Late Sunday links.

* Rachel Maddow kicks ass on another visit to Meet the Press. They should just give Rachel Meet the Press; I hope eventually they do. It's the only version of the show I could imagine actually watching.

* The networks are apparently afraid of SF; Day One has apparently been downgraded to a miniseries and the V remake is rumored to be forbidden to use the world "alien."

* Octavia Butler's papers will go to the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, joining Christopher Isherwood's, Charles Bukowski's, and Jack London's.

* Playgrounds of the 1970s. A version of the Officer Big Mac at right was active in Ledgewood, NJ, well into the 2000s. (Is it still there?)

* Judith Butler: Save California's universities. My only quibble is that she appears to be writing in the wrong country's newspaper.

* More Nate Silver: That the conservative intelligentsia reacted giddily to news of the Americans losing is telling. It's telling of a movement that was long ago knocked off its intellectual moorings and has lost the capacity to think about what people outside the room think about. Flagged by Bitter Laughter. More thoughts along the same lines from Cogitamus and Contrary Brin.

* My happiest time was after Mao came into power. Our social status improved. People were allowed to express their views. Before, people had no right to speak out. After the founding of new China, the first parade, I was on the front row during the first parade. Foreign journalists from America and the Soviet Union took lots pictures of me. I was carrying a flower basket, walking down Huaihai road, it was very festive, and there was much excitement. I went out during the parade every year for many years, rain or shine. Why the Chinese support the Communist party.

Devil Girl from Mars, the film that "inspired" Octavia Butler to write science fiction. Via SF Signal. Butler:

I'm going to talk a little bit about the effects of the media on me and on my work. It's impossible to begin to talk about myself and the media without going back to how I wound up writing science fiction and that is by watching a terrible movie. (Laughter) The movie was called, "Devil Girl from Mars," and I saw it when I was about l2 years old, and it changed my life. (Laughter) It was one of those old 1950s movies in which the beautiful Martian woman arrives on earth to announce that all the Martian men have died off and there are a bunch of man-hungry women up there. And the earth-men don't want to go. As I was watching this film, I had a series of revelations. The first was that "Geez, I can write a better story than that." And then I thought, "Gee, anybody can write a better story than that."

There's some good stuff about the Parable series in the "inspired" link, if you're a Butler fan.

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.

Gwyneth Jones lists her top 10 science fiction stories by women writers in the Guardian. Via io9, where subtractions and omissions are quickly discussed, including the remarkable absence of anything by Octavia Butler.

SETI.com has your ten must-read first-contact novels. Cynical-C and SF Signal have already decried the absence of Contact, so I will decry the absence of Dawn from Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy.

See also: Classic sci-fi film of the 1960s.