I look forward to reading some of this. SF is pretty much always about the current day.
Soviet SF was quite illuminating to me (back when anybody cared about the USSR). I’ve always wanted to read a couple of the Soviet equivalent of the James Bond novels.
“The air seller” by Belyayev reminded me a lot about the more wacky side of James Bond. The protagonist is not glamorous, can’t do that in USSR. But it does have a villain that tries to take over the world with revolutionary technology from his evil layer. The villain captures the protagonist to boast about his evil genius. Even a final battle between marines and henchmen is there. Could have been adapted into a golden-age Bond movie by adding a couple of tropical locations.
“The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” has a similarly grand super-villain scheme. And with more locations and glamor.
What a surprise to see “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” being mentioned on HN. I read some Soviet SF as a kid, unfortunately this is the only one I can recall by title.
Stierlitz is a typical noir character, entirely different from Bond. The entire premise of the James Bond series and of course Bond's lifestyle were completely incompatible with the ideology, so no real equivalent was possible.
SF is often speculative fiction that extrapolate current trends into the future - frequently taking them to their logic conclusion - to explore and critique. Good SF anyway.
Sci Fi is often a way to talk about the present without getting bogged down in the minutae of accurate facts and "what's realistic" for critics.
Whether that's worth reading depends on you. It's a big genre too, different authors and works don't all cover the same themes. If you want to see someone experience about what it's like to be a foreigner in a racist society, Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series explores that. If you want to read an optimistic vision of how computation could look and what ethical implications follow from that (set against a massive backdrop of geopolitics), read Ian Banks's Culture series. If you want to read a discussion of how society shapes our thoughts and beliefs, read pretty much anything by Ursula K. Guin (though The Dispossessed comes especially to mind). If you just want to explore the implications of different physical laws, Greg Egan.
And of course, there's plenty of the campy stuff too. You don't always need to read high-minded narrative philosophy with sci-fi if you don't want to.
I'd like to second the Culture, but just to add (minor spoilers ahead) that it's also a distopian depending on your point of view, which makes it even better.
In the Culture all real agency humanity has is lost to machines (Minds).
Humans have about as much say in important matters in the Culture as dogs do in ours, when anything really important happens (e.g. the events of Excession) they're not even involved.
For any individual human it's a utopia, I'd probably prefer to live in the Culture, but whether it's a good thing to aspire to is something the reader needs to decide for themselves.
> In the Culture all real agency humanity has is lost to machines (Minds). Humans have about as much say in important matters in the Culture as dogs do in ours.
The Culture is explicitly a direct democracy, it's just that the books are mostly about what is effectively a somewhat-rogue intelligence agency's activities in other civilizations.
> Politics in the Culture consists of referenda on issues whenever they are raised; generally, anyone may propose a ballot on any issue at any time; all citizens have one vote. Where issues concern some sub-division or part of a total habitat, all those - human and machine - who may reasonably claim to be affected by the outcome of a poll may cast a vote. Opinions are expressed and positions on issues outlined mostly via the information network (freely available, naturally), and it is here that an individual may exercise the most personal influence, given that the decisions reached as a result of those votes are usually implemented and monitored through a Hub or other supervisory machine, with humans acting (usually on a rota basis) more as liaison officers than in any sort of decision-making executive capacity; one of the few rules the Culture adheres to with any exactitude at all is that a person's access to power should be in inverse proportion to their desire for it. The sad fact for the aspiring politico in the Culture is that the levers of power are extremely widely distributed, and very short (see entry on megalomaniacs, above). The intellectual-structural cohesion of a starship of course limits the sort of viable votes possible on such vessels, though as a rule even the most arrogant craft at least pretend to listen when their guests suggest - say - making a detour to watch a supernova, or increasing the area of parkland on-board.
Yes, the Culture novels have an extremely biased POV by design, comparable to an alien's only knowledge of human society being CIA mission reports.
> The Culture is explicitly a direct democracy
It's not, and what you've quoted at length only reinforces my point.
Sure, humans get a vote in the design of their habitats, and even input on where the ship might fly.
But that's like saying that a modern nuclear power is a democracy because people get to vote on where their local park benches are located.
I'm saying that humans have no say on anything of consequence in the Culture. Anything that matters is decided upon by sentient hyperintelligent machines.
Yes. I'm going to specifically recommend Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Ursula Le Guin for particularly socially-focused fiction that is, in many ways, much more relevant to our current social issues than most contemporary fiction you can pick up off the rack. Not to knock fiction of course, but it can be hard to explore issues thoroughly while also delivering a believable and enjoyable story set in current times.
For the campy stuff, people seem to really enjoy The Expanse, both the books and the tv show.
Are you talking about Soviet sci-fi or speculative sci-fi? If the latter, there's plenty of speculative sci-fi worth reading. I'd recommend giving "I, Robot" a read - much of it is about reasoning through a sort of moral philosophy, through the lens of robotics.
I find it hard to understand how anyone could possibly be this dismissive about something they have no experience of, in public?
OK, so some of it is campy adventure pulp, but fortunately someone's collated the best and most long-lived works into the SF Masterworks series for people to pick from.
Phillip K Dick would probably get the same kind of praise as Joyce if he hadn't been ghettoized as "SF".
I meant to comment on "Stirlitz, the Russian James Bond" specifically, not all of Sci Fi (you can see me recommending Russian Sci Fi" in another response here from yesterday. Pretty big mistake on my part and people have been pretty understanding given the misconception!
See above, public apology to everyone. Meant to reply to "Stirlitz, the Russian James Bond" specifically. I read most "good" sci fi I can get my heads on. To me it goes something like Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Gibson, Harry Harrison for the "campy" stuff, Asimov very much in that order, though I know I will be crucified for putting Asimov last. Then there are good one-offs like The Forever War, Ender's Game, the Oumuamua book (whatever the actual title is). I specifically dislike The Three Body problem and the fact that modern Nebula awards can no longer be trusted. Out of historical fantasy, the Merlin Trilogy by Mary Stewart is absolutely amazing, at least as a teenager. Which reminds me that "The Nine Princes in Amber" is horrible. Hopefully someone recommends something.
That's a shame about The Three Body Problem. I have it on my list to read. There's a chance I might like it, of course, but because you said you like The Forever War I think perhaps not.
Where would you start with Neal Stephenson? Have you read Iain M. Banks?
Snow Crash is definitely the place to start with Stephenson, but it's also a bit dated at this point and in many ways seems like his least "visionary" book. Stephenson went very much from a balance of style and substance to the latter over time, and it gets a bit tedious. Anathem and Diamond Age are pretty good too. From there, you will have enough context to figure it out.
As far as The Three Body Problem - it's ok and starts off really strongly, but then just completely falls apart.
I have not read Iain M. Banks, what do you recommend as a start?
There's conflicting advice on where to start with Iain M Banks' Culture novels, but I would personally start with the first - Consider Phlebas - and read the rest in order.
If you like Consider Phlebas, you'll almost certainly love the rest. It's a strange start to the series, not least because it presents the Culture as the antagonists quite explicitly, but it's good for introducing some of the technology. The series as a whole is my favourite series of books, it's remarkable.
I'm not sure that's true, although in the past two decades or so it may have been.
But going back to the classics of 1960s and 1970s SF, I just don't see it. Sure, The Forever War is a thinly veiled allegory of Vietnam, but how are Lord of Light, Dreamsnake, The Left Hand of Darkness, or even Dune about their "current days"?
Dune seems prescient today because of its focus on natural resources, but back when it was written (long before the Oil Crisis) that wasn't really a political hot topic, or even something that most people thought about at all.
Dune very much commented on the contemporarybproblems of its day. A big theme was around the scramble for Africa which, while over, was still affecting the continent in various ways as decolonisation continued.
I agree that the extent of the commentary varies, and Dune is light handed in terms of political hot topics, but it was certainly there.
> A big theme (of Dune) was around the scramble for Africa
An extractive industry moves into in the desert for an extremely valuable substance that is vital for transport, while the indigenous inhabitants are overlooked. Religious fervour and holy war. I think that the Middle-east and oil are the most obvious parallels.
It is indeed "commenting on the contemporary problems of its day".
In The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai is at one point sent to a prison camp, in what is basically a communist country by a different name. Basically gulag, in Siberia.
The Doomed City is a bad example since it was specifically released in a post-soviet era. It had very direct criticisms of communism which lead to the authors deciding to not release it during the soviet era they wrote it.
"Hard to be a God", mentioned below, is a better example. Soviet era Sci-Fi where Star Trek esque space communists try to uplift a medieval society into modern political belief before establishing official first contact.
Technically, 'The Doomed City' was released in Soviet times, not in the post-Soviet one, as a result of Glasnost'/Perestroika. It was published in serialized form in "Neva" magazine in '88-'89, then in book form, while the USSR would still be a going concern for a couple more years.
It had direct criticisms of capitalism too, if I recall. There were characters that thrived and drowned under many of the different social orders presented there. The main character tried to adapt to all and ultimately lost himself and everyone he knew in pursuit of his constantly changing ideals.
I read Roadside Picnic a few months ago, and yeah, it's very good stuff. While there's a lot to be said for the context in which it was written, I think it also holds up on its own even if you're not very familiar with the history.
Roadside picnic is so ridiculously melancholy. Everyone in that book is so depressed! I also don't think I've ever seen so much smoking and drinking in a sci-fi book. You could tell the brothers were really not enjoying communism.
The novel itself and the setting are not about communism though, not even in disguise. It would have to be in disguise because the setting is an unnamed North American (possibly Canadian?) city, but even if it was, the themes are not about communism.
"The Dead Mountaineer's Inn" is a fairly unique sci-fi noir also from the Strugatsky brothers that was my first introduction to their work. It interested me enough that I read all their other books afterwards -- worth checking out!
Kurt Vonnegut was accused once of ripping off George Orwell's 1984 with Player Piano. He responded by saying that he and Orwell had both just ripped off Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. Yevgeny Zamyatin was a Soviet author who ran afoul of Stalin and wrote We inspired by his perspective of the revolution.
That's probably a testament to the criticism. Interesting that what Yevgeny Zamyatin presents as a clear, almost too on the nose dystopian satire has been repackaged as a desirable work environment.
As well as the Roadside picknick, the Doomed city, A billion years before the end of the world, the Ugly swans, etc etc - really most of their books - it’s a good literature and not a sf in its usual sense.
I can't comprehend this. Scifi is famously occupied with the future, and not the current day. Space travel, advanced technologies, artificial intelligences, and generally things that don't yet exist are par for the course. Most of SF is literally not about the present.
Do you mean to say that SF's subtext reflects the zeitgeist at the time/place of its writing?
SF is set in the future. But its meaning is more directly relevant to the time in which it is written than the time in which it is set. Take for example, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. If people in the actual literal 25th century are able to read about Buck Rogers at all, they will probably be reading it to better understand the 20th century, not their own.
One of my favorite examples is Black Mirror’s “Fifteen Million Merits”.
Read as a prediction of the future, it’s kinda shit. Unremarkable at best.
Read as a way to show us the time when it came out (roughly now—it’s not so old) from a perspective skewed enough that it might prompt us to re-evaluate our own normal, it’s pretty damn good.
A good demonstration of this is the differences present in any sci-fi that got a remake 10-20 years after it was first written. The setting may well still be the far future .. or long long ago.. but that future has changed to match the present.
The foundation TV series comes to mind. it's veeery different from the original novels.
Even if it's not true of all science fiction (especially the pulp traditions of American sci-fi), it is arguable that the origins of science fiction are thought experiments that exist to help think through and critique the present. A lot of influential writers have said exactly this, including Le Guin, Gibson, Vandermeer, Doctorow, and Palmer to name a few of the top of my head.
Alongside this, there are also several international traditions of sci-fi (Russian, French, Indian, Chinese) that imagined modernization in supposedly under developed countries to contrast a possible future against the very real modernization of developed neighbours.
It means the future elements in scifi (when it is about the future at all; some scifi doesn't even pretend to be futuristic) are an extrapolation of the current time and used to explore an idea about today.
An author's scifi "gimmick" (it can be a technology, a societal norm, an alien encounter, etc) is often the way in which the author develops and extrapolates a preoccupation about the real world, be it war, or invasion, or social alienation, or consumerism,
etc.
The most obvious (but least interesting) example of this is how all those "Mars attacks" / alien invasion / body snatcher stories really were about the Red Scare, basically "what if Communism was infiltrating our society!"
Blade Runner and the entire Cyberpunk genre* extrapolate Reagan’s America where corporations are completely unfettered, dominating the landscape and people’s everyday life in nearly every way.
