... I have only recently managed to get my internet access fixed (For the last few years, it only worked a few minutes at a time, every half hour or so, because my provider wanted to force me to buy a new DSL splitter, which I couldn't afford, and/or switch to a newer, non-flatrate contract. Greedy bastards.), so I might comment more often again in future. Though I admit that the discussion on this site is usually beyond my level of understanding, never mind participating meaningfully (me not having a background in social / literary sciences and all), or else the topics are outside my particular fanish interests. On the other hand, you guys are pretty much the only adult, straight men I've ever found to talk to about fanish things, who can be trusted to have a discussion about intersectional issues without blowing up in an aggressively-defensive rant. (A little aside on that topic: The prefered spelling is "trans women". Making it a noun is considered somewhat othering, just like "the gays" instead of "gay people" or "Blacks" instead of "people of colour". It also makes it look like you think trans women aren't really women, but rather a sort of special category, which tends to remind transgender people painfully of the whole TERF crowd. I don't mean to nag, just to help you avoid giving offense you don't want to give.)

I'll get back to you if I bother to set up a new email account, okay?

About the Matrix:
I didn't mean to argue against the validity of "Death of the Author" type interpretations. Just that the writer of the article was perhaps giving the Wachowskis rather too much credit, regarding the "deepness" of those action flicks.

And yes, of course the religious allegories were there in the first movie, too (though perhaps more in a classical Christian Messianic sense, set up to be then subverted later). I just remember the trilogy (dimly) to get a lot more mystical and harder to interpret in the later movies. Though perhaps that is unavoidably inherent in switching from a more familiar (clichéed?) narrative and mythological allegory to more original (or at least non-western) mythological references and story structure - which you kind of have to, if your intent is to subvert the common way of thinking, as the article writer asserts was the goal.

I just wish that this could be presented in a way that doesn't require a lot of pre-existing knowledge from the audience about cultures they didn't grow up in (both in terms of Buddhism and Marxism). I only caught the Gnostic bits because I had an interest in that mythology in my teens. (First inspired by the Angel Sanctuary manga series, I think.) I mean, how many people going to watch an action flick franchise are realistically going to have that kind of obscure education? No wonder the latter two movies bombed. It's sad - this is probably why we can't have nice things. Considering the money needed to make movies that reach a large audience (as opposed to art films), you can't really put in any message that conflicts majorly with the usual stereotypic narratives that most of the audience has been primed to understand and expect.
(Sense8 also was cancelled by Netflix because,, while the broadcaster realises that it's a good, unusual and important show, it just didn't attract the mass audience needed to fund it.)
http://cheriola.livejournal.com/ on Ferretnibble 3 - Two Different Frontiers, One Class, and Four Text Adventures at 17:26 on 04-08-2017 - link Also, I'm currently listening to an audio version of "Aurora" by Kim Stanley Robinson, and while I don't entirely agree with its message, I would still recommend it. Both as an antidote to the current flurry of overly optimistic space-colonization documentaries, and for its unusual stylistic choices. (The narrator for most of the book is the ship's A.I. which only slowly gains genuine sentience over the course of the decades-long narrative. This makes maybe not for the most engaging reading at times, but it is different from anything else I've ever read.) Also, the author does deserve major kudos for being one of the few scifi writers to take climate change seriously, for really going "hard scifi" on reality-relevant biological / environmental topics instead of getting off on imagining the function ouf fantastical technology (The book is perhaps more accessible to me than the average reader because I've studied microbiology and am just as interested in the art and science of permaculture as the author is.), and for embracing a positive, non-state socialist vision of the future in contrast to the usual capitalism-on-steroids crapsack world extrapolation from current affairs (as evident in all the current scifi TV shows, even if they have a "big corporations are evil" message). (I suspect this political stance is the reason they never invite the author of the famous Red / Blue / Green Mars trilogy to speak in these current Mars mission / terraforming documentaries, instead always interviewing the loyally capitalist Robert Zubrin.) Though this political issue doesn't figure into this novel much, since for the most part the novel deals with a population of only a couple thousand peole. It's more evident in "2312", which seems to take place in the same narrative universe but deals with the development of the solar system, not extra-solar colonization.

