{"id":11847,"date":"2009-02-03T01:46:31","date_gmt":"2009-02-03T09:46:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2009\/02\/03\/11847.html"},"modified":"2009-02-03T01:46:31","modified_gmt":"2009-02-03T09:46:31","slug":"give-me-that-old-science-ficti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2009\/02\/03\/give-me-that-old-science-ficti\/","title":{"rendered":"Give me that old science fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I've been reading (well, mostly skimming) the stories in <cite>The Best of Lester del&nbsp;Rey<\/cite>, and just found this line:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\"War was a dangerous form of political insanity, outlawed at the conference of 1998.\"<\/p>\n<p>--from \"Vengeance Is Mine,\" 1964<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;Added later, after finishing reading the story: It turns out that this was actually a quite deliberate choice on the author's part, and not at all the old-school-skiffy techno-rationalist optimism that I had thought it was; the character who says it is a robot from whom most of human history has been concealed. The story turns out to be a whole lot darker than it initially looked, and it started out pretty dark. Interesting story.<\/p>\n<p>I was mildly amused at the meta-joke a little later in the story, as the robot reads through a large library of books and starts to understand (and misunderstand) the concept of fiction: \"In the end, he evolved a simple classification. If a book made him think hard and forced him to strain to follow it, it was fact; if it made him read faster and think less as he went through it, it was fiction.\"<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been reading (well, mostly skimming) the stories in The Best of Lester del&nbsp;Rey, and just found this line: &#8220;War&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-stories","category-speculative-fiction"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}