Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Search
Margaret Atwood: Very Very Stupid Smart Person
September 24th, 2010
Apparently Margaret Atwood, the author of the Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, doesn’t believe that men walked on the moon. Maybe it’s worse than that — she’s trying to hedge her bets because she’s a “smart” person who knows being skeptical about this is idiotic and doesn’t want to admit to herself that she’s an idiot:
This was from a review a few years ago to a high school student. When asked more recently about this:
Keep in mind that the student who interviewed her does not believe she was joking at all.
So, she doesn’t really believe it was a hoax– except she’s still skeptical. Have some intellectual integrity, you idiot! Jesus Christ. She believes it really happened because so many people couldn’t be trusted not to let the cat out of the bag, except she also believe all the crap that the conspiracy folks are pushing about it. I hope Buzz Aldrin punches her in the face if she ever meets him. She’s the worst kind of stupid smart person.
To make my biases clear, I already thought she was an idiot because she’s one of those people who refuses to acknowledge she writes science fiction even though she writes science fiction. She’s an intellectual snob, and a very very lightweight one at that who has no concept of reality or intellectual consistency. Here, permit me to publicly sneer in her general direction. Whether or not you are a fan of her “literary works” I think it’s safe to say that her opinions about herself, her work, and the world in which she lives are difficult to respect. “Why haven’t they done it again if it was so easy?” She is not a rational, consistent thinker. Grrr.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
petty
That’s from the National Post. Some context may be useful.The Post has some reason to want to paint Atwood in as negative a light as they can.
That said, she apparently missed the whole transistor radio fad of the 1960s.
I don’t know the editorial slants of Canadian newspapers, so thanks. I don’t think harsh criticism (and/or laughter and fingerpointing) at people promoting ridiculous conspiracies is “petty.” Public figures, especially admired ones seen as intellectuals, should be called out when they promulgate bullshit.
She’s wrong about the lack of “microchips” in the 1960s. We had digital integrated circuits back then. They were not very dense, only a few gates per chip, but they were vastly better than the discrete transistor logic used by most commercial mainframe computers at the time. The military ICs morphed into commercial grade components which made the DEC PDP-8 minicomputer a commercial success in the mid ’60s. The flight computers for the Apollo program had capability roughly on par with a mini.
In any case, compute power is something of a red herring in her argument. It’s not cpu power that limits rocket flight.
Well, considering her take on “science fiction” in the last decade or so, I don’t think we should be surprised by this. Not in the slightest.
I can’t believe the snobbery that comes from some sci-fi fans. “She claims she doesn’t write science fiction, she must be an idiot/terrible writer/terrible person.”
Good lord. Grow up.
This snobbery bothers me, too. Especially having seen her speak in person, and be extremely knowledgeable about science fiction and to make the important point that she thinks of Handmaid’s Tale as dystopic fiction because those are the influences on it. It’s also clear she wants her latest SF books to have an impact on a general audience from the standpoint of making people think about global warming, its effects, etc., and getting pegged as “SF” doesn’t really help her with a general audience. That’s not about snobbery.
I thought she was genuine, smart, knowledgeable, and wonderful in person. She talked about how much she loved old Weird Tales and weird comics growing up, talked knowledgeably about all manner of stuff related to genre fiction…
I’m sick of SF tribalism, frankly. So…you know…nice rant, but…
JeffV
well, obviously HAL was huge, but then, it was supposed to be smarter than a human. Our best computers TODAY, who are HUGE, much bigger than HAL, are not as intelligent as HAL.
Thus, HAL is NOT a valid comparassion to the computers from Apollo, which can be best compared to maybe an HP12C calculator?
Maybe someone SHOULD tell her about microchips in the 60s…
Jeff, she could simply say, “Of course I write science fiction” without going out of her way to consistently distance herself from it. That’s snobbery, not marketing, since her books are “Margaret Atwood” books and will never be shelved in the science fiction section of the bookstore. It just sounds stupid for someone who writes something clearly science fiction to go out of their way to say they don’t.
That’s only mildly irritating to me, however. Her comments about the Apollo program I find offensive and do anger me. I’m a NASA-funded scientist and know some astronauts. Thousands of people dedicated their entire lives to the effort. Americans paid real taxes. People died in the effort.
What if she had said, “On the whole, I believe in the Holocaust since there were too many people to have avoided a leak about the truth. Still, there are some things that don’t add up about it…we can never be sure about it.”
Her reasoning is flawed, her suspicions unfounded, and her insinuations offensive to anyone involved in science and technology. She could have said, “Of course men walked on the moon, don’t be stupid.” She didn’t. She was stupid.
