[ExI] TECHNOPHOBIA!

[Damien Broderick]

At 05:26 PM 4/19/2009 +0200, you wrote:

>Has been repeatedly discussed on this list, namely in June and in January.
>
>--
>Stefano Vaj

Oh. That would include the thread


[ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers

Stefano Vaj
Mon Jun 16 13:44:30 UTC 2008

etc.

And I see I commented at the time (and then forgot):

This is nonsense. I see at amazon he's praised for his extensive
bibliography; I have to wonder how much of it is sci-fi (mostly
drivel) and how much sf (the pure quill).

It's obvious that one major device available to the astute sf writer
or editor (and about the only one available to the dickheads) is:
given novum X, what can go wrong as a result? Who gets hurt by this?
It's a classic narrative ploy in a commercial market. On top of that,
there's the dystopian strain running through and adjacent to sf,
where bulking up the aspects of current trends we dislike makes for
an exciting tale with added moralizing vitamins for those who wish to
feel improved. For all his madcap energy, Phil Dick did this a lot,
which makes it easy to conscript and bastardize/dumb-down his stories
into action movies full of Bad Things coming to get us, and at the
same time hail and canonize him from within an academy where the word
"anxiety" remains a touchstone to Deep Thought.

Damien Broderick