Editorial

As you may or may not be aware, I was ushered in this general direction at the behest of Mama Fisi. I'm sure you know that she's not one to give orders, but she's also not someone whose suggestions are easily refused. As to why I'm here, I'm as bewildered as you. I love to talk, but given an open-ended chance such as this I find myself with little to say. I've found an ear or two online for my own... diverse opinions and complaints. Apparently some of them were entertaining enough that I found requests for more cropping up before long.

So it's 2012, and the earth is still here, despite all paranoid schizophrenic claims to the contrary. As we all know, the Mayan Long Count calendar ended this year. People with the unfortunate combination of an anxiety disorder, scientific illiteracy, and waaaaay too much time on their hands have concluded that a stone age band of savaged who thought human sacrifice was keen, and who hadn't discovered the wheelsomehow could foretell the future. Well, ok, sure, whatever. You can't have an average IQ without at least half the population having a below-average IQ. I learn to ignore it.

Alien invasions make for great stories, but they don't make one lick of common sense. People hear about D-Day, and they think, "Wow, spacemen could do that! Or we could do that to a spaceman planet! In space!" But invading another world isn't like hopping a plane and jumping out, there's enormous energies involved, carefully calculated math, long travel times. If you've got the energy to travel across the stars, frankly, you don't *need* anything Earth could offer you, not even as raw resources.

Why do so many Golden Age SF authors look down on Literature? Heinlein is the most obvious example, in that he occasionally used the term "Literature" as an insult in his stories. Ayn Rand looked down on it, too, which is a little ironic since she's actually considered Literature these days. So why the deliberately lowbrow stance towards art?

My theory: