Proximal Eye – Page 7 – Mark W Tiedemann

Seeking Meaning In Sand

October 24, 2021 No Comments

I have not yet seen the new film version of Dune. I may write about it after I do, although it is not the entire story. What I am interested in here is the ongoing obsession with the novel. This will be the third cinematic iteration. Famously, there are two uncompleted versions, one by Jodowrosky and another by Ridley Scott. We know how far the former came because there is a fascinating documentary about it, but as for Scott’s version there are mainly rumors and statements that he wanted to do one. Personally, I would have been interested to see that one—I very much like Ridley Scott’s palette: even those of his films that don’t quite work for other reasons I find wonderful to look at—and in some ways he has perhaps played around the edges of it through his Alien franchise. (The first film starts on a world that might have been Arakkis, the second is evocative of Gede

Strange New Worlds

September 18, 2021 No Comments

Fifty-five years ago a television show appeared that changed everything. it didn’t seem like it at the time. It was clumsy, but for the time it was a marvel of production values. The scripts were occasionally tortured constructs, the characters stiff, the plots absurd. It lasted three seasons, got canceled, and drifted into the twilight zone of fondly-remembered might-have-beens. Then fandom took over, kept it alive, and eventually it was revived. Not in the way of retreads, as those we see today—reboots that quite often, though with better production values, are not exactly new—but in a resumption. We’ve gotten used to some of this today, what with franchise switching from one network to another, evading cancellation. We’ve even gotten used to quality reboots. But Star Trek was the first to do all this successfully, in several incarnations. I recently finished viewing the third season of Star Trek: Discovery and then began a rewatch of the original series. It has become

Fifty Years of Blue

June 27, 2021 No Comments

Anniversaries of album releases usually do not prompt me to comment, other than a personal “My ghod, has it been that long already?” Part of it has to do with my ongoing assessments of important albums—the fact of the work means far more than when it first appeared. But lately I’ve been worrying at a musical issue which has brought distinct periods into focus and after listening to some of the commentary on the 50th Anniversary of Joni Mitchell’s Blue some thoughts have finally come into focus. So. Blue is fifty. To my embarrassment (somewhat) I was largely unaware of this album the year it came out. I was not then particularly invested in Joni Mitchell. Folk music, broadly speaking, was not of much interest to me. There was overlap, certainly: Crosby, Still, Nash & Young, Tom Rush, and Eric Anderson all impinged by way of other forms, and created a gestalt in which a wide array of artists were

2020 and Reading for Purpose

January 1, 2021 No Comments

In a year that felt more like some surreal historical melodrama that ought to be safely turned into a documentary rather than something to cling to the future like a belly-full of bad booze, what we read may have been one of the most important choices we were able to make. Our lives constrained by a pandemic, we may have lived more vicariously than ever before, but we also dealt with the world as a landscape of impending doom in ways that perhaps our parents and grandparents may have in different ways, but was unique in the manner of it collision with reality and ignorance. I think it fair to say that never before has so much information, understanding, and intellectual resource been so available to so many and yet rejected in turn to such a degree as to challenge one’s sanity. It seemed like the more we knew, the more concrete things we could say about so many things,

The Relevance of Science Fiction

October 29, 2020 No Comments

Kingsley Amis, in his book on science fiction, named Frederik Pohl as possibly the best practitioner of the craft. For some inside the field, it was a curious choice, but over time it has become difficult to deny. Pohl had one of the longest careers in SF, working at one time or another in just about every aspect of the genre—writer, agent, editor, certainly promoter. His novel Gateway is still one of the most memorable and poignant reads ever produced in the field and his work as editor of Galaxy and If brought many superb writers in. He was also one of the great collaborators. He worked with Jack Williamson, Thomas T. Thomas, Isaac Asimov, Lester Del Rey. But perhaps his best collaborations were with Cyril Kornbluth. Especially The Space Merchants. Much has been written about the so-called “predictive” qualities of science fiction. Those familiar with the field weary of this. The whole point of science fiction is speculation based