And personally, I’ve never seen or met her. I guess she’s probably real, since I’ve seen her books in the bookstore and others have said they’ve met her in person. But it’s strange, you know…there are people out there who invent things just to press my buttons and make me rant. Well, I haven’t heard any leaks that Margaret Atwood is one of their creations, so on the whole, I believe in her.
My enjoyment of Atwood’s novels has as much to do with her views on the moon landing as my enjoyment of the song “California Dreamin'” has to do with the fact that John Phillips was apparently screwing his own daughter. In other words, none.
Paul, I respect and agree with that position. We may be in a minority, however. I did a poll last year and a majority of people responding said they couldn’t separate the work from the person (I think this was in the specific context of Orson Scott Card who holds a lot of offensive positions but writes good books).
When public figures associated with science and science fiction say things that undermine reason and science, it makes me upset and concerned enough to call it out. Lots of irrational and offensive artists out there…I’ll point it out when they do or say something ridiculous, and continue to consume their work if I enjoy it.
well, at least she didnt questioned why the flag was waving if there was no wind, or that no ship can pass through the ultra deadly Van Allen belts, or the fact NASA screwed up by forgetting to put stars in the photos, etc, etc.
hey Mike, how is your portuguese… check this video from a northeast Brazil station, where they interview some clearly illiterate people who live around the Alcantara space-center in Brazil, asking them if they believe men went to the moon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48GdN8fW0k4
well, let me help you:
“how will you enter in a moon, if it is round? It doesnt have a door”
the woman (they say she had never heard about the lunar landings)
“Saint Jorge lives there… with his sword, the dragon… but the man going to the moon? He will never go”
the best one, is the old white haired guy who says
“And why men havent gone to the sun??”
the woman in the end saying why men has not returned to the moon
“there was not as much sin as there is now”
Read the end of the first quoted section again, Rogerio — she did question the flag and the radiation belts. That’s not joking around, that’s repeating things that conspiracy theorists say.
One of the taxi drivers in Porto Alegre is sure that the Apollo landings were hoaxed, so I know this is not a US or Canadian phenomenon. Willful ignorance and idiocy is international.
I’ll check out the video — I still have trouble following movies and TV easily, but can manage with something I can watch more than once.
[…] Margaret Atwood: Very Very Stupid Smart Person […]
oh god… she INDEED asked about the shadows, flag and van allen belt.
sad. very sad. The worse thing about it is that there are like 1 billion places explaining each one of these conspiracy theories.
Bones to pick with you Mike: you said:
“I think this was in the specific context of Orson Scott Card who holds a lot of offensive positions but writes good books”
Should have read “…who holds a lot of offensive positions and therefore it does not matter whether he writes crap or not since no one should endorse or support him…”
Atwood? Idiot Snobante. If she weren’t so hell bent on creating her own “genre”, she’d be appearing in two sections of the bookstore simultaneously. Fortunately, Ursula is still at least one up on her in the “ranking” department (you go girl!)
Jeff – when the mainstream realizes that science fiction/fantasy IS the mainstream, catch-all genre, there will be no need for tribalism.
Seriously tho, the difference between Atwood and, say, Stephen King, is that Atwood seems to go out of her way to diss a potential audience. It’s as if she feels compelled to elevate herself above the genre peasants. Not content to take the stairs, she steps on heads. This is like one E. Coli bacterium feeling superior to others because it divided earlier than the rest. May make that E. Coli feel better about itself, but it is still living in shit along with the rest of the bacterium.
Hey Steve, tell me what you really think! I think you’re holding back! 😉
Like Card or not (I know which), Ender’s Game has become a modern classic for the younger generation.
I do like Ursula LeGuin quite a lot already, and respect her all the more for calling BS on Atwood’s genre squirming.
And instead of equating science fiction to shit, how about saying we’re playing in the stars while she’s the one looking fondly back at the shit hole pretending to still be there?
[…] it sci-fi or not” argument that seems to dog Atwood constantly, I tend to agree with what Jeff VanderMeer says about it. I’ve only read two of Atwood’s books now, and none of her most recent books, but I […]
Atwood and Le Guin are lifelong friends who agree that genre definitions are too restrictive. They have simply decided to handle the very real danger of ghettoization differently. They had a public conversation about this issue a few days ago, and managed to say thought-provoking things without calling each other or anyone else names.
Atwood, like Le Guin, has written across genres (13 novels, 15 poetry collections; literary fiction, science fiction, magic realism) and has won awards in many categories — for example, both the Booker and Clarke prizes. But unlike Orson Scott Card, she has fallen into neither recipe repetitions nor hateful stereotypes and her post-apocalyptic novels tackle real problems.
Perhaps we should resume this conversation when the collective literary output of the commenters in this thread (regardless of genre) reaches, say, the amount and reach of Atwood’s work — we’ll leave the quality aside for the moment.
