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Baa?21248 Posts
On September 29 2015 05:30 corumjhaelen wrote:Really sad  I don't think Verne is the greatest writer ever, and I'm sure English-speaking youngsters have tons of great stuff to read, but I had so much fun reading some of his novels when I was younger, it really seems a pity. Often witty, crazy ideas, charismatic characters... My favourite is The Mysterious Island, or how 5 random guys get stuck on an island with next to nothing and finish the novel with a telegraph and nitroglycerin. Beat that Robinson.
Mysterious Island was my favorite Verne as well!
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Why do all university courses teaching SF have to have such boring syllabi? It's sad
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Baa?21248 Posts
Sci fi (as most people today understand/define it) is a fairly new genre. And introductory sci fi courses would obviously tend to stay with the short list of canon works, in the same way any other branch of literature tends to stick with canon works at the introductory and basic level. The # of established sci fi works is low compared to other branches, so it's to be expected that you see Frankenstein and a handful of other works repeated often.
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I suppose what I mean is that I think the idea of teaching an "introduction to SF" at all is sort of dumb. It should just be structured as a "topics in SF" class where you teach a set of works dealing with some topic or theme.
This class is not even effective at that, seeing as it doesn't include anything from the Gernsbeck era OR the golden age. It jumps straight from the Victorians to Vonnegut, if I'm reading that right.
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There's also no Arthur C. Clarke in there
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Right, that's my point. You can't pretend to be a survey of SF history without at least one of Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov. Aside from the quality or lack therefore of their work
which is why it would be far better, for example, to teach a class about "robots" and you can start with greek legends about Hephaestus and go through jewish golem stories and then through RUR and etc. And not pretend to survey all of SF in a novice level lit course
On the other hand, maybe I'm just cranky.
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Baa?21248 Posts
Definitely just cranky, since by your standards we would have no introductory, broad overview classes of any sort at all 
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Wait, that's not what I said! I was talking about SF in particular. SF scholars have this inferiority complex where they want to make their topic a "real" topic and so they want a "canon" and "survey courses," but it actually just ends up making it all sort of boring.
But I guess in general I probably do feel that way. Survey of English Lit is in my opinion a particularly pointless course. Survey classes are not the most effective way to structure learning. I think every student should take a survey of western humanities (say from Homer to Heidegger) but that's about it, really. The rest should be structured as "topics in X"
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Well, the course is branded as an introduction to science fiction literature, with an overview of the genre intended. It's a 200 level course (2nd year) with no prerequisites, so it's not going to go into the same sort of depth or detail that an upper level course might, where more foundational knowledge is assumed.
I'm in the last year of my Computing Science degree, and wanted to take a softer course since I had a free slot. An introductory comparative literature course seemed up my alley, haha.
Anyway, I picked up this today:
![[image loading]](http://assets.cambridge.org/97805216/35035/cover/9780521635035.jpg)
Nielsen and Chuang's Quantum Computation and Quantum Information.
It's supposed to provide a fairly comprehensive introduction to quantum computing. My physics is a little rusty, so I might have to brush up on my quantum mechanics and Fourier analysis. It may be slow going.
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there is no foundational knowledge! it's just science fiction!
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Have you guys seen https://iwl.me/ ? It purports to say what author you write like.
I plugged in some essays of mine and found it quite manipulable. I was able to get it to tell me I write like H.P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and Dan Brown (ew). I tried some fiction and it consistently gave me David Foster Wallace, who I assume wrote some books or something.
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I feel like that would be highly dependent on subject matter.
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On September 27 2015 19:18 corumjhaelen wrote:Show nested quote +On September 27 2015 10:37 phantomfive wrote:On September 26 2015 22:11 corumjhaelen wrote:
I think it's top notch among philosophers. Worse than Schopenhauer and Plato, equal or better than about anybody else I've read, including Descartes who is always hailed for his style by French people. He really is hilarious too.
Reading Ibn Khaldun. Lots of pretty amazing ideas for a XIVth century guy. Lots of pretty repetitive stuff too, a pity.
Also rereading H2G2 for some reason. Still can't really find that funny. Voltaire is probably worth mentioning in any list of skilled writing philosophers. Nietzsche is interesting in that I find his stuff fairly flowing, even when I have no idea what he's saying. That could be the translation though. What philosophy has Voltaire written though ? ...
Candide comes to mind. He had a huge influence on the subsequent romantics.
My characterization:
Voltaire - religion is silly, and we are happy!
Schopenhauer - religion is silly, and we are miserable!
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I wouldn't characterize Candide as philosophy. A funny novel though.
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Well, it's a satire aimed squarely at Leibniz, so I think it counts as philosophy
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Are there any Biographies of George I of Greece?
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Time to re-read some of the scary stuff to build up my anarchist feelings.
![[image loading]](https://www.raisethehammer.org/static/images/the_shock_doctrine.jpg)
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
I know it's a bit pulp but she does have a point on few occasions and there's actually plenty of interesting stuff in it. And as you follow the references and dig deeper into it you get really scared.
![[image loading]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/413olGFM7QL._SX388_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg)
Netocracy: The new power elite and life after capitalism by Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist
When I first read it way back when (over 10 years ago) I thought it fun and funny. Pretty speculative. What scares the hell out of me reading it now is that it was actually quite prophetic...
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I don't know if anyone has mentioned Godel, Escher, Bach yet.
I like Candide as an artistic appetizer, though maybe not a philosophic one. I don't think he adds many new ideas. He's just your typical Enlightenment hack. He was also pretty intellectually dishonest. Read Candide, then get drunk and go back to reading Wilde.
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wait, the part where they lynch Dr. Pangloss after the Lisbon earthquake you don't think is funny?
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EPT
