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Thursday, June 26, 2014

Perversion in SF/F

Vox Day has recently been on a tear concerning pederasts, and winking at pederasty, within the Science Fiction and Fantasy Establishment. Here is his most recent post on the matter

Now, I love sf and f, and have since I was a kid (I used to walk downtown to the public library and sit there for hours as I read books; I think I read most of them over the years). I figured out when I was still a kid that there was something not right about, say, MZB and Samuel Delany. What I mean is, I didn't even need to know that MZB had molested her own daughter (and other children, according to the daughter) to know that she was perverted. I didn't even need to know that Delany was a proponent of NAMBLA to know that he was perverted.

10 comments:

B. Prokop said...

Robert A. Heinlein always creeped me out as well. Especially his last 4 or 5 novels. There was something decidedly "off" about his aggressive advocacy of bisexualism and polyandry.

Ilíon said...

... and incest! I agree, he was creepy.

B. Prokop said...

Did you happen to listen to the LINK I provided over on Victor's blog? I think you especially would appreciate the tax angle in the story.

By the way, if you like the radio adaptation, the original short story is much better!

Ilíon said...

No, I hadn't seen the link (I've been in the thread in which you posted it until just now to see if that was where you had posted it). Quickly glancing in that thread, I see that the tiresome strong-AI (ahem) argument has reared its ugly head, again.

I'll try to give it a listen when I get home this weekend.

Ilíon said...

It's funny, really: a computer program can't even simulate weather records, and these foolish people keep insisting that any day now a computer program will emulate human minds.

B. Prokop said...

As British biologist Alun Anderson wrote: "Human brains are the most complex objects in the known universe. Inside each one are some 100 billion nerve cells wired together with a million billion connections."

For comparison, there are "only" 100 billion galaxies in the known universe (give or take a few billion) - in other words, there are ten thousand neural connections in our brains for each and every galaxy! Oh, and by the way, you have to use the square of that last figure to get the number of possible active combinations of brain circuits at any one moment.

That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible active combinations. That's more than there are stars in the known universe. Far more.

And some people think that all that came about by random chance!

Ilíon said...

On top of which, we all start out as a single-celled organism.

B. Prokop said...

And as science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, a single cell was not only more complex than an automobile, it was more complex than the entire automobile industry!

Ilíon said...

Good night, but I hate most of the (recorded) performing arts from the 50s and 60s ... and 40s and 30s and all the way back to silent movies -- the stupid music and the horrible way they talk.

Ilíon said...

I do vaguely recall personal property taxes and the invasive nature of the assessments.