{"id":1535,"date":"2003-10-31T10:13:10","date_gmt":"2003-10-31T15:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2003\/10\/31\/1535.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:43:29","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:43:29","slug":"musings-and-a-coincidence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/10\/31\/musings-and-a-coincidence\/","title":{"rendered":"Musings, and a coincidence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>As it happens, yesterday Your Humble Blogger was browsing through <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pandemoniumbooks.com\/index.html\">Pandemonium Books &amp; Games<\/a>, looking for a little light reading (it's not all Spinoza here, you know), and it occurred to me that there was very little old-fashioned science-fiction. The store appeared to be three-quarters swords-and-sorcery books, with the remaining stuff split between <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scifan.com\/writers\/tt\/TepperSheri.asp\">Sherri S. Tepper<\/a>\/<a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidbrin.com\/\">David Brin<\/a>\/<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sff.net\/people\/Jim.Morrow\/\">James Morrow<\/a> sort of fairly-literary examinations of cultural questions, leftover unsellable 70s used paperbacks with once-naughty free-sex subplots, paperback media tie-ins, and a handful of space-opera Bujold wannabes.\n\n<p>I exaggerate.\n\n<p>Anyway, it led me to think that one of the frequent storylines in the science fiction I read as a callow youth (and it was pretty callow science-fiction, looking back on it) was A Scientist Invents\/Discovers a Thing, which has Repercussions. I haven't read one of those in years. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of 'em published all the time, short stories and novels, and I'm sure my Gentle Readers can (and I hope will) tell me who is currently putting out that stuff. I'm just saying, yesterday I was scanning the shelves, and I didn't see a lot of Scientists Inventing Things.\n\n<p>Shortly after leaving the store, I was trying to think of the name of the hard-science guy. The one that I use as the epitome of hard-science; the one that (tho' I'm not a huge fan) I was in the mood to read yesterday. The closest I could come to the name was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/c\/chaseha01.shtml\">Hal Chase<\/a>, which I knew wasn't right.\n\n<p>Anyway, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/globe\/obituaries\/articles\/2003\/10\/31\/hal_clement_81_craftsman_of_sci_fi_novels\/\">Hal Clement is dead<\/a>. \n\n<p>Redintegro Iraq,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As it happens, yesterday Your Humble Blogger was browsing through Pandemonium Books &amp; Games, looking for a little light reading (it&#8217;s not all Spinoza here, you know), and it occurred to me that there was very little old-fashioned science-fiction. The&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1535"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16857,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535\/revisions\/16857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}