Frank Hecker

I had uninterrupted time this afternoon to sit down and watch the BD of the 2020 film Last and First Men. If you like

• the science fiction of Olaf Stapledon
• the music of Jóhann Jóhannsson
• the voice of Tilda Swinton
• brutalist architecture
• stately black-and-white cinematography on 16mm film stock

then I think you'll agree with me that this film is pretty fucking great.

Joanne McNeil writes about the way that respectability flattens out was is interesting about science fiction. Also some book recs.

(honesty compels me to mention that i snipped off the start of the headline quote which is "Something I don’t necessarily believe but I think I could argue convincingly is that". but in my defence i ran out of characters.)

In the linked post Joanne McNeil comments about science fiction that “the prestige and mainstream acceptance arrived over the course of the past two decades ... but at a cost, these new readers tend to straightjacket what’s interesting about the genre.” One symptom of that mainstream acceptance and respectability is the increasing number of science fiction authors whose work has been published in new editions by the Library of America, an organization self-described as “publishing America’s greatest writing.”

If you ever go to a book signing I highly recommend asking the author a question not related to their books like “what’s your favorite cake?”

If I remember correctly William Gibson’s answer after a significant amount of thought was coffee cake

At the same reading he talked about his influences and introduced me to Alfred Bester my favorite 1950s Count of Monte Cristo fanfic author and Green Lantern oath creator.

The Stars My Destination/Tiger! Tiger! is really good, I also highly recommend The Demolished Man.

The Stars My Destination/Tiger! Tiger! is a revenge story in a world transformed by teleportation becoming an everyday thing.

The Demolished Man is about a tycoon doing a murder in a society with telepaths

I absolutely recommend both these books. True SF classics.

Who I am (in case it factors into your decision): old straight white cisgender man, married with one daughter, former math and physics major, living in Maryland, USA, and working as a “pre-sales engineer.”

What I write: original essays on quasi-random stuff like

• “Life in Patreonia,” “I fought the power law and the power law won,” and other thoughts on the “creator economy.”
• manga magic is fake but entertaining, “real magic is hard and also unsatisfying”
• “Democracy with Taiwanese characteristics” and “the geopolitical uses of lesbian romcoms”
• “Harvard considered as a long-lived biological organism”
• how Yasujiro Ozu's 1951 film Early Summer seems pretty darned queer to me
• whether an anime sheds light on the best economic system for creating Japanese dictionaries
• billionaires and universities or “The Koch brothers don't care about Byzantine history”
• Alice Evans and her theories about “the great gender divergence” and “10,000 years of patriarchy”
• “Our lives are built upon the bones of millions” and "the half-life of injustice"
• excerpts from good poetry by (mostly) dead poets
• any other thoughts on the yuri genre I might have after writing a book discussing one of its more well-known works
• and more ...

More on my interests below, in case you want to compare mine to yours ...