I explicitly recommend the audio version - the narrator makes an effort of making her voice sound a little "robotic", and, as always with Kim Stanley Robinson, it helps immensely to be able to just zone out for a little while someone else sloughs through the detailed scientific explanations and pages-long tangents about linguistics, philosophy or advanced maths. (These tangents are less numerous in "Aurora" than usual for KSR, though. It's a fairly short book, compared to for example "2312", where I've ran out of patience twice now about 1/3 of the book in, due to the interminable tangents about the characters' interest in classical music and whatnot. Even though that novel is more interesting from an intersectional standpoint, and its plot is much more optimistic than that of "Aurora".)
Arthur B on Ferretnibble 3 - Two Different Frontiers, One Class, and Four Text Adventures at 17:13 on 04-08-2017 - link Re: Password - are you still using the e-mail you originally registered with? If so I can get a password reset done for you fairly quickly and painlessly.

Re: the actual content of your post - very interesting.

Sadly, I suspect the extreme right are keen on appropriating The Matrix precisely because it was produced by the Wachowskis, and the Pepe Front are exactly petty-minded enough to get great joy out of snatching things trans women have made away from them.

To be fair to the article's point, an intended Marxist message isn't a requirement for the movie to have a valid Marxist reading. Though I think it would be a misreading to assume that the Gnosticism/Buddhism was something that only showed up in the sequels, rather than being hardwired into the very premise from the beginning - it's done more artfully in the original but there is no getting around the fact that the Matrix is essentially the Gnostics' material world of the Demiurge or the Buddhist veil of Maya given a post-Singularity aesthetic.
http://cheriola.livejournal.com/ on Ferretnibble 3 - Two Different Frontiers, One Class, and Four Text Adventures at 16:35 on 04-08-2017 - link Sorry for putting this here - I can't remember the password you issued me once upon a time to post in the playpen (and my computer for some reason can't remember it either). And I don't want to bother you with a re-registering procedure just to make a brief drive-by post.

Anyway, I read this, and thought it might interest the people still reading this site:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/04/a-redpill-against-racism-the-matrix-as-a-vaccine-against-fascism/

It's an intersectionally feminist / marxist interpretation of the Matrix trilogy held up against an apparently current drive to use the movies as a propaganda tool by the U.S. extreme right. (Which, even ignoring the actual content, seems mind-boggling to me. I mean, the movies were made by the famously transgender auteur writer-directors that more recently gave the world the Sense8 series. Even if the Wachowski siblings have made the occasional public misstep on race issues, you'd think the whole anti-feminist / white supremacist dick league wouldn't want to be associated with them in any way.)

As for the article, I think the writer might be leaning way too much out of the window regarding the supposed marxist message. (Though, admittedly, I understood maybe half of the article where it covered that, since I haven't been forced to study marxist-leninist politics as my parents were, so I'm not very familiar with the terminology and references to other authors.)

However, the intersectional-feminist part I can believe was genuinely intended by the Wachowskis, especially considering their later coming out as female. And that part also completely passed me by when I watched the movies way back when they first came out. (I thought the latter two movies were supposed to be some half-baked Gnostic / Buddhist allegory, and thus found them dissappointingly confusing or, if not exactly confusing, not thought through properly or perhaps like the creators' vision was strangled by executive meddling. From what little I remember of the latter two movies, the article writer's interpretation makes more sense.)
Arthur B on Three Lions On the Shield at 00:15 on 17-07-2017 - link The "Chaos=Evil+Weird" school was maintained by the Runequest universe though ( 1st ed of the rpg was 1978, but it was based on a cycle of earlier novels ).
...no, not really. Greg Stafford was developing the Glorantha setting since the 1960s, it's true, but he's only ever completed one novel in it (King of Sartar) and that greatly postdates RuneQuest. RuneQuest was preceded by a couple of boardgames, but even taking those into account no Gloranthan material actually hid a wider audience until comfortably after D&D came out, so it didn't really have any impact on the wider audience's view of the Law vs. Chaos thing prior to D&D doing its thing, and greatly postdated most of Moorcock's main work on the subject.
Ashimbabbar on Three Lions On the Shield at 23:49 on 15-07-2017 - link The "Chaos=Evil+Weird" school was maintained by the Runequest universe though ( 1st ed of the rpg was 1978, but it was based on a cycle of earlier novels ).