* Or at least it used to. Most of today’s Cyberpunk media seems to have lost sight of that motif and really just ape the aesthetic (e.g. neon lights everywhere) - a hollow shell really.
I sometimes watch/read South Korean SF and this description of Northern SF sounds familiar. Yes, there are often nefarious Americans behind the protagonist's problem. Yes, the plot often makes a hash of logical coherence. I think a study of both northern and southern SF would find there is still a significant shared culture.
I feel like Andy Weir did a phenomenal job with his handful of books. The Martian, Project Hailmary. Both of these felt more like team effort emphasis, which I liked.
He is a fastidious and interesting writer. I nonetheless found both these novels disappointing. They seem to be porn for engineers. Like all porn, the lead character is a cardboard cutout with monomaniacal motivation. (It seems revealing that both books place the protagonist in a position of complete social isolation.)
This was a more serious flaw in Project Hailmary, in which first contact - a profound event - is treated as a lone man’s engineering puzzle. The book is a good argument for sending poets, or at least properly thoughtful scientists, to meet our first aliens.
> "Stories often touch on topics like space travel, benevolent robots, disease-curing nanobots, and deep-sea exploration. They lack aliens and beings with superpowers. Instead, the real superheroes are the exceptional North Korean scientists and technologists who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders."
Here is an interesting symmetry as reflected by ideological mirrors. In NK, the state sanctioned imaginal worlds lack others that are superior, and superheroes are loyal technocrats. Here in the West, "market driven" Hollywood insists superheroes are distinct tiny subset of humanity and that it is to our benefit that they are hidden but highly organized. And no, you can't just become one of the special superheroes. Both are aiming to pacify the target society.
> And no, you can't just become one of the special superheroes. Both are aiming to pacify the target society.
Worse: You aren't such a superhero, but by random chance you might be chosen to become one and you are invited to imagine yourself in that situation. Any common person who might want to limit your hypothetical powers is an awful bigot and many of the stories revolve around tension between those with powers who would oppress the plebs vs those with powers who wish to benevolently rule over the plebs (but certainly not cede their power to them.) Also, when the superheroes abuse their position and power it's okay when they're motivated by good intentions, because the ends justify the means and they'll surely revert back to being good once the crisis is over. Power doesn't corrupt everybody who gets it, you can trust the good superheroes with their unchecked power.
All of this mirrors the way Americans are encouraged to think about the ultra-rich, encouraged to believe they might randomly join the ranks of the ultra rich one day. Encouraged to believe that they could be a good and benevolent billionaire, and that the plebs who would limit their wealth are harmful bigots. Taught to believe that the meaningful conflict is between the good billionaires who would benevolently rule, opposed to the bad ones who can only be kept in check by the good ones.
> many of the stories revolve around tension between those with powers who would oppress the plebs vs those with powers who wish to benevolently rule over the plebs (but certainly not cede their power to them.)
Except not really. The most popular superheroes like Spider-Man has nothing of that sort going on. The tension in his story is the balance of his duty to use his gifts for good (with great power comes great responsibility) and the demands of his everyday life - with the latter often suffering to his detriment.
On DC’s side, Batman is probably the most popular. Frankly, Batman is more a plot device than a character, the most interesting characters in his stories are the villains.
Heck, in most cases, their super powers are not transferable.
Reality: Americans have not been ruled by the superhero-like ultra rich for decades, and are starting to notice that little is improving and much is getting worse.
I think a lot improved for the countless people who got medicaid.
When you assert something hasn't improved, it tells me it hasnt improved according to your personal criteria. I suspect those dont cover the wellfare and health of your society.
.... I looked back to the very root comment for any mention of Musk. Why did you mention him? What relevance does he have? What point are you trying to make?
For as much as any man in 21st century America can claim to stand for the position of the superhero rich man trying to dictate policy in favor of industry, he does. He argues for less regulation, less taxes, even such quaint things like free speech. But the rich can also stand for the opposite of those things, as the Rockefeller trust and the Bill Gates fund do.
I'll just point to basically everything that's happened at Twitter as an example of bad policy, including the 'free speech' he promised except not really. He's also dialing labor laws back by a century or two with the pressure he put on people to sleep in the office, even setting up beds that were in violation of building code.