Athena, why did you comment if you don’t have the literary output and reach of an Atwood? Should we respect your opinion?
You don’t need to be a literary star to know when something that is clearly science fiction is clearly science fiction. Similarly, you don’t need to be a scientist or engineer to know that men went to the moon. Atwood felt she was qualified enough there to voice her suspicions.
But really must the snobbery continue? Only important literary figures can have an educated opinion? That’s the kind of thing that makes some of the commenters here dislike Atwood so much, the implication that she’s doing serious work, and everyone associated with science fiction is not worth being part of any discussion with her (LeGuin apparently excepted).
But forget the snobbery. Atwood is repeating the lunacy of moon landing conspiracy theorists. That’s stupid and offensive and someone should educate her as she hasn’t seemed to have managed to do it herself. You don’t get to say, “On the whole I believe in the moon landings since it’s seems too difficult to have avoided a leak. On the other hand, here’s a long list of things that make me suspicious that it wasn’t real…†That’s the kind of statement that makes me lose respect in a heartbeat. It lacks intellectual integrity. It reflects a lack of self-consistency. It suggests an insufficient amount of intellectual curiosity to resolve the apparent inconsistency. It’s irresponsible. It’s insulting to the triumphs of science of engineering (that “easy†remark she made was full of fail).
The avoidance to the point of silliness of avoiding the label “science fiction†seems unfortunately consistent with her avoidance of the science required to understand why her suspicions are also silly. It smacks of the literary snobbery that has been found in a society that thinks it’s perfectly ok not to be good at math, but horrific not to have read Shakespeare. It’s a weird double standard that should be held out for ridicule. I have no doubt Atwood is a smart person, so I am sure she has the brainpower to take on the issue of the moon landings more seriously if she’s going to insist on espousing such a strange opinion.
Thanks for making people aware of Atwood’s incredible stupidity. The National Post is an editorially conservative/libertarian newspaper, and yes, it was right-wing bloggers who dug up this interview with her dumb comments. But the centrist and leftist media in Canada have completely ignored and evaded her comments and the whole thing has passed now, because her reputation up here overall is strong. The reason the bloggers were after her is that she had been making some partisan noise (and I might add, her views on those issues were just as confused as her understanding of circuit boards), so her supporters simply shot the messenger.
The pathetic thing about conspiracists, like Atwood and the Holocaust Deniers, is that they consider “motive” tantamount to “proof”. The US government had wanted to “beat” the Soviets to the moon, therefore they faked the landing; Jews “want” to extract money, sympathy and support for Israel, therefore they lie about the Holocaust.
And so it is with the revelation that Canada’s leading cultural figure is ignorant. The reason some rightists were po’d with her is that she was trying to suppress a right-wing tv network from forming here. If you want to talk “motive”, the National Post would have supported her, because, as a right-wing paper, they’d be competing with such a network for advertising, talent and viewership. But no, her supporters see this vast conspiracy and evade the whole phenomenon of a widespread ignorance of science, which is far from being limited to Christian fundamentalists.
Notice also in that interview that she seems to be under the impression that there were no other moon landings, real or faked. “Why didn’t we go back?”, she asks.
Not saying that the moon landing never occurred, but as a rational skeptic you should acknowledge the fact that without seeing proof for yourself that has no possibility of being skewed, you can’t rightly say that it ever took place.
Attacking someone for thinking a conspiracy theory is possible is like saying “The Bible is the word of God because I read in the Bible that God wrote it.”
Shannon, I disagree with you strongly here. Rational skepticism isn’t the same as doubt without seeing proof yourself. There’s zero credible evidence for a moon landing conspiracy, and a gazillion pieces of evidence that it happened.
Are you also skeptical about the holocaust, essentially everything in the history books, evolution, the round Earth, etc?
I’m attacking Atwood because she thought about it and wasn’t smart enough to realize that her doubts were ridiculous, then shared them in a public forum as an intellectual authority.
There are things to be skeptical about. This isn’t one of them.
Shannon, almost all of the scientific knowledge of the last two hundred years is based on things that are not directly observable – and yes, that includes evolution and the Big Bang.
Anything is “possible”, and the onus of proof is on you to demonstrate the degree of “possibility”. Sure, you can say a particular event was possibly a conspiracy, but why are conspiracists always asserting things related to the US government? Why can’t the launching of Sputnik or Salyut I be a Soviet fiction? Why can’t the Rosa Parks incident be a publicity stunt engineered by the Klan to intensify racial conflict?
I’m no defender of the US government per se, my point is that the motivation of Atwood & Co. has nothing to do with a genuine interest in scientific achievement but in political causes.