Interesting Links for 12-08-2025

[andrewducker]

1. Oh god, Edinburgh Council has a section on Freeman on the Land and Sovereign Citizens conspiracy nonsense

(tags:law Scotland Edinburgh conspiracy )

2. Apparently AOL are still running a dial-up service! For another month, anyway.

(tags:aol internet EpicWTF )

3. Why you shouldn't recommend Classic science fiction to kids

(tags:children recommendation scifi )

Comments

[simont]

#3:

I think one factor that warps people's thinking in this area is the desire to give credit to the person who had an idea first. SF has a strong emphasis on shiny cool ideas, but there is more SF written than there are ideas, so a lot of newer SF reuses ideas that older SF had already had. And I think it's easy to think "well, in that case, the original must be superior to the derivative clones". But in fact it's commonly the case that the first person to write about an idea was not the person who wrote about it best!

Even without the extra factor of "cultural mores changed over decades and what was once excitingly progressive is now Problematic™", from a pure writing-quality perspective, it sometimes just takes two people to write well about a cool idea – one to have the idea, and one to write well.

[andrewducker]

True.

Also, people think back to books they enjoyed back in their youth and think that people now will respond in the same way, even though kids nowadays have very different contexts.

[channelpenguin]

I definitely should not be recommending anyone SF books. Other than the first few pages of the first Murderbot book, I don't think I've read anything new for a decade or more. Sigh.

I don't want disaster or dystopia, so it seemed to make it hard and I gave up. I guess never going into bookshops any more doesn't help.

Plus I've lost the ability to link any of it to plausible tech as we find out more and see how real tech is going. I see SF now as just fantasy with different trappings.

[simont]

#1: I'm reasonably impressed that they managed to write all of that without using any word like "nonsense" or "idiot"!

[andrewducker]

I am always impressed to see firm, reasonable responses to utter nonsense, while appalled that people have to waste their time on such things!

[simont]

I think at this stage I'd rather see a city council writing a reasonable response to Freeman-on-the-Land woo than having to write a reasonable response to "I got my LLM to try to confuse the council tax office to death" blither. At least there's a limited amount of the former.

[andrewducker]

I haven't encountered the latter. I should probably consider myself lucky!

[simont]

An unholy alliance of both, which I ran across late last year. A law-student friend checked up on it a bit, and just as you might expect, the LLM-generated references to clauses and sections and acts are fictional, consisting of nothing more than plausible numbers. Any section references that actually exist at all don't match what the LLM text says they say, even in general subject matter, let alone content.

[andrewducker]

Bloody hell! And they're still pushing it. I suspect they will get what they deserve!

[calimac]

I don't think I've ever written out my own response to the fall of the sf canon, so I should do so soon. This has actually been going on for decades. When I was learning the field in the 1970s (I'm a decade older than Scalzi), we had already dumped the once-canonical works of the '30s like Doc Smith. Not surprising this should creep on further. And it probably wasn't coincidental that, just before we came along, Doc Smith had died. So after Asimov and Heinlein died, it was their turn.

[andrewducker]

I would be interested to read that!

[calimac]

Turns out I did write it.

#1

[emperor]

...my stupid joke about this from the other day - https://wikis.world/@demoographics/115009419041525853

Re: #1

[andrewducker]

Reposted!

Re: #1

[rmc28]

Excellent :-)

[conuly]

3. Why you shouldn't recommend Classic science fiction to kids

You have the same problem when you ask for children's books recommendations - inevitably, you get a lot of stuff that a. everybody has already heard of because b. their grandmothers read it to them in a fit of nostalgia.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. Enid Blyton for all! Even the terrible bits!

[jducoeur]

My personal version of #3 is mostly focused on comics: anyone who thinks the comics of the 20th century still hold up as the best really isn't keeping up.

Out of my monumentally-enormous collection of comics, spanning the past 50 years more or less evenly, I have one bookshelf of the absolute best stuff ever written IMO. Most of that has been in the past 25 years, and a substantial chunk -- including almost everything I generally recommend to under-25s -- has been in the past ten.

(Really, IMO the only bit of the Golden Age that still mostly stands up is The Spirit, and even that, while brilliantly written in many cases, is pretty problematic.)

[andrewducker]

I would be really interested in hearing your recommendations from the last decade!

[jducoeur]

Keep in mind that this is all extremely subjective (but comes from a pretty well-informed viewpoint).

The items on The Shelf that finished in the past decade (although some started before then) there are:

• Strong Female Protagonist -- a look at what happens when superheroes decide to try to actually make the world better, not just punch bad guys (unfinished, but the first two books are excellent, and maybe they'll eventually complete it)
• Shubeik Lubeik -- a distinctly Egyptian graphic novel about a world that is just like our own but has genies as an exploited economic resource
• The Wicked and the Divine -- the epic masterpiece by Kieron Gillen (my pick for best comic book writer, period) and Jamie McKelvie, ostensibly about perfomers-as-gods but really about the power of story and myth
• It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth -- the astonishingly brilliant vignette-memoir of covid-times by Zoe Thorogood -- as well as her breakout book The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott, which put Avery Hill Publishers on my radar
• 100 Demon Dialogues -- Lucy Bellwood's panel-a-day book of introspection, the closest I've ever seen to a self-help book that qualifies as "literature"
• Harleen -- just about the only thing I've bought from DC in modern times, this is Stjepan Sejic's harrowing version of the origin story of Harley Quinn
• and last but by no means least, Blue Delliquanti's O Human Star -- an intensely queer-inflected, powerfully humanist bit of science fiction, looking at a not-too-distant future where the line between human and machine gets blurry and identity becomes more self-defined (this is probably the single piece of science fiction I am most likely to recommend to someone under 25)

Honorary mention goes to the GN adaptations of Snow, Glass, Apples and Chivalry -- while the original short stories are much older, and I'm not recommending Gaiman so much nowadays, Colleen Doran's adaptations are true works of art: these are the only books I recommend specifically for their art, rather than primarily for their writing.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely loved the first 2 books of SFP. Would be delighted if book 3 ever happens.

Wicked + Divine is great.

I shall add the rest of those to my wishlist!