Technical Difficulties

TIME: 30 min.
DISTANCE: 3.5 mi.
TOTAL: 29.7 mi.
NOTES: Too busy yelling at Prof. Rabkin to go for the burn.
SHIRE-RECKONING: I can see the River from here!

---

We've started Part 2 of the lecture series and Professor Rabkin is defining science fiction. He constructs a definition of science fiction in which the prototype has three characterisitcs:

1. claim of plausibility against a background of science (he's also asserted that Star Wars is science fiction, and I'd really like to know where he finds the claim of plausibility in it*)
2. high adventure (at this point, I yelled "MIKE!" at the DVD player, because Growing Up Weightless is brilliant science fiction and not even remotely "high adventure"**)
3. intellectual excitement (I will grant that good science fiction does provide this, but you know, so do mysteries. Fantasy can do it, too--at least I hope to hell fantasy can do it, or what on earth have I been doing for the past fifteen years?)

There's also an implicit, unexamined definition of science fiction against fantasy, whereby science fiction is (a.) for adults and (b.) literature.

And I'm sorry. Taking cheap potshots at the MOVIE VERSION of Dracula (and he doesn't even specify which movie) to assert that Frankenstein is more scientific and more plausible, and he conflates the Karloff Frankenstein with the Shelley Frankenstein anyway, since Mary Shelley very carefully avoids ANY explanation of how Victor animates his creature--I think that was the point at which I descended into name-calling . . . no, sorry, that was when he was expressing ASTONISHMENT that Asimov and Tolkien should be grouped together by publishers. I very nearly stopped the CD at the point where he was explaining prototypical definitions with the example of female beauty. "We look at a woman," he says, and you know what? That "we" does not include any women in it. It's that nice unexamined "the generic pronoun in English is 'he'" kind of misogyny which has no animus against women, and it doesn't matter unless you ARE a woman, in which case you suddenly feel like you've been asked to leave.

Also, when he talked about the types of definition, citing Wittgenstein (prototypical, functional, characteristic, and social) he forgot to mention the other crucial axis, prescriptivist vs. descriptivist. But since he's chosen to make a prototypical definition, he's prescriptivist by default. Which means I will be severely skeptical from here on out.

Also, he's trying to claim The Tempest is science fiction. Where is the science? Where, for that matter, is the claim of plausibility? WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT, OVER.

Um.

Well, you know, it got my heart rate up. *g*

---
*My Star Wars canon includes only three movies and does not contain the word "midichlorians" in its lexicon. And Rabkin's only talking about A New Hope anyway.

**Speaking of Mike, I hope he knew about and visited the Mid-Continent Railway Museum. We went last weekend, and I kept thinking, "Mike would love this!"

Today, April 10th, would have been Mike Ford's 50th birthday.

In an instance of truly beautiful serendipity, the ARCs of The Mirador just arrived, one of which, if you recall, I am going to auction off for the John M. Ford Memorial Book Endowment.

Here's the plan.

I will make a post opening the auction on Thursday (April 12th), and it will run for twenty-four hours, closing at the same time on Friday (April 13th). Bids will be made in the comments to that post. On Friday, I will make a second post, closing the auction, and then the winner can email me their address and how they want the ARC inscribed. (And, yes, the ARC will be hand-corrected by the author--you can also tell me whether you want the corrections and inscription in Noodler's Nightshade, Forest Green, or Le Couleur Royale.) I send them the ARC; they send the JMFMBE a check.

Everybody wins.

Happy birthday, Mike, wherever you are.

P.S. Please, tell the world about the auction! Non-LJ commenters will be allowed to bid, so long as they SIGN THEIR COMMENTS and INCLUDE AN EMAIL ADDRESS.

Robert Anton Wilson's last months are not going to include eviction and destitution.

papersky has written a sestina for Mike Ford.

mrissa urges everyone to suck it up and do routine preventative health maintenance stuff, to which I can only say, Yes.

matociquala called me this morning to tell me that Mike Ford has died, and we had a sort of very small wake over the phone.

I am glad I saw Grim's Fairy Cabaret at Boskone.

I am glad I went to Ask Dr. Mike every chance I got.

I am glad I got him to sign at least a couple of his books, so that I still have that link to him.

I am glad for the evening we spent, at whatever con that was, watching TV in the room, just the two of us.

I am glad that I knew him, glad that he seemed pleased to see me when we met at cons, glad that I got to hug him. Glad that he'd spend half an hour telling me about whatever television show he'd been watching most recently, with digressions into everything under the sun.

And I'm going to miss that--miss him--terribly.

Mike, I hope wherever you are now, the conversation is good.