maybe these guys designed the roomba chimney sweep?!
Larry Niven also spends a lot of ink in his books covering interspecies-sex...
I dunno why, conservatives often write A LOT about sex.
I kinda threw up in my mouth thinking about it...
Uhm, not thinking about sex, but thinking about conservatives writing about sex...
Well that 's the most ironic use of 'brainchild' I've ever seen.
Hubris, if you think Larry Niven is nuts, just wait until you sample Jerry Pournelle's form of insanity. He makes Larry Niven look like Mahatma Gandhi.
Another thing you may or may not have noticed. Larry Niven's writing turned to shit about 20 years ago. These days, he's in the cellar along with Anne McCaffrey, Allen Dean Foster, Piers Anthony, and similar "luminaries".
The last Niven novel I really enjoyed was "Protector".
wait what huh?
THE larry niven?
Ringworld guy?
Rishatra?
One of my favorite authors??!?!?!?
No, if you want hospitals to stem their financial losses, deal with the prescription drug addiction problem in this country. My spouse works in the ER, anywhere from 50-75 percent of patients a night are there for prescription narcotics.
I know people are in pain, I know pain is bad and needs to be treated, but if you're getting a script for 30 oxycontin from three ER's in the same night, or showing up at the hospital for back ache/trouble breathing/a full cardiac workup/a script for vicodin 3-4 days a week, you have other problems. And you know none of them ever pay for any of it.
Niven's writing turned to shit about the time he started spending too much time around Jerry Pournelle. Who acts like a drunken bull in a china shop even when he is sober.
The same administration that tries to suppress real scientists hires these hacks as consultants
Maybe a neutron star sucked the conscience out of Niven.
Why are so many American SF/Fantasy writers so reactionary? You don't seem to get the same level of crazy with Brits like Michael Moorcock or Iain M. Banks.
Mine ancient Gods have truly fallen into deep disgrace. What can I say?
Heh - jokes always work to lighten the mood. Herewith: Olde Jerry Pournelle joke - and especially for the SF in-crowd fen who might have volunteered to help at SF conventions, and dealt with Jerry Pournelle, or those at SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America):
Q: what's worse than Jerry Pournelle?
A: A *drunk* Jerry Pournelle.
He is known to be obnoxious, and was especially obnoxious when he was drinking at SF conventions. He cut it out a while ago, due to warnings about his health.
Larry Niven, on the other hand, has the reputation for being a friendly, sociable fellow - along with his wife "fuzzy pink Niven."
The last work I read from either of them was "The Mote in God's Eye." I read the first "Ringworld" novel, and thought it a bit tedious.
It's the Heinlein Effect. Sci-fi writers seem to think the key to being great is being as reactionary and crazy as Heinlein was.
"Maybe a neutron star sucked the conscience out of Niven."
Heh. Just capital-L Libertarianism. Every so often you see members of a local Libertarian party pull some "clever" PR stunt or make an "outrageously innovative" proposal; all involve physically endangering the public or a portion thereof either immediately or sometime in the future.
Funny how guys like this are first in line to suck at the government teat when easy work is offered.
"Another thing you may or may not have noticed. Larry Niven's writing turned to shit about 20 years ago."
I'd say 25 years ago. A lot of stuff turned to shit around that time. Reaganism gave lots of educated professionals license to act like sociopathic asshats.
Niven and Pournelle are very obsessed with closed, self-contained worlds, where the wrong kind of people are kept out by clever and amoral gatekeepers. The hospital idea is right in line with this.
"He is known to be obnoxious, and was especially obnoxious when he was drinking at SF conventions. He cut it out a while ago, due to warnings about his health."
Now I know which one is the model for the protagonist of Niven and Pournelle's "Inferno", who dies and goes to Hades when he drunkenly falls out a window at a SF convention.
Larry Niven hasn't written anything worth reading in at least twenty-five years.
As to Pournelle: when he was writing his computer column in Byte, there was a joke in the industry: "use the big red [on-off] switch, Jerry ... "
Yeah, Ringworld was good SF.
But, a racist nutcake is a racist nutcake.
Where's the Kzin when we need him?
Niven was independently wealthy before he started writing. Family money. So, infected at birth by the GOP virus.
Pournelle, on the other hand is a Bill'O clone, 'way back when he wrote about communist conspiracies in the US. From the John Birch wing of the pseudo-libertarians.
Put 'em together and all kinds of insane babble spills out. Just ask some LASFS members.
Just because somebody can write or tell a highly entertaining story doesn't mean we should necessarily care what they think about politics or religion. 
I didn't realize classic SF was so richly populated with reactionary crackpots. I guess Isaac Asimov was an honorable exception.
IBW the first gen scifi writers tended to be on the liberal side (azamov, clarck, ect.) these are second generation guys who grew up idlizing Heinlein..i think there is a reason i stick to fantisyt and british...although hard scifi tends to bore me.
