Atomictumor

I saw a link on my googlie homepage that caught my eye. The link was to a Wired magazine article about how Sci-Fi is the last bastard bastion of big ideas literature.

If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.

I think the guy is spot on, especially when he starts poking at high-brow, realistic fiction.

From where I sit, traditional “literary fiction” has dropped the ball…. Why? I think it’s because I was reading novel after novel about the real world. And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I’d read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, “OK. Cool. I see how today’s world works.” I also started to feel like I’d been reading the same book over and over again.

Anyhow, I’d never really heard of the Sci-Fi author referenced in the wired article. So I plugged his name, Cory Doctorow, into google to see what I could find. Lo and behold, he has his own website! Imagine that. Turns out Doctorow’s soap box is digital rights information type stuff. He even lets you down load his books for free which is great!

Digital rights is an old saw here at the Tumor, but why not have some food for thought.

Cory Doctorow:

I believe that we live in an era where anything that can be expressed as bits will be. I believe that bits exist to be copied. Therefore, I believe that any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb, and that lawmakers who try to prop these up are like governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the sides of active volcanoes. [citation]

Doctorow, again:

 …as Woody Guthrie said:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

Here’s the quote from his book, After the Siege, that really got me thinking.

The USA was a pirate nation for the first 100 years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from with blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the US revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.

Hmmm, Thoughts? The US of A, a pirate nation?? Was the Stars and Stripes once just a glorified jolly rodger? It’s hard to believe.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Consumerism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.