That’s what we call it when we want to write up a post that links some interesting materials that floated up after some trolling on the Web. A true carnival has some kind of linking element or organizing theme. But this one is just organized on the principle of “I liked it and thought you might too”. We shouldn’t try too hard to be clever. First, let’s talk about the essay by Brian Aldiss in the London Times book section, lamenting the low esteem afforded writers of Science Fiction, over there anyway. Aldiss is an established practitioner of the genre, who wrote a history of SciFi called The Billion Year Spree. He also edited an anthology of SciFi in the Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus which has just come in a new edition. But, it seems in Albion, SciFi is looked down upon as something not quite serious enough to be graded as “real” literature. Aldiss calls attention to some thematic variation in current SciFi writing: there are fewer rocket ships zipping around between planets and galaxies, and more considerations of how climate change might alter the way we structure social orders. There is a lot more “inwardness”: things about minds, simulation, psychology, consciousness and the like. Well that’s what Brian says and he ought to know. It seems to me that Britain has always been a major production center for highly imaginative fiction (Barre, Dodgson, Wells, C.S.Lewis, Orwell, and I’m not even trying). Oh yeah, toss in Tolkien and that Rowling lady. Why the spec/fic writers don’t write SCIENCE fiction may have more to do with the kind of education they received (Classics vs. “stinks”, ie, chemistry, biology and physics), class and snobbery. Or maybe not. Still, it’s good to know that the Omnibus is back. The Times link is:
Aldiss
The Hollywood Hype Machine is in full gear and grinding out, well, hype, and at high speed too.
All the to-do concerns the launch next week of what the Media Moguls hope will be the next Multi-Megabuck-SuperBlockbuster: a film version of the first volume of Philip Pullman’s novel His Dark Materials. Starpower aplenty, and a lot of involvement by the author are said to add up to a boffo cinematic experience, to use the lingo of the PR flacks. Toss in alernative universes, the giant armor-clad polar bears, the visible “souls” of humans depicted by animals, a super-cute heroine,plenty of mayhem and special effects and you’ve got all the makin’s. Of course, it can still be a lousy movie. What works in the book doesn’t always work on the screen, as piles of dead and dying “adaptations” of popular books attest, througout movie history.The Pullman books have been read world wide and translated into a number of languages. They have also become famous or notorious,depending on your stance, for their outspoken anti-religious sentiment, something the movie producers were at pains to mitigate. This is spec fic, OK, and in spades. Oh, yeah. The movie is called The Golden Compass.
Dark
Wired magazine is offering a kind of “Hall of Shame”, called The Ten Cheesiest Monsters on Star Trek. It’s kind of a rogues’ gallery of ridiculous critters which appeared on various planets visited by the Good Ship Enterprise, going boldy, etc,etc. It’s good for a laugh, unless you’re a True Blue Trekkie, and take ill any suggestion that there was anything to laugh about, at all, anytime, ever.
Cheesey

The American novelist Norman Mailer died this week at the age of 84, after a long illness. Although I found his work not at all to my taste, it’s impossible to deny his place among the great generation of writers who appeared in the aftermath of World War II. In his personal life, Mailer was “controversial”, to say the least, and was very good at making enemies who warmly returned his expressions of low regard. There were a number of valedictory appreciations, some in the vein of “good riddance” and “about bloody time”, and others more reserved and even cautiously respectful, at least of the undoubted energy that he seemed to possess until quite late in his illness. Judgments about the quality of his very considerable body of work vary. His final place in the pantheon, or in the broom closet, of American literature will not be clear for some while yet. Already, though, things seem a little duller.
Arts and Letters Daily gathered a number of obituaries and reports. The same site had several reports on Mailer and his publishers.