Classic SF writers were all over the map, politically. And they could disagree strongly on a variety of topics - the community was, and still is, like a somewhat disfunctional family, that helps out members when the need arises. Some other notables are Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford Simak, Mack Reynolds, Jack Williamson, and Theodore Sturgeon - they all differed politically from each other.
I read a lot of Sci-fi in 1981 and '82. "After Worlds Colide" and "Lucifer's Hammer,"
provided "What the fuck?" moments that linger to this day.
The army of crazed, cannibal negros attacking the nuke plant was an updated rewrite of, "The Klansman."
Teenage fantasies about domination, revenge, and compliant women were all well and good, but Niven & Co. soured me on Sci-fi for years.
Fantasy is for those who can't handle science... methinks.
I wouldn't have put Anne McCaffrey in the basement? What's she done to piss anybody off?
Now,if you want to talk about reactionary turds, let's talk about Orson Scott Card... who nonetheless writes some really good stuff. But his politics stink.
Some points to clear up (and yes, there is no way for me to avoid being calld an apologist).
I know Larry (and to a much lesser extent, Jerry Pournelle).
I think he was being more than trifle ironic, since he has a large string of stories about the evil outcome possible from organ transplant being widespread (look up Gil the Arm, or just plain, "organlegging").
In that context, it has a different flavor.
Is Larry conservative; mostly. Part of that is growing up in money (but that said; and he admits it, the money let him spend his time writing. He has, as I understand it, no money which isn't his own, as he paid back to the trust fund he was given out of).
Jerry, is another kettle of fish altogether. He's reactionary. He's less unpleasant since he stopped drinking (15 year ago, more or less), but his politics have gotten more ossified.
I find it interesting that you take an army led by a white guy; which had some blacks in it, but by no means all, nor even the majority, and characterise it as, "an army of negroes". Yes, the way blacks are depicted is sterotyped (and one of the things which dates the book most) but (again speaking from experience) I think Larry's failings were more in not telling Jerry this was a bit heavy handed (the corrupt activist, Alim Nassor was a straight-up play to bigots, and pretty much the worst thing in the book).
I point out that Larry didn't say the hospitals ought to be killing people, but that spreading fear would deter ignorant people from using hospitals.
Which is also a distinction with a difference.
All in all, I think it was stupid to say (and he's daft if he think undocumented aliens are why hospitals are going broke, but that's a function of class, not politics. I know too many Democrats who have much the same idea... the commonality; they are well off).
Pournelle, who is tall and has a booming voice, was as obnoxious in meetings of science writers (at AAAS-associated meetings of the National Association of Science Writers) as apparently he has been at SF conventions.
Ray Bradbury, who was outspokenly against the Vietnam War, has apparently gotten conservative in his old age.
dejah thoris you ever read moorcock, ever read Gamin...i stay away from most of the D&D crowed in fantisy (im lookign at you Ann) but there is soem very good fantisy out there(although we all have our vices..sure its pure hero story stuff but I love Fiest)
ceabaird: i neglected to answer you earlyer.
there is a clear formula for writing timless works of fiction that sell. You msut have a brothle sceen and a sword fight (you can update that depending on your tiem period that you are writing about)
hell we considered gettign a brothe sceen and a swordfigt into our tech book. (my PHP Security book shoudl be out soon should be out soon, PHP and Mysql for dummies desk refeance made soem amazone best seller list)
rememebr you want your fiction to sell, you want it to be "serious literature" 100 years from now you need sex and volence.
I shared a Lucasfilm scriptwriting credit with Card back in the early 90s. Officious bastard -- let me do all the work, never returned my e-mails, drove the producer stark raving crazy...and still collected his check.
Too bad about Bradbury. I spent a day as his driver during a public appearance once in the late 70s. To this small-town girl, he was the soul of American compassion and tolerance.
Heinlein gets misunderstood, I think. He was enough of a libertine, but not all that libertarian. In fact, he set out what I think is the best standard of government ever: the duty of government is to serve the needs of mothers and their children. We do that in an honest and sincere way, we'll never get far off track. He was big on personal responsibility and duty to the collective, which are also liberal values.
I've only ever been to one SF con -- it was WorldCon, back in the early 90s when it was held in SF. My best friend at the time was writing books with Mercedes Lackey, so we got invited to all the good parties. It still wasn't enough to draw me back for more.
Mr. R has thousands of SF books in the basement. I doubt I've read a dozen of them. Meh.
Oh don't get me going on Card. He's one of the biggest assholes in all of Science Fiction.
NO respect for his readers, and he plagiarized an entire series directly from The Book of Mormon.
He stopped being interesting 15 years ago.
Asshole. Total fracking Mormon asshole, and I mean that in the worst way possible.