The Color of Sound

June 16, 2020 No Comments

Ages ago, it seems, I stumbled onto a band that opened up for me the possibilities of what music could be. Band. That word connotes things which seem oddly inadequate for this. Back in 1973 I bought two records from a local store I favored (Play It Again Records, now long gone). I may have been advised to get them or it may simply have been the covers and the length of the tracks. I used a number of questionable metrics back then to find music, because not all of it was being played on the radio, and frankly almost none of my peers were into some of things I was into. What I was into I later learned was called Progressive Rock. In 1973, my favorite bands were, in no particular order, Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Santana, and Chicago. But I also owned Switched-On Bach and someone had told me about Beaver & Krause. As my

Hild, A World, A Novel

May 26, 2020 No Comments

(This is a repost, done to correct problem in the original) It is completely fitting that science fiction writers should write historical fiction. Both forms deal with the same background—alien worlds. Because we live in a story-saturated era where access to the ages is easily had with a visit to the library, the local bookstore, the internet, movies, it is easy to assume we know—that we understand—the past, with the same cordial familiarity we experience our own personal history. That people lived differently “back then” seems more a matter of fashion and technology, not a question of thought process or philosophy or world view.* People lacked central heating and air conditioning, cars, television, telephones, indoor plumbing, antibiotics…but they lived essentially the same way. Well, one could make a case that they did, but you have to ask the question “In what ways did they live the same way?” Therein lies the heart of good historical analysis and extrapolation. Because

Imperial Relevancy

May 22, 2020 No Comments

Confession. I read John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War when it came out. I enjoyed it. I then read Agent To The Stars and likewise enjoyed it. I bought a copy of Lock In and… Lots of reasons one fails to continue reading a book or an author, many of them having nothing to do with either. As a kind of funhouse mirror response to the long line of homages to Starship Troopers, Old Man’s War was fine, more interesting than most, and written in a manner that allowed easy enjoyment. I laughed out loud at Agent To The Stars and again, the voice was pleasurable. I can’t say there was any valid reason to not keep reading Scalzi. Other than the growing pile of to-be-reads, research for my own projects, reading I need to do for the day-job, and, well, life itself. I have many books to hand that deserve a read and are languishing because I am mortal. When the first volume of his

Recurrence and Renewal

April 8, 2020 No Comments

William Gibson’s new novel, Agency, is a sequel to his superb The Peripheral, which is arguably one of the best of three or four time travel novels ever written. Here he continues with several of the same characters, still exploring the peculiarities of the Stubs, and it is clear now that the matter at hand is alternate solutions to a set of problems faced in the present world. Wilf Netherton, Ainsley Lowbeer, Ash, and Rainey intervene in a new stub that is on the brink of nuclear war. As the narrative unfolds, it become evident that this is not Our World. The 2016 presidential election did not go the way ours did, for one thing. But the changes seem minor as far as they go. At a certain point, though, none of these distinctions matter, because Gibson has tapped into the truth that we all live in our own stubs. Reality is comprised of an enormous amount of shared background,

Sleepless In Present Time

March 30, 2020 No Comments

Nancy Kress is one of those writers who comes up in conversations about good science fiction who elicits knowing nods and smiles of appreciation, sometimes even among people who may not have read anything. The name is known and she has written material that influences. In particular, a novel which can be regarded as a classic. The word gets over-used and misapplied, but in the sense of meaning something of on-going value, with a tendency to remain relevant to present issues, and a reliably fascinating read, Beggars In Spain qualifies. Let’s get the mechanics out of the way first. With regards to elegant sentences, smooth plotting, well-drawn characters, and thematic cohesion, this is as good as it gets in any genre. Published in 1993, the only thing that has “dated” is the actual timeframe in which it is set. This is a problem of most near-future SF. But here it intrudes so lightly that one may mentally move the frame

Mark W. Tiedemann

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The Proximal Eye