An Old Fashioned Blog Post

I tend to get most of my info in my RSS reader (NewsBlur) from RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds. I am currently subscribed to 268 sites. A few of these I also am subscribed to an email newletter.

I far prefer the RSS feeds. For 1 thing, I can Share a post in NewsBlur & it automatically gets added to cjheinz's blurblog. This gives me a great & easy way to bookmark posts.

When I find a website/post I want to save for further analysis/comment, I normally click on the NewsBlur header to pull up a tab displaying the original post. Then I move this tab to my "blogger" Chrome window. When I blog about this post & am finished with it, I delete the tab. I have been particularly using this technique for my "Bullshit Apocalypse" posts.

I noticed I had 3 really interesting non-Bullshit Apocalypse posts saved in this way:

1. "A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE by Iain M Banks", 1994.

   Banks' Culture Novels are some of my fav sci-fi of the last 3-4 decades. The ship & orbital minds (now THAT'S an AI) that run the colossal ships & manufactured "planets", with their outlandish names; the smartass Special Circumstances robots of the Contact Division.

   Banks' untimely death in 2013. age 59, from gall bladder cancer, somehow makes me value these stories more.

2. "Starship Stormtroopers: Michael Moorcock", 1977.

   I don't think Moorcock has been mentioned in the blog much. Hunh, he's still alive, 86 YO. In college & shortly thereafter, we loved his stuff. He very much borrowed from Joseph Campbell's "Eternal Hero" mythos. Elric was his best anti-hero.

   I always felt, tho, that his writing was often a little sketchy, a little comic-booky.

   In this post, he really lays into the majority of science fiction for its militarism & fascism. Yep.

   I think I have already mentioned how the Atreides in "Dune" were good fascists, vs the Harkonnens who were bad fascists, but they were still fascists.

3. "The Theory of Interstellar Trade", by Paul Krugman, 1978.

   So a 25 YO Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale has some fun riffing on what trade balances would look like with relativity-contrained (< speed of light) travel. Complete with equations!

These had sat for a while, & when I got around to reading them 5-10 days after I had saved the links, I was like "Where did these come from?"

Then I remembered. They came from another of my absolute fav authors of the last 4 decades, Charlie Stross, in a post to his blog "Rethinking space opera", from September 11.

Charlie's discussion of the space opera subgenre of sci-fi is, or course, very interesting. Several other interesting links in addition to the 3 above. Plus, it is a fairly short read - always a bonus! I think Charlie has 1 or 2 space operas in the works, yay! He has written a few in the past, they are great stuff!