Because I care

[james_davis_nicoll]

As mentioned in comments, Dan Simmons has a dystopic novel coming out.

Canada, used to dividing itself into smaller parts to appease ethnic groups, languages, and claims to prior ownership, [...]

Is that a snipe at Nunavut?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Am I in a different universe in which Constantine founded his city in 260, and in which the Byzantine empire didn't fall until 1532? Or where Hagia Sophia was briefly a Roman Catholic church because the Greeks were just feeling friendly?

Of course, he's seriously confused as to the use of "logos", but then writers and words just don't mix, see OSC and "observatory".

William Hyde

[yamamanama.livejournal.com]

It actually was briefly a Catholic church, but not because the Greeks were feeling friendly; it was because the Catholic crusaders occupied the city.

The Hagia Sophia church was in a horrible state of disrepair when the Turks got there.

[(Anonymous)]

Yep, and the Catholic crusaders in 1204 did in fact slaughter those who had taken shelter in the church: and the Muslims didn't think to put a prostitute on the imperial seat in the Church, being the sort of low-brow Crusader humor that wouldn't occur to Sultan Mehmet.

Bruce

[(Anonymous)]

Which was indeed my point. I don't think that Simmons thinks of 1204 as a conquest, becuase it's conquest by Christians. That is, if he's heard of 1204.

If only he'd read Robert Silverberg, he'd know so much more.

William Hyde

[yamamanama.livejournal.com]

Or if his worldview fit what he reads instead of reading what supports his worldview.

Coincidentally, I'm reading Nightwings.

[cshalizi.livejournal.com]

The phrasing of that paragraph in Simmons's self-advertisement is (as I would put it to a student) uncomfortably similar to the Wikipedia entry on Hagia Sophia. This may be due to the shared influence of a third source. Wikipedia, of course, correctly and repeatedly gives 1453 as the date of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in that very article; I have no idea where 1532 is coming from.

In fact, it strikes me as very odd that someone who was as obsessed with the clash of civilizations and the scary, scary Muslims as the narrator of that rant is, would would repeatedly screw up the date of the fall of Constantinople. This gives me a tiny sliver of hope that the who thing is an elaborate put-up job by Simmons. More likely, of course, it is all too horribly real, and the loss of a genuine talent to the brain-eater.