Wednesday 2.

* My North Carolinian readers should consider sending a letter expressing their displeasure to the offices of our senator, Kay Hagan, who as Facing South reports is currently one of the major stumbling blocks for health care reform.

Sen. Kay Hagan
521 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-6342
Fax: 202-228-2563

You can contact her via email at her web site, but a snail mail letter is still best.

* Climate Progress analyzes the concessions made to Collin Peterson to get Waxman-Markey to the floor this week. Kevin Drum and Yglesias has more, as well as a teaser for how much worse the Senate version will be.

* Also from Yglesias: (1) a post on Asimov's novel The Gods Themselves that intrigued me enough to drop everything and read the book and (2) a report that the Iranian soccer players who wore green in solidarity with the protesters have been banned from the sport for life. The Gods Themselves, I can report, is a great read: in addition to the environmental allegory Yglesias highlights there's also some really intriguing queer sexuality stuff in the "how aliens have sex" section—very rare for Asimov—and a nice Star Maker-style cosmology regarding the origin of the universe and the fates of planets that don't solve their energy crises. I think Asimov's probably right that it's his best book.

* Squaring off on the suckiness of Transformers II. In this corner, Roger Ebert:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

And in this corner, Walter Chaw:

The worst summer in recent memory continues as Michael Bay brings his slow push-ins and Lazy Susan dolly shots back to the cineplex with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (hereafter Transformers 2), the ugliest, most hateful, most simple-minded and incomprehensible assault on art and decency since the last Michael Bay movie.

* And your webcomic of the day: Warbot in Accounting.

Saturday!

* I knew we were in a Seldon crisis: Obama eying "New Foundation" as his answer to the New Deal.

* If you can't beat 'em: GOP moderate and feared 2012 rival Jon Huntsman joins Obama administration as ambassador to China.

* There's been a lot of talk on the blogotubes about recent polls showing a national shift towards pro-life positions. It's possible there's been some sort of catalyzing event or demographic shift I'm unaware of that accounts for this, but it seems to me most likely that this reflects an important rhetorical shift that has recently been embraced by the GOP. Consider that the nation's most prominent pro-life politician, Sarah Palin, routinely describes "life" as a morally admirable "choice" made by her and others. I suspect this new rhetoric of choice is significantly muddying the waters in these polls, encouraging people who might not choose abortion for themselves to think that's what being "pro-life" is. Of course, that any choice is or should be involved at all is incompatible with what the term "pro-life" has historically meant.

Thursday links part two.

* The headline reads, "Civil War Raging in Right-Wing Blogosphere." It is simple impossible for me to believe that the founder of Little Green Footballs has become a leading voice for calm and reasoned discourse among the wingnuts. That's a perfect demonstration of just how crazy things have gotten over there.

* Crooked Timber talks about neoliberalism and the euphemism treadmill.

* There's a lot to be said for this article at the Valve arguing that a first book no longer be considered the "gold standard" for tenure—but all the same admitting that most of what your discipline produces not only isn't being read but isn't worth reading in the first place seems like something of a bad strategy for academics.

* The film version of Isaac Asimov's deeply underappreciated time travel story, The End of Eternity, has a director.

* And the Guardian has your quiz on literary apocalypses.

Krugman says he found himself in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, especially the Foundation series—"It was nerds saving civilization, quants who had a theory of society, people writing equations on a blackboard, saying, 'See, unless you follow this formula, the empire will fail and be followed by a thousand years of barbarism.'"

Krugman and I have something in common. (via io9)

Poli-Sci-Fi Radio took my Urtexts posts from Sunday (1, 2) and ran with it on the show last week. The podcast (free!) is here; the conversation about SF and my post starts about 25 minutes in. Who knew so many of us had once been Star Trek geeks?

Every science fiction fan has a foundation for their nerdity. It is their Urtext. For me—and I take no particular joy in admitting this—there's no question that it is Star Trek. The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and I watched more or less every episode of Star Trek produced before the day I came to understand the show's structural limitations sometime during the mid-'90s.