I was an avid Niven fan, once upon a time. As for his collaborations with Pournelle, I thought "The Mote in God's Eye" was a pretty fair first contact story, but nothing spectacular.
My disenchantment began with "Lucifer's Hammer", but it was "Oath of Fealty" that finally put me off both authors. I really don't care that much about a writer's politics, so long as they can tell a good story. But when the ideology infects the story to the degree that it begins to resemble a straight-up rant, it never makes for good writing.
I'm sad to say, the same thing happened for me with Poul Anderson in his later years.
Even so, Niven's cute little suggestion still surprised and disappointed me. It's truly revolting on so many levels, whether he was dead serious or just "joking" (heh heh). Especially when you consider that so many of those Latinos work 2 or more pissant jobs with no health care plans, thus allowing Messieurs Niven and Pournelle and the rest of their reactionary ilk to reap the obvious benefits of Latinos' low-wage labor, it's doubly disgusting.
"Fantasy is for those who can't handle science... methinks."
totally disagree with this one, SF was never all that much about the science. As a genre it was developed to be a construct where writers and readers could examine current social issues or trends from a more distant place emotionally.
I just read Never Let Me Go for my book club. It is about human relationships with a backdrop about cloning. excellent.
anyway, it is NOT for people who don't get science.
LHG, you could be right for some fantasy, but I think you generalize too much for SF. What got ME hooked WAS the science.
that being said, folks like Heinlein could write good characters and stories, using science as the hook. I don't think Heinlein was all that liberal either,but he taught us to stand straight and back up what we believed and not take shit from faux patriots the like of which we see festooning the GOP halls and White House today.
dejah thoris,
Agree that Heinlein would not look favorably at Bu$h Co., but I always wondered what he thought about Reagan
and the right wingers back in the 80's.
Now I know why I always preferred the likes of Spinrad or Brunner to these guys.
Regrettably, their "ironic" suggestions are a perfect fit with the extremists currently in the White House, so the question of it being snark or not is moot: Bush, Rice, Cheney et al haven't got much of a detectable sense of irony, but they sure do have deep pockets for insane projects (cf. Iraq) when it's someone else's money being thrown around.
Organleggers R Us, dead ahead!
there was nothing "ironic" about this suggestion. It was not some offhand remark at a meeting or bar. He made it to the DHS at a panel especially for suggestions.
i liked Ringworld. I have just recently read about 7/8 of The Ringworld Throne. I just petered out on it -- couldn't figure out what was going on. (I was reading it because I got it for $1 at a library sale.) It was terrible.
I read an essay, I think it was by Brad Hicks, that said genres in writing have a life span, and science fiction is past its time.
Now we seem to be onto fantasy. I think it goes with our political atmosphere that we are into fantasy -- note that most fantasy novels are in monarchies or dictatorships -- never any mention of democracy. Come to think of it, there wasn't much democracy in science fiction either....
Science fiction is a very exacting genre. Books or movies, works fall into only two categories, Really Good or Really Bad.
It's the Really Bad stuff that most people are familiar with.
Really Good, such as the likes of Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, C.M. Korbluth, Alfred Bester, William Gibson, and James Tiptree Jr, just to mention a few favorites, are absolutely mindblowing. (Some of the men's names are women, from the bad old days.)
Go back and read some classics, and the prescience will astonish you.
The best science fiction is extremely difficult to translate to movies, though Philip K. Dick, now that he's dead, has had a string of luck.
And, I'm sad to say, I can't read much of what's been published for the last 20 years, it's just crap.
But pick up a copy of The Sheep Look Up (thirty years old, and it's got the Bush Era nailed.) Or More Than Human, one of the best studies of human nature and its facets ever written. Or one of Harlan Ellison's blistering short stories, such as I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, which is, at its core, about the incredible love humanity is capable of.
Science Fiction is in the doldrums right now. But it will come back. As long as there is people and technology, good writers will be drawn to explore that.
Let's face it--we're living in science fiction--that's why I gave up reading it so long ago. Not being a very technically minded person, I can barely keep up with Wii and Wifi, cell phones, the Internet etc. Let's not even touch nanotechnology and bio weaponry, Monsanto and GMOs! People much younger than me are practising polyamory even if they don't know the meaning of the word, and patriarchal sexual systems can't keep up--as much as reactionary Republicans are trying to bring them back. They can't fight what they don't acknowledge, much less what they can't even see.
I came of age right after Free Love and the Vietnam War, and have come to see that for many, the idealism and progressive vision were never backed up with pragmatism and actual work. It's very easy for an old guy with money like Niven to become more conservative as he ages--as so many do--because for them, the ideals were never worked on, just talked about. The kind of people who really work on progressive causes were never really part of Niven's circle. He and people like him have no real frame of reference.
3 Visitors Online
Commenting by HaloScan
