I thought the Local Fluff had already reached us.
]]>In this case, I assume you mean David-Scott-who-walked-on-the-moon and Charlie-Brown-the-Apollo-command-module.
]]>What if the objects of the simulation are bacteria (we're just a boring high-level emergent phenomenon of symbiotic prokaryotes ganging up together inside single cell membranes and swapping messages)? Or mammalia in general (because warm-blooded life is important and, oh, as carnivores we're in the shit)? Or some variety of posthuman which finally meets the criteria for being interesting to the ancestor simulators?
Why should we be the special sparkly ones?
(You may take "Missile Gap" to be a stab in this direction.)
]]>Wikipedia entry for Anish Kapoor. Key sentence, for non-art-loving philistines: "Kapoor made a $27 million profit in 2008, taking the fortune he has made from his art to an estimated $62.7 million. His record auction price is 1.94 million pounds, set in July 2008."
]]>It's a huge body of knowledge. Just because it's knowledge denigrated doesn't mean the equivalent of graduate level work in folklore, anthropology, linguistics, history, sociology, and others I'm not thinking of isn't basically required for quality fantasy. And as long as hard SF claims to not need characters or feeling to get in the way of its awesome ideas, I'm not really up for hearing how much harder and better it is. But I'm sure I will!
]]>(Also: in hard SF, your readers will make their mental apologies for you if you skimp on character development and socio-cultural stuff because, hey, that touchy-feely stuff with girl cooties ain't allowed in the tree house.)
As for the PhD's, I think it's possible to take a PhD in just about any subject and use it to perpetrate fiction. For example, I know of one fantasy author who gets really pissed off with bad Celtic fantasy; having a PhD in mediaeval British history (specifically 5th to 13th century Welsh history with an emphasis on ...) certainly makes her fantasy novels better grounded than those of someone who just read Tolkein and thought that shit was cool. Or there's Harry Turtledove, with his background in Byzantine history (which his earlier books deployed to good effect).
But the PhD's are just research. They don't (with a very few, specialized exceptions) help you write -- what they do is give you a rich lode of background detail to mine for colour and texture.
]]>Lack of talent probably being number one.
I think all that 9160s TV screwed me up too, and the movie 2001. I'd a story, and then realize it was about two pasty guys in a spaceship, battling a computer.
Regardless, I know what a cliche is, it's something that's been overused, but I had to look it up. So, cliche is from the French clicher, to stereotype, imitative of the sound made when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a stereotype plate. A stereotype plate is literally solid type, as in not movable type - solid print. I see!
I’m old enough to have experienced a tour of the local newspaper where they still used molten metal on the old linotype machines. But they aren't that old! They only go back to 1884. I mean, it's old, but it's not.
Question is, you say you avoid stereotypes, but most stories don't. They try and judo flip it, right?
]]>The problem with cliches is that they got to be cliches because people were over-using them because they work.
Flip side: if you come up with a genuinely new and original depiction of something and enough people like it it will eventually become a cliche.
]]>How's this for, say, the start of a novel: The ministers' yachts are bobbing in the harbour; the diesel tanks are full, and so too, are the holds full of food.
The cars can be left on the quayside, they aren't worth much anyway.
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