[ExI] sf with pathos

[Damien Broderick]

At 02:19 PM 4/19/2009 -0700, spike wrote:
>
>Damien wrote a good sci-fi with comedy
>mixed in, altho it isn't primarily a comedy, just has some hilarious stuff
>in it, Transcension.

Thanks for the nod, Spike. I'll now do my usual irritating sf-writer 
thing of insisting that I have *never* written "sci fi" (which is the 
journalistic term sf people repurpose to mean "crap pseudo-science 
fiction", including almost all movies and TV with 
space/monster/future/Blob trappings). Nobody here will take the least 
notice, but hey. THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES, in my view, is sf, not 
sci fi. BABYLON 5 was clunky sf, lifted straight from the sf 
magazines of the 1940s and 1950s. STAR WARS is pure sci fi.

(It's surely relevant that the premier sf writers' organization is 
SFWA, not SciFiWA, and almost all the Year's Best books use SF/sf in 
the title or introductions.)

>Damien wrote another one which I cannot recall the name (Damien, which
>please?) where the scientist Dr. Paul (who?) and his friend are trying to
>concentrate on the business at hand, important stuff, but they are both so
>horny they can't think straight.  They have no birth control devices (rather
>not in the standard sense) but they make do with what they have, which makes
>for a most hilarious scene.

POST MORTAL SYNDROME, by me and Barbara Lamar. It was online for a 
year as a free download, but I expect it will be available soon from 
a small press who are bringing out some of my old novels and a couple 
of new short story collections. Self-Indulgent Notifications will 
flood this list and others when that happens.

>Sci-fi with feelings: well there is Contact, the movie version

The great, memorable, written sf-with-feelings-that-make-you-cry 
story is "Flowers for Algernon" which made a pretty awful Cliff 
Robertson movie (as CHARLY) decades ago and a quite touching Matthew 
Modine TV version more recently: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0210044/

 From the 1950s are the People stories by Zenna Henderson (also made 
into a fairly good, modest TV movie).

Connie Willis's DOOMSDAY BOOK is guaranteed to put a lump in the most 
cynical throat.

Damien Broderick