Pedo Guy Space Karen is not the billionaire superhero you want him to be, so simp for him elsewhere.
I'm not assigning any moral value by calling him a 'superhero' only pointing out that he can represent a side, and that side does not even hold the majority of the wealthy.
Calling him a superhero assigns him the moral value of things generally considered "good", which is quite an assumption to make about Pedo Guy Space Karen WeChat2 Wannabe. He represents the non-billionaire cohort about as well and faithfully as Trump did. 'Kill your heroes' and you'll be better off.
No. Most were in the $1-10 million net worth range before taking office. Former presidents, of course, can easily make tens of millions on book sales and speaking fees. But that's still small time compared to the owners of major firms.
The difference that makes that much less logical being that in the West the government is not determining what people can watch, they're watching what they enjoy.
Western writers (usually) aren't taking direct orders from the government, but that doesn't mean they're impartial weather vanes that reveal currents in society but never try to manipulate (or fabricate) those social currents as they see fit.
You should read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chompsky. Most of what seems to be a conspiracy in western media is not actually organized as a conspiracy, but is emergent behavior in a system in which individual actors have aligned incentives. Acting individually without coordination, people hire and promote people who think like them, and ape then adopt the beliefs of their superiors.
I said usually western writers don't take direct orders from the government because sometimes they do, and this isn't even a secret. Hollywood lets the US military rewrite movies whenever they want access to military hardware and facilities. And during wartime, the US government employs writers to produce propaganda. Superhero comics in particular have their roots in overt war propaganda.
The conspiracies being your attempt to argue that the superhero movie fad is some absurd attempt at making billionaires look good.
If you look for a conspiracy in everything, you're going to find it in everything. Entertainment is generally just entertainment and this sort of overanalysis of things to push an agenda has been part of what has made so much of modern entertainment so cookie cutter.
Yeah but just with literally everything else in life, everything is way more complex than first glance suggests, interconnected and if you actually care to dig deeper, you find interesting stuff. Nobody sane argues western Illuminati is steering and manipulating everything and everybody towards desired future, yet mass media manipulation is extremely common practice, ie mr Murdoch and similar folks have significant powers.
Also lets not forget that CIA was very active in Hollywood for many decades with light and not so light touches here and there, I mean its the propaganda tool for US hegemony and spreading western view on society, values, 'american dream' etc. If you want to shoot say an action movie with real US planes landing on real aircraft carriers, US navy will have non-trivial impact on your movie and its story (so most end up as over-patriotic to the point of being unwatchable for many non-US viewers).
Its all natural and logical, all humans like to see or hear stories that make us feel good even if its not proper truth, much more than stories telling some ugly hard truths.
I just told you it's not a conspiracy, you're tilting at windmills.
I have not proposed a conspiracy to create movies like this, I don't think there's a cabal of billionaires who dreamed up and coordinate this as a deliberate propaganda campaign. I assert that the Hollywood system creates movies like this because because of the way it is structured and the nature of making movies. People who fit the mold and are naturally inclined to make movies like this get promoted and given opportunities by like-minded people. People who don't jive with the crowd never have the opportunity to make movies of their own, because making movies (particularly blockbusters) requires access to a system with lots of capital and manpower.
I'm not the one looking for conspiracies. You're looking for a conspiracy in what I'm saying so that you can dismiss it. Read Manufacturing Consent.
I'm calling it a conspiracy not because I think you're saying there's a cabal of billionaires doing this. I get that you're trying to pull the popular claim these days about things being "systemic".
My fundamental disagreement is that I don't care about what an obviously biased guy has to say about the media, I think a superhero movie is just a superhero movie and that of course Chomsky sees propaganda in everything, it'd be like expecting a politician anywhere in the world to not try to imply that all things wrong in the world are their opponent's fault.
To bring in a lighthearted example of the impression I have, regarding the sexualized outfit worn by characters in Nier Automata, there's been tons of analysis and whining, and mocking all that and to the satisfaction of most fans of the game, the author, when asked about the decision, pretended to be giving some complex reasoning before just straight up saying that he just likes girls.
It's the same with superhero stuff, the biggest takeaway from Iron Man isn't that irl billionaires are good guys, it's that an exoskeleton that can fly and shoot lasers is really fucking cool.
