The pain of an affluent, middle-aged white American denied his boyhood fantasies

Man, you people are lucky there's a limit on how long titles can be on LJ.

Anyway, coming to you from email: the tears of an SF writer:

My lifespan encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions. This summer, at the age of 51—not even old—I watched on a flatscreen as the last Space Shuttle lifted off the pad. I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars? Until recently, though, I have kept my feelings to myself. Space exploration has always had its detractors. To complain about its demise is to expose oneself to attack from those who have no sympathy that an affluent, middle-aged white American has not lived to see his boyhood fantasies fulfilled.

And on an unrelated note ... No, I'll save it for the next post.

Unrelated to previous post

So there was this interview with Michael Lewis where he mentions Iceland in passing.

I think this is US link.

I'll quote from the LA Times quotation:

In what Lewis thought was a sign of the times, Iceland now has the first lesbian head of state. "The women said, 'You don't know what you're doing'. They've had this realization of how dangerous men are with money."

The actual interview is a bit more scathing on the intellectual capacity of the Icelandic men, which is hilarious because I'm not from Iceland (That said, they have some fine astronomers).

So, anyone jumped on this for a "The Snow Ball Effect" style story, where the cruel gynocracy of Icelandic financial services spreads across a long suffering world on account of how they're not screwing up while alternate models are?

October 6, 2011

VOTE!

Since I will be out today

Seen in comments:

As I've said before, "hard" SF was captured during the 1980s by a small group of writers with close ties to the California aerospace complex.

Outline how a hard sf dominated by a different small group of writers might have developed.