Certainly sincere, but probably not flattery.

We're perched in a booth at the Frog and Firkin on Friday night, and the topic of music snobs has come up.

(Say hello, Chris. "Hi."  It's not a guest posting, but we take what we can get.)

Anyway, we were discussing music snobs - Alan, Laurie, you know who we mean - and it led me to wonder what exactly the term "snob" means in this context.

According to my Concise Oxford, there are a number of meanings, but the part that jumps out at me is "...judge of merit by externals".  In other words, a snob is someone who passes judgement based on the cover, rather than the book.  If you asked me, I would say that I'm not often guilty of snobbery in this sense, but there is one area where a mea culpa on my part is necessary: the literary pastiche.

If you've never run into the term before, "pastiche" is French for "imitation", and generally refers to a tribute to an artist that deliberately uses their themes or motifs.  However, I use it to describe the odd phenomenon that plagues the science fiction and fantasy communities, the "continuation" of a dead author's work by another writer.

Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide series as continued by Eoin Colfer; Isaac Asimov's Foundation series as continued by David Brin, Gregory Benford and Greg Bear; John Gregory Betancourt's prequels to Roger Zelazny's Amber series; the Dune prequels/interquels by Frank Herbert's son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson; the myriad of authors who have written Conan books - I could continue the list but I think you get the idea.

Now, I'm not completely guilty of uninformed pre-judgement. I did read House Atreides, the first Dune prequel by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, when it first came out in 1999, although I will admit that I read it with a strong degree of skepticism.  Whether that resulted in a self-fulfilling prophecy or not, I found the style and plot to be...let's say "inadequate", that seems polite.  Not necessarily bad, not horribly written or badly structured, just not up to the standard set by Frank Herbert in the original books.

And that's really my problem with the entire phenomenon.  It's not that any of the authors who indulge in this bizarre activity are bad writers - in fact, many of them have well-developed and successful careers in their own rights.  The issue is that they're not the same writers.  No matter how good an imitation is, it's still an imitation, and as such it can never match the original.  In a way, you could think of these books as literary zombies, still lurching along in spite of the fact that life has long since departed.

It would forgive the whole process a little bit if I thought that it was motivated by any sort of desire to keep the original author's creative flame burning for a little longer.  Sadly, I'm fairly certain that the sole motivation is profit:  the desire to beat a few more miles - and dollars - out of a literary horse.  As such, I find the idea offensive, and that's resulted in a blanket refusal to support it by purchasing any of the books in question, regardless of how good they might or might not actually be.

In other words, I'm a snob.

- Sid

Canny, explicable, and believable - is that so much to ask?

 

My previous post featured a picture of a sign in front of a local coffee shop, blaming extraterrestrial influences for their lack of drip coffee.  Now, before we go any further, I feel that I should clear up something about my opinion regarding the possibilities of alien intervention and its effects on coffee.

I don't believe a word of it.  Not a word.

Yes, when it comes to the entire category of what we will perhaps unfairly call "pseudo science", I'm a complete skeptic.  Sadly, in spite of a lifetime of science fiction and fantasy intake, some solid internal layer of disbelief has remained impenetrable, and as a result I don't believe in UFOs, ghosts, Chupacabra, crop circles, or any of the other X-Files entries that continue to resist rude and unseemly demands for documentation and evidence.

Truth to tell, that's my problem with all of it, the lack of hard evidence.  If once, just once, something would happen that left clear and irrefutable proof, that's all I ask. I don't want to hear about mysterious events that have no rational explanation - screw that, I want mysterious events with a clear and obvious explanation: alien visitors, psychic ability, pyramid power, whatever, doesn't matter, provided that there's proof.  In the real world, all we seem to have is this massive archive of blurry, out of focus, grainy and otherwise deficient images of fringe phenomena such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and large headed Greys from Arcturus, an archive that no one really takes seriously. It may well be that the truth is out there, but that's a sword that cuts in both directions: maybe the truth is that it's all false.

One of the great changes to the paradigm for the new Doctor Who episodes is that Earth-based plot lines don't just deal with three people in an isolated castle, but rather take place on a global scale and are witnessed by all of humanity.  A spaceship like an inverted mountain hovers over London and makes countless people stand on ledges and prepare to jump, they evacuate the city at Christmas due to several years of alien incidents, everyone on the planet looks like the Master for a few days, Earth gets shifted to another location, and everyone knows*, it's part of history. Now that's what I'm talking about!

Now, this is not to say that I don't think that there's life on other planets, I doubt very much that in the infinity of space we're the only planet that's managed to produce what we will charitably call intelligent life.  I just think that if extraterrestrials managed to cross the great gulf of interstellar space, they wouldn't waste their time with the sort of silliness that's been attributed to them.  In fact, if there are any aliens reading this (sit down, Laurie…) hey, it's time. Enough with the crop circles and anal probes, drop a shuttle craft down in front of the White House and send someone in to talk to Obama, okay? Seize the moment - after all, the next guy could be another George W. Bush.

- Sid

* Except Donna Noble.

Well now they've gone too far.

Damn aliens - I don't even drink coffee, and I think this is over the line.

- Sid