Why Oh Why Can't We Have A Better Press Corp?

Y'know, I've heard stuff like this before. When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969, the Soviet mouthpiece paper Pravda ran a short article on page three about it, and never again mentioned any of the subsequent landings. To this day, most Russians have no idea how extensive our lunar project was.

It's just so weird to see a reporter from the French Press Agency so sadly uneducated that he writes something this stupid, and his editor lets it go:

Russia plans to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2025 and wants to build a permanent base there shortly after, the head of Russian space agency Roskosmos said Friday. The only moon landing in history is NASA's Apollo expedition in 1968.

Why oh why can't France have a better press corp?

Yet more sexual harassment!

While we were out doing the Great Back To School Shopping of 2007, I was once again harassed for wearing me kilt in public. As Omaha and Kouryou-chan shopped for new shoes, I stood outside and fumbled with one of the luggage racks on the car, which had taken some damage during the most recent camping trip. The shoe store is on a corner lot, and its intersection is stoplight controlled.

As I stood there in the parking lot of the shoe store, a blue Mercury with three young women in their early twenty's stopped at the light, and the driver leaned over her passenger and shouted, "Hey! Do you wear underwear with that thing?"

"Would you?"

"Do you?" she said, as if not understanding the question.

"Why don't you come in here and find out?"

"Okay!" Then they drove off.

Joan Slonczewski, Brain Plague

It's not often that I re-read a book that, while I enjoyed it, I had a struggle doing so. However, several of Joan Slonczewski's fans, one of whom I trust quite a bit, encouraged me to re-read her book Brain Plague.

The basic plot is straightforward: a middle-tier artist who has moved to her interstellar empire's capital world to be part of the art scene is accepted for an "experimental" medical procedure that, she is told, will boost her intellectual capabilities. While this is going on, a "brain plague" is moving through the population at large, a blood-borne disease that turns people into zombies who either die or mysteriously disappear. Our heroine discovers that what she is getting is, in fact, a colony of millions of sentient beings who live at speeds hundreds of times faster than she does, and their 'boost' is in fact her leeching off of their creative efforts. They don't mind, though: they can only live within a human host and she, in effect, becomes their "god," and all they do is for her well-being. The plague, it turns out, is made up of corrupt colonies of these beings who take control of their hosts pleasure centers, addicting their hosts and sending them on an involuntary religious quest to find "the Eternal Light."

From here, much personal and political hijinks

( The original review )

I was hoping, upon re-reading, to discover that I had read the story incorrectly. I had not. Instead, I found the story even more bizarre. The characters flit from starsystem to starsystem in starships as casually as you and I take a subway. Sentient AIs have a scatological problem: mentioning "waste heat" is even more offensive to them than any epithet human beings use among themselves. Despite the enormous variance among the AI characters, they're all trying to found a city on a planet for AIs only just to show the protein machines that they can. There is no investment scheme targeting poor villagers living on the backward from which heroine Chrys comes, exploring the economic value of an entire planet that it's quite cheap to exploit, no capitalist at work trying to make the universe more productive. The economy, the social structure, the moral milieu, everything about this universe exists only by authorial fiat.

There is a class of writer that does not understand how the world came to be the way it is. She looks around and see class divisions and economic segmentation and doesn't understand why those institutions exist-- and then she extrapolates, badly, from the existing to an analogous SFnal setting. Slonczewski has done that with Brain Plague, but in the process she has given her class segments and economic segments (or their progenitors) capabilities that should destroy and re-arrange the distinctions with which she's trying to analogize.

Slonczewski remains a great writer of characters and their relationships (except when she doesn't; she does a poor job of communication Chrys's social life, using it primarily as an excuse to drive her into the grubbier bars), but she introduces ideas willy-nilly into her story without really grasping the consequences of her actions.