Mailer

That’s what they used to call it, and as a kid, I was confused, mainly because I didn’t know what an “armistice” is. November 11 was so designated to remember the fallen of World War I, which ended, sort of on that day in 1918 at eleven a.m….”the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”, as the guns which had been pretty busy since August of 1914 finally fell silent, in western Europe anyway. There was plenty of shelling and gunfire in other parts of the world, which would continue for several more years. An armistice is a cessation of fighting, without the actual conclusion of a peace treaty, and the side which asks for it is taken as the loser. So, there was celebration bordering on delerium, in Paris, London, Rome and New York, mostly because of the sheer relief experienced at the conviction that nobody else would be killed, and joy at the promised return of some kind of sanity to daily life.

Historians used to concentrate on WWI largely in terms of it’s being a warm-up, a kind of JV game, before the Main Event that started in 1939. But recently there has been more attention to the events and their outcomes on their own terms, so to speak: Four Empires destroyed, entities which had determined the shape of politics and culture for centuries swept away, the bumptious American republic boosted to center stage, largely on a flood of money and oil (both of which we seem not to have anymore), millions of dead, among them the finest their nation had to offer, millions more hurt, deprived, sick, scarred, desperate, looking for a Leader, almost any Leader. And then, finally, just to show everybody who’s boss, a new Horseman appeared in the form of the Flu epidemic to show the other Four how it’s done, and killed many more people than the war did. WWI and the treaties which ended it carved up the imperial domains into new states, largely puppets of victorious powers, most of which Americans felt they could safely ignore because they were so unimportant and so far away: Bosnia, Palestine, Iraq. Yes well, about that, it seems we may have been, like, wrong. Later Armistice Day was transformed into Veterans’ Day. The Great War, as it was called, is with us still, as we only slowly come to realize that many of the dilemmas we face abroad take their root in those events, apparently so far in the past. I read the other day that farmers in France and Belgium still turn up unexploded ordnance, uniforms, rifles, other gear and the odd corpse. Over one and one half billion projectiles were fired at one another by the belligerents, so there are plenty of more tangible remains of the war that supposedly ended on November 11, 1918.

There was naturally a tremendous literature, both popular and scholarly,appearing after WWI, trying to communicate to others what it was like and to figure out what it all meant. But recently, there has been what might be called the “second wave” of interpretation and scholarly investigation. Nial Ferguson, Hew Strachan (in three volumes), John Keegan, and other authors writing in English have revisited the events. Some writers have tried to correct a “Western Front” bias, by focusing on the struggles on the Russo-German front, the Middle East, the colonies and the home front. Maybe some day we will figure it all out.. It’s interesting to see also that many novels and personal memoirs are being either re-issued or published for the first time.

Through the Wheat; A Novel of the World War I Marines. by Thomas Boyd, University of Nebraska Press ( 2000), 978-0803261686

Toward the Flame: A Memoir of World War I , by Hervey Allen. Bison Books (2003) 978-0803259478

The First World War: Volume I: To Arms (First World War (Oxford Paperback)) by Hew Strachan (2003), Oxford University Press, USA; New Edition, 978-0199261918

Eastern Front 1914-1917,by Norman Stone, Penguin Global; 2Rev. edition (2004) 978-0140267259

14-18: Understanding the Great War by Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker. Hill and Wang (2003), 978-0809046430

The Great War in Africa, 1914-1918, by Byron Farwell, W. W. Norton & Company (1989) 978-0393305647

That’ just the start of a scratch on the surface.

Our readers should also be looking at a blog called 3Quarks Daily, which describes itself as a “filter blog” for interesting and unusal materials gathered from patrols of the web on topics in science, the arts, politics, and so on. The content is highly varied and the tone is set fairly high. There is a precis and a link to the original item. Read the ABOUT US statement for some eye-popping endorsements, which have, in the main, been born out.
3QD
PS. A “quark” is some kind of subatomic particle or component of an atom or something. James Joyce used the word in a story. The same group of characters, “Quark”, means Lard, in German.
Actually, it’s something like cottage cheese…I just looked it up