Proximal Eye – Page 13 – Mark W Tiedemann

Smartness

March 28, 2016 No Comments

James Gleick’s biography of physicist Richard Feynman ought to be part of all high school science classes. Not only does he chronicle the life of one of the preeminent scientists of the 20th Century, not only does he portray the chief puzzle of physics in that century clearly, he manages to convey the substance of the work in enviably accessible prose without once “dumbing down” any of it. All this while using remarkably few equations and those usually only in description of what they do, not in the numbers and symbols themselves. One comes away from the book—Genius: The Life And Science of Richard Feynman—feeling that this would not be such a difficult subject, or at least feeling that it would be as much a human endeavor as art or music or engineering or accounting. Science is encased in an opaque mythography that seems designed to make people feel inferior. In the main, this is a consequence of language. At

Dextrous Brilliance

March 20, 2016 1 Comment

Most of us doubtless have gaps in our reading histories. Books we ought to have read simply because. Long delayed for a variety of reasons, sometimes forgotten, and occasionally remembered in awkward conversations including a surprised “What do you mean, you haven’t read that?” Shuffle of mental feet, chagrin, a shrug. Never got around to it. I have finally gotten around to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. There is a danger in so late an experience. One cannot escape, depending on one’s circles, commentary, opinion, even spoilers. Over time a book like this acquires the stature and dimension of the impossibly fine. I remember finally, after hearing about it for over a decade, seeing Citizen Kane. The hype perhaps poisoned the experience. As fine a piece of film making as I can admit it to be, I have yet to watch it without falling asleep. So it is with some trepidation that I approach works

Crossovers

March 14, 2016 1 Comment

Cross-genre experimentation often produces interesting failures, less often brilliant chimeras. The novelty seems to open up possibilities. Steampunk has been one of the most successful in recent years, but it seems to be wearing thin as too much of it tends to be old-fashioned occult or mystery, rather Sherlockian (or more Wilkie Collins) in essence with a thread of SFnal gadget-geekery running throughout. Often it’s just a new suit of clothes disguising an old set of bones. One of the things that has rarely been successful but is perhaps the oldest of these mix-and-match tropes is the attempt to blend science fiction and fantasy. Try as we might, it usually ends up being demonstrably one or the other merely borrowing the trappings of its often unwilling partner. Roger Zelazny was perhaps the most sucessful at it, but he managed it by bravura sleight-of-hand, or wordcraft, rather than through genuine alchemical mergers. What we generally find are stories that set the

Emerson

March 12, 2016 5 Comments

Okay, this is hard. Very hard. Keith Emerson is dead. Apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 71. That in itself is difficult to square with the pictures in my mind of the epic artist of the heyday of one of the greatest musical outfits of the 20th Century. It’s tempting to get into the justifications for Keith Emerson’s place as a composer and performer, what his music meant for rock, for classical, for a generation of people who found in his work an uncompromising dedication to a particular aesthetic and a level of quality found in few pop acts. Indeed, to even use that term—pop act—seems to diminish the breadth of the ambition he displayed throughout his career. Post Sgt Pepper’s, rock music—what then without much hesitation or embarrassment was termed pop music, in the sense of it being “populist” as opposed to “elitist” and embodying an idea that popularity and depth were not mutually exclusive—went into a

In Review

January 2, 2016 No Comments

2015 is done and I have read what I read. It was a year fraught with turmoil in science fiction, a year prompting reassessments, a year when required reading competed with reading for pleasure, and the time constraints of working on a new novel (two, in fact) impeded chipping away at my to-be-read pile, which mounds higher. As in the past, I count only books I have read cover to cover here. If I added in total pages of unfinished reading, I’m probably up with my usual volume (somewhere around 90 books), but that would be a cheat. That said, I read 50 books in 2015. One thing I concluded, both from what I read and the upheaval in the background about what is or is not worthy science fiction, is that the decades long pseudowar between mainstream and genre is over. Skirmishes will continue to be fought here and there, certain elements will refuse to yield or concede, but

Across Boundaries

November 29, 2015 No Comments

Ray Nayler’s novel, The Mountain In The Sea, is a superb example of asking a simple question and then exploring the ramifications at length. The question? What is intelligence and how would we recognize it in other species? The novel concerns the discovery of an octopus species that exhibits the kind of behavior till now deemed impossible—unlikely at best—given the nature of octopus biology. Dr. Ha Nguyen accepts an invitation from the head of a global corporation to come to an isolated island in the Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Trade Zone, Con Dao, to study an anomaly. Con Dao is a protected area, cordoned off by advanced defensive systems to keep predators—human—from coming in and wiping out the ocean life in aggressive sea farming. On Con Dao she meets two people with extraordinary capacities, one an android, the other barely human after a life of harsh conflict. The android, Kamran, is the only one of its kind, a remarkable construct

…Behind Door Number…

November 23, 2015 No Comments

After viewing Ex Machina I sat in a bit of a daze wondering what it was I’d just seen. Stylish, well-acted, the now-expected seamless special effects, and a story with pretensions to significance. The next day, I spoke to a good friend about it, who has also written about its flaws, and came to the conclusion that the film is not at all what it seems to want to be. In fact, it may be the perfect demonstration of style over substance. It would be easy to see the film as a misogynistic attempt to intellectualize adolescent cluelessness, and certainly there is that in it, but perhaps that doesn’t go far enough. Misanthropic may be more accurate. It has nothing good to say about anyone or anything. The chopper pilot may be innocent, he’s just doing his job, but once Caleb lands and approaches the isolated superhouse of his employer, Nathan, sympathy for anything human vanishes and we’re treated to

The Problems With Going Farther

August 27, 2015 No Comments

Kim Stanley Robinson has built a body of work which, after the polish and sophistication of the surface ceases dazzling, is solidly in the tradition of What If fiction which is supposedly the hallmark of science fiction. Large-scale What If, to be sure, which allows for the examination of development of the minutiae of his subjects in exhaustive detail. One of the chief pleasures of a Robinson novel is exactly this level of detail. The bolts are all there, the seams spliced with precision, the pieces and parts fit together as they should. Or as they should if the scenarios depicted were actually undertaken. At least, that’s the idea, to provide a level of verisimilitude sufficient for a vicariously “authentic” experience of… What would have happened in Europe had the Black Death not stopped when it did? What would it be like to really terraform Mars? What happens when population keeps expanding and technology keeps trying to keep pace? All

Mark W. Tiedemann

Author. Blogger. Photographer.

The Proximal Eye