> My fundamental disagreement is that I don't care about what an obviously biased guy has to say about the media
That's not disagreement, that's just covering your ears and going la la la. You're barking up the wrong tree, that book is a good primer for you to find out how, if you don't read it you're still barking up the wrong tree.
No, it's just you're talking to yourself. You are not interacting with the points raised by the person you reply to, you just twist them into a straw man to beat down on. Which is fine, but doesn't require the presence of anyone but you.
> I assert that the Hollywood system creates movies like this because because of the way it is structured and the nature of making movies.
You respond to that with
> I get that you're trying to pull the popular claim these days about things being "systemic"
And go on to talk to yourself some more. You just aren't equipped to even read that comment, much less that book and others exploring the same issues.
"Everybody who disagrees with me is a conspiracy theorist, even if they explicit say there is no conspiracy. Also they're biased but of course I'm not."
Chompsky makes a biting critique of the US military-industrial complex. It's a great book that I recommend everyone sink their teeth into at some point.
Not really. These days, if you have talent, spreading your work is as easy as making a Reddit or HN post and get traction in no time at all. What sinks probably isn't worth much attention. Of course, works are also made and not published anywhere, but people are free to stay a hermit and not publish their work.
Hey, can you please not post in the flamewar style? The site guidelines contain several rules that ask commenters to avoid posting like this—including:
"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Not anymore. I can't imagine what media doesn't have a free type of publisher (Youtube for videos, Amazon or Lulu for text, itch.io for games, Github for software, play store for apps, etc), and getting traction is as easy as a Reddit/HN post.
If your content is good, it takes 5 minutes to get it to the entire world for free.
You're too absorbed in your own cynicisim to see the obvious.
There is hundreds of thousands of hours of all sorts of content added to the internet every day from all over the world.
Western governments have nowhere near the sort of control over what their people can see to pull off anything anywhere near comparable to NK's attempts at controlling their people's entertainment.
The whims of the morally aggressive Western elite substitute for heavy handed regulation from top down. Although recent moves have been made to try and institute a CCP style bureau of misinformation even in America.
While I agree that social media is way too aggressive with moral policing of content, I can still trivially watch any of the morally reprehensible stuff that would be banned from there.
I guess I’m also pretty naive then. Got any examples of the US government dictating what people can watch through censorship on par with North Korea or even China?
That is not categorically true. There is a great diversity of superhero origins. Some are allegories for minorities (X Men), some are not secretive at all and a regular part of society, sometimes it turns out that the organisation is not to our benefit, sometimes they are just plain evil. Still others are secretive but not organized
Jules Verne is fun to read in this regard because the people who organized to go to the moon in "From Earth To The Moon" were simply part of a gun club that chose to fund the effort privately, not the government. It reflects how people had a different relationship with the government in the 19th century.
Before the income tax, people like Rockefeller would just bail companies out during panics from their personal bank accounts, much to the consternation of bankers like J.P Morgan. Private individuals were massively more economically powerful and that's were people looked for progress. Only Elon Musk comes close to this level of economic power in the modern era, especially because he is a hands on industrialist and not a financier, but there were probably a few hundred who had that level of influence back then and they were mostly industrialists.
While Elon is the only one with the intuition to bail out a company as large as Twitter, there probably are a few dozen Rockefeller CEOs of various SV/tech-adjacent companies that can and do use their power to command acquisitions of medium size startups that have promising tech but suffer from issues of cash flow or business strategy.
> While Elon is the only one with the intuition to bail out a company as large as Twitter
What intuition? Wasn’t he forced to buy Twitter by the SEC? He bought it at 4x the valuation - Twitter’s ex-shareholders made it out like bandits. Now he is losing money hand over fist thanks to Twitter - as Twitter’s ad revenue has dropped due to his changes (and big mouth) and he is paying to the tune of 1 billion USD a year in interest from the loan to buy Twitter; Twitter’s yearly income on the best of years have come nowhere close to a billion.
> Before the income tax, people like Rockefeller would just bail companies out during panics from their personal bank accounts, much to the consternation of bankers like J.P Morgan.
To my understanding it was Morgan and not Rockefeller who engaged in these kinds of bailouts.
Jules Verne is an interesting example, because his books often have themes about traveling more than anything. I feel like at the time (and now!) major projects to just go somewhere were seen as "rich people hobbies". Things are "easier" now for things like mountain climbing but even now most undersea exploration is just financed out of rich people's pockets.
