If you've spent any time on the internet, you'll know that there's nothing more appealing, for a lot of people than a good scrap. And, you'll also know that there are a number of areas and subjects where you get nothing but scraps, it being the nature of much of the internet not to educate and inform but to provide launch points for prejudices to be aired. I'm sure that, like me, you spend most of your time rolling your eyes and wondering where people get the energy or time to waste in what really amounts to banging their heads against a stone wall in the hopes that it might crack. If Tartarus exists, I can only imagine that the updated version involves internet debates with people with really vociferous opinions and internet trolls. It struck me recently that there are a few of these areas where I just don't care which side is right, I just want something to be done about the things that can be done, and for us to move on philosophically from the stuff that...
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The Tiger and the Wolf by Adrian Tchaikovsky, is a novel set in a tribal, ancient world, creation, drawing more on Native American and Aztec imagery than on the traditional planks of Fantasy. It looks at themes of destiny, intention, and identity. Our protagonist is Maniye, a girl who is an outcast because of something within her, a stranger among her own people, She is cursed to transform into a wolf and a tiger, and suffers their warring within herself, even as an old war is rekindled by the actions of her father, the bloodthirsty chief Akrit Stone River. This is ability not unusual per se, everyone in this setting can shape change. Maniye's people, the Winter Runner's, are Wolves, all of them can 'Step' into the form of a wolf. In the same way, the Deer people and Boar tribe, who are in the Wolves' 'shadow' - ruled by them in other words - can change into their respective beasts. Essentially, this is a matter of soul, The people in this world (which i...
I didn't see much of Star Wars as a child, only Return of the Jedi . It didn't make much of an impression, to be honest, just a film that entertained me for an afternoon at a children's party. It would be over ten years until I saw the rest of the original trilogy. I actually watched Blade Runner and The Crow , and I think The Matrix before I actually sat down to see A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back . This perhaps is where things went wrong, perhaps I was too old for them by that point. Like Marmite, it may be that it's best to see these films young if you want to love them. To make things worse, I watched them as part of the research for my dissertation on SF and feminism, looking at the subtext and so on in an attempt to see if science fiction films carried hegemony, or if they set out to establish new normative ideas. Inevitably I found they did the former, reinforcing the ideas that were already in play, and in places cutting against ...
One thing I've been wondering recently is whether our perspective of scale is starting to work against us, By that I don't mean that our ability to see in three dimensions is failing or anything, but that we aren't as flexible and able to see the world as we think we are. We are limited by our essential primate nature, and by the complexity of the world. Standing at one point, or being in a particular place means that we lose sight of another part, whether that's the inability or very rich people to realise that there are places, in their own countries, where families are surviving on very little money, or for citizens in the UK (for example) to see empathetically the plight of Syrian refugees or of flood survivors in Bangladesh. There seems to be a point where we cease to be able to see the big picture effectively and fall back on gut instinct and tribalism. This may be the same impulse that makes us opt for the simplest solution where we can - even if that's not...
I'm planning to do a metric ton of posts about politics, social media, feminism and the world n general, so you've got that to look forward to in the next few months. First, though I thought I'd throw some random facts up on here to see if anything takes your interest. To make it truly random, I thought I'd throw dice to decide how many facts you're getting, and I videoed it. I don't know if that video is working but I rolled a ten on one dice and a six on another - using a pair of standard d10s. I also decided to roll dice for categories of what to admit to, and the categories are as follows: 1 History 2 Culture 3 Personal 4 Nature 5 Politics 6 Travel 7 Favourite Things 8 A Thing I Dislike or Hate 9 Oddness (something weird about me) 10 Um... I ran out of things to choose from - so I'll leave you to ask me things for those three... So.... Anyway. Let's get started, shall we? I have sixteen things to tell you (the 0 is a 10 on ...