Date: Sat, 13 Jun 1998 20:00:33 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: mellon@pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <199806132000.NAA04949@usr06.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19980613212837.A17939@doriath.org> from "Anatoly Vorobey" at Jun 13, 98 09:28:37 pm
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> I definitely agree, but I do wonder at the choice of SciFi as the main > reading material (perhaps it isn't in your case, but it is in case of > most of reading programmers and hackers I know). It always struck me as > something weird that so many otherwise very intelligent people, who > are able to create amazingly clever and beautiful algorithms/programs/OSes, > spend so much of their time reading essentially trashy literature, not > much different in its average quality from detective stories or paperback > romance novels. They can explain to you subtle details of VM architecture, > or tell you the plots of all William Gibson novels, but ask them about > Flaubert or T.S.Eliott or Cortasar or Chaucer or Pushkin or Italo Calvino > and you mostly get blank looks in return. > > Ah, SciFi. There are so few really good authors and books in it, books > that could really be considered real literature. Besides, many of those > remain much less known than better-selling trash. This is especially true, > I would say, in the US, in which readers usually pay little or no attention to > non-American authors. For example, America has, by and large, missed the > genius of Stanislaw Lem, who is perhaps the greatest SciFi author currently > alive, certainly in the Top 5, if you ask me. I don't read solely Science Fiction, but it is certainly the vast majority of what I read. I think you are unfairly maligning the genre. This is not to say that I haven't read non-science fiction as well; Umberto Eco, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Edmund Spenser, Sir Arthur Connon Doyle, Edward Stratemeyer (8-)), Euripides (though Arthur Dent leaves the frogs standing...), Sophocles, Plato, W. Edwards Demming, Aristotle, Dave Barry, Jack London, Lewis Carrol, Miguel De Cervantes, Robin Cook, Ludovico Ariosto, Guy Kawasaki, Edgar Alan Poe, Richard Preston, Ambrose Bierce, etc., etc.. As I said before, I've read a lot of books. But Science Fiction is my favorite. Not only is there the fact that good SF is *really* social commentary, it's generally packed with brilliant ideas. The older the science fiction, the more likely it is that you can actually implement the technology. 8-). All technical and scientific ideas were, at one time, classifiable as Science Fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, in a Science fiction novel, invented communications satellites. Other authors invented almost everything else you can point to. I have a wonderful novel from the early 50's that defines a PDA... under the name "The Electrobook". 8-). More instances: It was "common knowledge" that heavier than air craft, such as those depicted in H.G. Wells "When the Sleeper Wakes", were "Impossible", as had been declaimed by Lord Kelvin. The idea that there were "animicules" so small that you could not see them was science fiction, until Anton Van Leeuwenhoek built a microsope and saw them. The idea that they could be the cause of disease was scoffed at, until Louis Pasteur proved the relationship. The idea that you could actually kill them without killing the host was science fiction until Alexander Fleming "contaminated" one of his slides with a bit of penicillium mold. PS: Excuse my butchery; I'm not home (where the book is) right now: "Very well", said Klapaucius, "Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mostly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with real feeling, mind you, and in the true cybernetic spirit." PPS: If you think computer scientists don't read Lem, you should check your "fortunes.dat" files... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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