Saturday links.

* Fox News caught stage-managing 9/12 protestors.

* Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, speaking to fellow members of his Conservative Party: "Fifty years from today, Americans will revere the name, 'Obama.' Because like his Canadian predecessors, he chose the tough responsibilities of national leadership over the meaningless nostrums of sterile partisanship that we see too much of in Canada and around the world."

* Also at TPM: new polling data suggests that resistance to health care reform peaked at the emergence of the town hall disruptions, suggesting this strategy may have backfired for the Republicans.

* Also backfiring on the Republicans: everything. More here and here.

* Game of the weekend: MagnetiZR.

* Cynical-C catches Kids in the Hall parodying Glenn Beck over a decade in advance.

* Collapse IV, "Concept Horror," is a free download.

* Between 2010 and 2050 each $7 spent on basic family planning can reduce emissions more than a ton; to achieve that same level of reduction using low-carbon tech would on average cost $32 per ton. Via Donkeylicious.

* Great find: Virginia Woolf's fan letter to Olaf Stapledon. Via Kim Stanley Robinson's New Scientist piece on British SF.

Fifty fantasy & science fiction works that socialists should read. Cool list—if a bit questionable sometimes. (Beloved? Really?) Perhaps not surprisingly, this is all very contiguous with my exam lists. A few notable omissions, off the top of my head: John Brunner's ecopocalyptic The Sheep Look Up (1972), which I've been meaning to blog about for months now; the incomparable Samuel Delany's Triton (1976), likewise; Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975); and, most unforgivably, Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker (1937), which I've blogged about once or twice and which I must insist again is very, very good.

See also: Portable Learner's reading list for time travel and alternate history, in which I must say I am also surprisingly well-read.

That pun is fully intended.

io9's playing with great opening sentences from science fiction. (More at MeFi.) Contrary to the aesthetics of io9's list, it seems to me that the best are those which refuse to immediately announce themselves as science fiction. Here are just a few from favorite s.f. novels that I haven't seen anywhere else (all links go to Amazon):

"We slept in what had once been the gymnasium."
—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

"Mars was empty before we came."
—Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

"On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back."
—Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

"What's it going to be then, eh?"
—Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Though what can match the quiet elegance of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed? "There was a wall."

Unless of course it's Octavia Butler in Dawn: "Alive!"

QUICK UPDATE: I realized too late that I'd omitted a book that should be on any list of this sort, Olaf Staledon's Star Maker:

One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill.

I've put together another experimental post on science fiction theory for culturemonkey, this one playing with Greimas squares, subgenres, and Olaf Stapledon's wonderful novel Star Maker. As with others, it's a bit theoretical and a bit undercooked...

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."

James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis, says we're all screwed. MeFi continues its never-ending discussion about the extent to which the sky is really falling. There's something of Olaf Stapledon's wonderful Star Maker, which I think I should have more to say about soon, in the way this article ends:

"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."

And of course, something of No Future as well:

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

io9 has a post on the twenty science fiction novels that will change your life. I've only read about half of these, and I suspect the less interesting half at that—which makes this a very good and helpful list for me as my dissertation project (expected completion date: 2017) increasingly begins to focus on sci-fi.

Not on the list, but should be: Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, which I'm not very far into but which is amazingly good. I'd also be remiss if I didn't use this opportunity to remind people to read Watchmen.

Also at io9: weak postmodern superheroes and comparative sex-specific body mass index in the Marvel Universe and the real world.