The Blood is the Life: 28-12-2010

[miss_s_b]

• What the Dickens?
  Has A Christmas Carol ALWAYS been science fiction?
  (tags: scifi writing)
• Photos: Rare Snapshots from Early Star Trek Conventions
  You know that bollocks about how only men like scifi and women getting into scifi is new? Here's photographic proof that it's bollocks (and if that's not old enough for you, Mary Frigging Shelley FFS)
  (tags: feminism startrek)
• Your Money – LibDem manifesto commitments delivered so far! | Lynne Featherstone
  Lynne Featherstone details what the Lib Dems have done in office.
  (tags: libdemmery)
• Random information for fanficcers/fanartists ["You look Time Lord."]
  Ever wondered what colour a martian sunset would be?
  (tags: cool)

Comments

[innerbrat]

I feel I should be golf-clapping Peter David right now. Is this really new to him?

- firstly, I cannot believe it took him so long to realise the story is about Ebenezer Scrooge. Growing up with adaptations is no excuse - of course the story is about Scrooge MacDuck, Michael Caine and Bill Murray. I can't imgine how someone can red it otherwise.

- but then of course, it's taken him this long to realise the ghosts of Christmas past, present and yet-to-come have the power of time travel. Really, Peter David, really? It wasn't in their names or anything?

- I left the tab to come right this comment when the poor sod tried to use the following logic:
- the story involes time travel
- time travel is SOLELY THE PROVENANCE OF SF.
- therefore the beings that the narrative explicitly and repeatedly refers to as ghosts and spirits cannot be ghosts or spirits because that's fantasy, not SF.

That's the whole point of his post. He then goes off on a speculation that Scrooge was a Stan Lee-esque mutant based on the idea that SF and fantasy are two mutually exclusive genres and not, as any good example from either will show you, just aspects of the wider speculative fiction genre.

Do you think David might benefit from the realisation that time-travel happens quite comfortbly alongside supernatural entities in 'fantasy' stories like, say, the Discworld? Or that Stan Lee was not a writer of hard science fiction but a talented writer of social science fiction - a subgenre of speculative fiction that borrows as much from fantasy as what in my genre-snob years I called real SF? In other words - that mutant powers make about as much SF sense as spirits and ghosts?

But then, this is Peter David, who still thinks that he wrote the first gay kiss ever to happen in comics, so what can you do?