Sir Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642. Following the Gregorian calendar, Newtonmas would be on January 4. One advantage to keeping the traditional date is that this coincides the death of Galileo with the birth of Newton. Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, many of my friends were Ukrainians and others whose churches kept the old Julian calendar, giving some of the kids two dates for presents. (It also explains Tom Clancy’s Red October, even though the Bolshevik phase of the 1917 Revolution began on November 7.)
Poor Seeing
Last Saturday night (the 20th), I set up my 104 mm refractor but there was too much dew. I tried two fans and space heater but it was not enough. Also, the view of the Orion Nebula Messier 42 was uninspiring (flat and colorless), suggesting more water in the upper air. So, I will wait for another opportunity.
Ethnocentric Science Fiction
I am publishing an anthology of flash fiction to be released this summer in celebration of ArmadilloCon 50 coming in 2028. Austin 2078 will have ten authors and be published on Blogspot, free reading for as long as Blogspot continues. I am paying the authors and others. Only 100 physical books will be created for distribution to the authors as part of their payment.
Right now, I have seven authors committed and one manuscript received. I also have a book designer. Next is to find artists for illustrations.
To find authors, I started with those whom I have met at ArmadilloCon. From there, I discovered Solar Punk, which I find interesting. The “punk” genre began with cyberpunk, a style that defined much of my life from 1989 to about 2001. But that only built on the computer hacker culture into which I had fallen about 1975 when I took a class in Fortran. The differences were in the shade and hue of the two projected futures.
Graphic prose from William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and the others appeared on television as Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future. Whether in the pastel plastics of Isaac Asimov and A. E. van Vogt or the rust and dust, space travel was always a constant, culturally created before Sputnik. Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey neatly joined the two cultures and before that, Captain Midnight had to face hostile robots. At school ,we practiced hiding under our desks in case of a nuclear war. I was about nine years old, when I point out to my friends that the Russians would likely target the steel mills, over a mile away. I think that it was Ronald who replied that the atomic bomb is an air burst and with the mills down in the valley, that make us the ones hit worst. So, when my mother bought me Assignment in Space with RIP Foster, it seemed normal that the bad guys would be Commies (“Connies”: Consolidated Peoples’ Republics). And we are fighting for possession of an asteroid of thorium. Color the future as you please.
You can match it to your shirt. Some science fiction writers match it to their skin. Last night, I read through an essay on AfroCentric scifi.
This Feminist Africa issue was inspired by my weekly conversations with five African-born graduate students in “Gender & Sexuality in Afro-Futurism”, an upper-level course offered by the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. We began the course by discussing why individuals of African descent have been marginalised in science fiction, a genre of fiction that conceptualises future scientific or technological advances. We observed that while White men have long dominated science fiction, Black people have expanded the boundaries of the genre. For instance, we debated how continental Africans have used Afrofuturism—an interdisciplinary genre and movement that emphasises the cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of history to address the developing intersection of cultural expressivities and performances with technology in the African diaspora—to imagine diverse futures and the effects of rapidly changing gender ideals in postcolonial contexts.
Gender and Sexuality in African Futurism
Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué in
https://feministafrica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FA_Volume-2-Issue-2_Editorial_Gender-and-Sexuality-in-African-Futurism.pdf
in
https://feministafrica.net/feminist-africa-volume-2-issue-2-2021-gender-and-sexuality-in-african-futurism/
At ArmadilloCon 45 (2023) the History session was disappointing. Each panelist complained that their self-identified minority was unfairly presented or under-represented in popular history. Myself, I am more of a Vulcan.
Although it is easy to label Lije Bailey as the viewpoint character and hero of Asimov’s first three robot novels, I believe that the author leads the reader to identify with R. Daneel Olivaw. That thread begins with Radius, the leader of the revolt in RUR:Rossums Universal Robots by Karel Čapek. Positive portrayals of female robots are rare. The archetype artificial woman is the False Maria of Metropolis by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou. The best alternate I know is the computer program Valentina in the novel by Joseph H. Delaney and Marc Stiegler.
I found it easy to understand Elizabeth Bennett and her sisters and the people in their lives. The author did a good job of bringing them to the reader, and that work has endured for 200 years. Truly, if I were a woman, more of the book would have resonated deeper and differently.
I understood Federal Marshal William O'Niel in Outland when we saw it in a theater in Lansing in 1981. On Monday the 22nd, I was told verbally that we were to stop writing citations, the University being mostly shut down for Christmas and New Year. I continued my work as normal, going back to tag a vendor who exceeded his time limit; and then I opened Outlook, read the actual email, and stopped issuing parking tickets. They’re not going to shoot me but it’s the same story.
When we watched ten seasons of NCIS and seven years of JAG, I was working and serving in related capacities. But right now, we just watched four episodes in the series Rosemary & Thyme and I am not English, a woman, or a gardener. The author has a job to do, of course, but the viewer or reader must also bring a willing suspension of differencing or it would be impossible to be saddened by the tragedy of Frankenstein’s monster who never asked for his fate and brought about his own destruction.
You do not have to be Italian to understand The Godfather or Goodfellas. But where are the dramas about Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta, Guglielmo Marconi, and Enrico Fermi? For the Historical Astronomy Division of the AAS, in 2022, I wrote about Nobel laureate Riccardo Giacconi’s discovery of the X-ray star. On the other hand, a friend had to say the name out loud before I heard anything ethnic in the Cordwainer Smith character Magno Taliano. It was his wife, Dolores Oh, who commanded our attention. Magno Taliano came from a universe with servile underpeople derived from animals: C’Mell, D’joan, and a million others. That sociology was compelling.
Understand that after my mother divorced my father, we never saw the Italian side of the family. We were ethnically Hungarian and you don’t find a lot of them in science fiction even though our modern scientific age was very much their own special creation.
THE LEGEND OF THE MARTIANS
György Marx (Eötvös University Department of Atomic Physics)
There is a rumor in America that there are two intelligent races on Earth: humans and Hungarians. (Isaac Asimov)
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| The story is here from Page 116 forward. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1994, 1997, 2001 |
Szilárd Leó had a good sense of humor, and he answered Fermi's rhetoric this way:
- They are here among us, but they call themselves Hungarians.
Online in Hungarian at the HUNGARIAN ELECTRONIC LIBRARY / MAGYAR ELEKTRONIKUS KÖNYVTÁR
https://mek.oszk.hu/03200/03286/html/tudos1/marsl.html
I cut and pasted it into Google Translate to provide the text above.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Star Trek Discovery and the Conflict of Values