In a world where artificial satelites aren't a thing that is a useful good, I doubt that NASA exists.
> Private individuals were massively more economically powerful and that's were people looked for progress
Did they? The people themselves looked? Or did the private individuals get to fund a large amount of libraries and educational institutions with "[your name here] supports progress" instead?
The peak of this may have been Fordlandia, Ford's attempt at doing a private Latin American colony, which was a spectacular failure.
Interestingly, Verne has a book about private libertarian-separatist rich men: "Propeller Island". It ends in infighting and disaster.
In the West it’s really to make money. No one cares if the target audience is pacified or not - might even be more profitable if they are riled up to spend more money.
Luckily they both didn't have rich parents in charge of large companies. Not saying they didn't work hard but they certainly had help financially that unfortunately normal people probably don't have.
But the whole US ideology is about anyone can be a rich. Of course in real world it's not true, but it's a direct contradiction against the GP's weird "western ideaology = you can't just become one of the special superheroes" conspiracy.
“Normal” human beings, as in, the rich scions of super-genius hyper-capitalists who have a functionally unlimited amount of inherited capital to fall back on as they create their own super-hero enterprises.
NG You know, I was in China in 2007, and it was the first ever state-sponsored, Party-approved science-fiction convention. They brought in some people from the west and I was one of them, and I was talking to a number of the older science-fiction writers in China, who told me about how science fiction was not just looked down on, but seen as suspicious and counter-revolutionary, because you could write a story set in a giant ant colony in the future, when people were becoming ants, but nobody was quite sure: was this really a commentary on the state? As such, it was very, very dodgy.
I took aside one of the Party organisers, and said, “OK. Why are you now in 2007 endorsing a science-fiction convention?” And his reply was that the Party had been concerned that while China historically has been a culture of magical and radical invention, right now, they weren’t inventing things. They were making things incredibly well but they weren’t inventing. And they’d gone to America and interviewed the people at Google and Apple and Microsoft, and talked to the inventors, and discovered that in each case, when young, they’d read science fiction. That was why the Chinese had decided that they were going to officially now approve of science fiction and fantasy.
While that article was written in 2015 about 2007, IMHO as a recent employer there and long term resident, the issues in China also stem from a lack of creativity in the educational environment, the political weaponisation of Confucianism, government-controlled media, a closed internet and the recent and unwaveringly vicious politically motivated disempowerment of high profile entrepreneurs. Nearly every single person a young person meets before the age of 25 is likely to scold them for original thinking, dreaming or playing: from their own parents to their state teachers, and all are co-witness to the public vilification, robbing or subsuming of successful innovators by the state. Meanwhile, the increasingly authoritarian government attempts to limit children's access to simple computer games. All are taught that the nail that sticks out is the one that is hammered down. In such an environment, who would dare to be different? Ideas are generally tolerated and evaluated on short term greed potential only.
More reflectively, it is such a shame to see the current situation because as Joseph Needham's classic series shows, the China region is perhaps historically the longest serving and arguably in many ways the most significant bastion of human inventive potential, period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...
This seems to underlie their problem: if they're only supporting SciFi (and probably other creative outlets) as a means to an end, as a means to encourage innovation, they're doing it wrong. Asimov didn't write because he foresaw all of the tech entrepreneurs who would read his work, he wrote because he wanted to, and because the society where he wrote supported him—and promoted artistic works (though of course there is perverse incentive for art here in the West, in the form of monetary incentive for artists). If China only supports SciFi to innovate, they won't produce good enough works to innovate.
Historically many or even most great works of work have been "compromised" by similar things, whether it's the politics of some King's court or flattering a rich patron or simply dealing with the vagaries of the market.
As an aside to this tangent, the World Science Fiction Convention is in China this year, for the first time in its history (by way of comparison, it's been in Kansas City twice):
The inventors at Google and Apple and Microsoft also like to trip on the occasional LSD. That might be something else China will have to allow if they want to be a magical radical land of invention.
Someone in China saw how well hollywood sci-fi could be used as a vehicle for PR and glorification of the American military and decided to follow suit.
Soviet SF was quite illuminating to me (back when anybody cared about the USSR). I’ve always wanted to read a couple of the Soviet equivalent of the James Bond novels.