Marginalia

The Onion ran an interview with Incredibles director Brad Bird back in November. Some of the bits that had to be edited out of the interview for length are here. And the Guardian has a roundup of some of the debate about the moral issues in the film here. [via applez]

Bookslut has a new columnist who will be writing about novellas.

Wachowski Brothers even less creative than we thought [via penny arcade] EDIT: No, apparently they're still solely to blame.

A long and interesting post at Making Light about fanfic and its potential impact on pro writing, responding to this LJ post.

There is a blog written to Margaret Atwood. I now believe there is a blog for everything. [via shaken & stirred]

"The Ig Nobel award for medicine—one of the prizes given annually to scientists who have produced unusual research—was given this year to a team of researchers who had found that cities in which radio stations played a higher than average amount of country music had higher than average suicide rates." So it really is the music of pain.

The Guardian First Book award was not won by Strange and Norrell but by Mutants, by Armand Marie Leroi, which sounds almost as interesting.

Argosy is not dead, and will be serialising a novel by John Grant

The horror ... [via major_clanger]

EDIT: Hmm. 'The forthcoming Hollywood adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is to sacrifice many of the film's anti-religious sentiments in an effort to avoid a backlash from America's Christian right.'

Paid Content, 2048

A speculation on the future of publishing. The quotes in the piece (or most of them, anyway) are real, but the rest is fiction:

REUTERS - Bangalore, Monday January 8, 2048

Author, critic, and collective publishing pioneer Douglas Rushkoff died in his home Saturday afternoon, a family spokesman said. No cause was given. He was 86.

[...]

Rushkoff, who first surpassed Isaac Asimov as the most prolific author of all time, with 324 books and approximately 2 trillion words posted, may be best remembered for his creation of the "omniscient author," an anonymous writers' collective continuously publishing works under a single name—his—after Rushkoff acheived some reknown as a media critic and novelist in the late 1990s.

[...]

Rushkoff (or to be precise, the Corporation) overtook Asimov as history's most prolific author in 2034, but was himself overtaken a few years ago by the Cory Doctorow Collective. Doctorow, the author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and more than 400 other novels, personally retired from writing science fiction in 2016, but his subsequent decision to register his body of work as open source—to allow anyone to alter, annotate, revise, and republish his books in any medium—was immediately hailed as a breakthrough by the vestiges of the book publishing industry. Today, the "Complete Works of Cory Doctorow" (updated hourly) is available from Amazon.com in a 6 terabyte download, while an estimated 200 smaller versions of his collected works, in varying combinations, are available as free and paid downloads across the Web.

[via The Infinite Matrix]

The Incredibles

Tom requested a poll on the philosophy of The Incredibles. But, given that I'm me and not him, I'm going to preface his simple enquiry with a whole load of other quotes and questions.

Exhibit A:

The superhero was dreamt up by Nietzsche during the 1880s, and has been summoning humanity to transcend itself ever since. Does Mr Incredible's renunciation mean that the superman has finally despaired of the midget, puling race he was meant to lead onwards and upwards?

Exhibit B:

Is Dash, the supersonic third-grader forbidden from racing on the track team, a gifted child held back by the educational philosophy that "everybody is special"? Or is he an overprivileged elitist being forced to take into account the feelings of others?

Is his father, Mr. Incredible, who complains that the schools "keep inventing new ways to celebrate mediocrity," a visionary reformer committed to pushing children to excel? Or is he a reactionary in red tights who's been reading too much Nietzsche and Ayn Rand?

Is Syndrome, the geek villain trying to kill the superheroes, an angry Marxist determined to quash individuality? Or is his plan to give everyone artificial superpowers an uplifting version of "cooperative learning" in an "inclusion classroom"?

Exhibit C:

Who would have thought that an animated film would finally touch a nerve, putting egalitarians on the defensive? That is the achievement of Pixar Studio's new hit, The Incredibles, the story of a family of superheroes who struggle against the reign of mediocrity and finally break free to excel. Along the way it skewers the dumbing down of schools, the mantra that everyone is special, and the laws that give losers special status as victims.

Exhibit D:

The movie does come to some interesting philosophical conclusions, not least among them the way it advocates full-on Nietzschean ethics. The "Supers" -- literal Ubermensch -- are the strong, endowed with special gifts that place them beyond the range of normal men. The Supers also possess unimpeachably noble spirits, just as Nietzsche described. While competing amongst themselves to be the finest hero, they devote themselves and their gifts entirely to protecting the weak from themselves.

And, as mentioned in my earlier post, the Guardian has a roundup of comment here.

[Poll #399598]

Note that if you answer 'other' to question three, you should explain that in the comments, too. Myself, I'm undecided. So, convince me, one way or the other!

A Book For Every Month of Next Year

The latest issue of Locus contains, apart from the usual reviews and interviews, lists of forthcoming UK and US books for most of next year. Because I'm desperately sad about this sort of thing, I actually started noting the books I'm going to want to read; perhaps not surprisingly, fairly quickly I had at least one book a month picked out, and I thought I'd share my pickings with the wider world. The caveats: I've tried to stick mostly to UK publication dates, although I know full well there will be some US books I'll want to get; and for several months, there was more than one book in contention (September was a hard choice, and for October I've outright cheated). But now, without further ado ...

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