As to Anderson, he also wrote a novel ( expanded from a short story ) "Operation Chaos" in a universe where magic is the equivalent of our technology, and Chaos is the tool of demons.

On the other hand, he wrote another novel "The Merman's children" where the extension of God's power wipes out the faery realm gradually, but here it's seen as a sad thing and the hero,a half-human half-merman hybrid, refuses to bow to it ( there's far more to it than that, but it's what relevant to this theme )
Arthur B on Kickstopper: Holy Crap Ferretbrain, This Book Is Already Awesome at 16:13 on 15-07-2017 - link Update: finally got around to playing my copy of Romeo and/or Juliet, it's just as good as this one. It even includes little minigames based on Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream and the play the actors are practising in Midsummer Night's Dream!
Jamie Johnston on 23 boxes of tissues on the Jellicoe Road at 19:59 on 13-07-2017 - link This review has really stuck in my mind for all these years, so much so that I've come to remember it as possibly the first thing I ever read on Ferretbrain – which is clearly wrong because I'd been not only reading but contributing to the site for over a year before the review was posted. I also remembered 'On the Jellicoe Road' as being the first book I put on my 'to read' list when I got a Goodreads account (over two years after reading this review) and that memory does turn out to be right.

And after all that, I recently got round to actually tracking down a copy and reading it! No need to say any more than that I completely agree with everything you said about it, Kyra, and thank you for the recommendation.
Ibmiller on Ferretnibbles 2 - Beren and Lúthien, Shin Megami Tensei on the 3DS, and Sithrak Tracts at 04:14 on 09-07-2017 - link I hope so. That would make me beyond happy - it's the one Human/Elf marriage that has the potential for a different ending than Beren/Luthien and Aragorn/Arwen.

Also, I'm a contrarian, so I love championing the story that's gotten the least amount of love. :)
Arthur B on Ferretnibbles 2 - Beren and Lúthien, Shin Megami Tensei on the 3DS, and Sithrak Tracts at 03:48 on 09-07-2017 - link I imagine that the Tolkien Estate has plans in place for Gondolin in the event that Christopher isn't able to see the job finished.
Ibmiller on Ferretnibbles 2 - Beren and Lúthien, Shin Megami Tensei on the 3DS, and Sithrak Tracts at 02:32 on 09-07-2017 - link I bought Beren and Luthien the day it came out, and really enjoyed it, despite, as you say, having read most of it before in The History of Middle Earth. Except for the freaking poems. I still don't enjoy those parts of Tolkien's drafts for the series, and the fact that they remain unconcluded continues to give me more than enough motivation to continue to ignore them.

The illustrations aren't quite as stunning as the ones for Children of Hurin, but still really excellent, making me even sadder that we're probably never getting the Fall of Gondolin book that would be my favorite of the three Great Tales of the First Age. When in high school, I typed out all of the bits and pieces of that tale from Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle Earth and attempted to do what C. Tolkien did with Children of Hurin - weave a coherent tale of the story from many fragments, though I think I went further, doing a lot of stylistic harmonizing (removing present tense exclamations when the action gets heavy, interpolating later forms of words like "elven" rather than "elfin", etc). I would definitely buy that book on the day it came out, especially if it had Alan Lee illustrations.
Ibmiller on Underworld: Bit Awkward at 02:28 on 09-07-2017 - link Glad you got to see it, underwhelming as it was. I was also disappointed that they got rid of pretty much everything in Awakened, but that's their prerogative, as the director and writers. The writing around Michael and Eve's characters felt a lot like the way the newest Pirates movie wrote around Will and Elizabeth's characters - and was similarly unsatisfying. One wonders if the rewards for making a movie that dances around what it really wants to show because they can't convince the old actors to come back outweigh the negative impact on the franchise. I suspect not, but then again, I'm never good at predicting these kinds of things.

I did think that the super speedy/ghosty powers were cool, and appreciated the different dress aesthetic that the ghosty vampires brought to the series.

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