"been teaching literature for over 35 years"

Christopher Simon · 05 Sep 2013, 22:36 · from 2013-September.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: kierkegaurdian at gmail.com (Christopher Simon)
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 18:36:06 -0400
Subject: (urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"
Message-ID: <52290769.660c320a.7def.fffff916 at mx.google.com>

"Bujold tips her hand in the eloquence of her language (normally a good thing) and the attention to detail that only women would find attractive: balls, courts, military dress, palace intrigues, gossiping, and whispering in the corridors."

Kinda sexist too, isn't he?

-----Original Message-----
From: "Jeff Wilson" <jwilson at clueland.com>
Sent: ?9/?5/?2013 5:52 PM
To: "urth at urth.net" <urth at urth.net>
Subject: (urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"

Paul Cook has a ranty go at books he doesn't consider SF, including BOTNS.
He considers the presence of medieval and Arthurian tropes with poor sfnal
world building like the Urth failing to wobble from the lack of a moon
(!!) to be false advertising.

http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/09/science-fiction-science-fiction/

Alas, the site editor has blocked comments after a torrent of
coutner-ranting, but has offered to publish a suitably impersonal
counter-column submission.

Would anyone like to join me in compiling some quotes and citations that
poke holes in some of his underinformed opinions?

in particular:

 - there's no moon, so the earth should wobble
 - vulcanism has ceased
 - mountain raising (tectonics) has ceased
 - extreme antiquity (millions or billions of years)
 - subduction zones have stopped removing carbon from the atmosphere
 - events in vast antiquity not referred to, antiquity "not used"
 - "Book Two has a long fairy tale inserted in the middle of the novel
that goes absolutely nowhere and adds nothing to the novel"

It would be best to stick to the original 4 volumes and the pre-Urth
short-stories if we can.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - < jwilson at clueland.com >
A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab
< http://www.tamut.edu/cil >

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