But if my nerdy nature can have a second foundation, it's undoubtedly Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, which I remember as vividly today as the day I read them a decade and a half ago. It's only partially an exaggeration to say that for me all theories of history are but footnotes to Asimov. (If it's good enough for al Qaeda, it should be good enough for everyone.)

Asimov Wiki
Timeline of the Robots/Foundation Universe
A favorite commentary, and a followup.

Now, I wouldn't recommend that any of you necessarily read these books now; I suspect Asimov's magic only really works on thirteen-year-old boys. But I bring this up because there's word that a Foundation movie is finally going to be made, and it's clearly going to be awful. The director attached, Roland Emmerich, directed Independence Day, the Godzilla remake, The Day after Tomorrow, and 10,000 BC. On his entire IMDb page only Stargate and The Thirteenth Floor (producer's credit) fills me with anything less than total dread. B-movies are great, but Foundation shouldn't be a B-movie. If anything, it should be a HBO series...

Quick links:

* Toothpaste for Dinner beholds the Singularity. (Thanks, kate w!)

* They're (finally) turning Isaac Asimov's Foundation series into a movie.

* Once again people are discovering Orson Scott Card's reprehensible politics. It happens about once every six months.

* 29 Literary Science Fiction Novels You Should Read. More than half of these are already on my exam lists; the rest probably will be by the time I take my exams in March...

I've been sitting on some bookmarks of s.f. lectures and documentaries for the last few weeks, waiting till I had the chance to take them in. That day was, at long last, yesterday:

* At Cynical-C, Isaac Asimov on the Golden Age of Science Fiction;

* At Boing Boing, Neal Stephenson on problems of genre and criticism in contemporary s.f.;

* Via MetaFilter, A Day in the Afterlife of Philip K. Dick;

* And also via MetaFilter, the Sun Ra documentary Brother from Another Planet.

Enjoy!

Three more:

* Sugarshock: A webcomic in three parts from Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon, via MeFi.

* Yet another article in praise of The Wire, this time from Josh Shelov at The House Next Door.

* Warren Ellis has the three new laws of robotics.

Science-fiction-flavored interviews with William Gibson on his new book and Isaac Asimov on the Bible and Biblical literalism. Here's Gibson:

What is your hope for the future?

That we’ll turn out not to have already terminally soiled our unthinkably rare and lovely little sphere of water and air.

Via Bookslut and Cynical-C.

I've been meaning to link to the New Yorker's Philip K. Dick profile for a few days, and so at long last here it is.

But Dick has also become for our time what Edgar Allan Poe was for Gilded Age America: the doomed genius who supplies a style of horrors and frissons. (In both cases, it took the French to see it; the first good critical writing on Dick, as on Poe, came from Europe, and particularly from Paris.) Like Poe’s, Dick’s last big book was a work of cosmic explanation in which lightning bolts of brilliance flash over salty oceans of insanity.

In other sci-fi news, this 1974 Asimov lecture on the future of humanity is pretty excellent reading, as is Karl Schroeder's notion of colonizing the Earth. Here's Asimov:

And the interesting thing is that if we can get through the next thirty years, there's no reason why we can't enter into a kind of plateau which will see the human race last, perhaps, indefinitely...till it evolves into better things...and spread out into space indefinitely. We have the choice here between nothing...and the virtually infinite. And the nice thing about it is that you guys in the audience today, when I say guys I mean it in a general term embracing gals...when you guys in the audience today will still be barely middle-aged when you will know which choice has been made.

See, I've been so shrewd that I fixed it so that I was born in 1920.

[group laughs]

Which means I'll be safely dead.

[group laughs]

Before the crunch comes!

[group laughs]

But you guys will see for yourself. I hope you see a world in which mankind has decided to be sane. But I must say in all honesty that I figure that the chances are against it.

Thank you.