Time to play... The Lottery

Will this be Old Man Warner's "lucky year"?  He's no doubt praying that it isn't.

A 1969 film adaptation of Shirley Jackson's horrifying classic short story "The Lottery".

I first read "The Lottery" during my freshman year of college.  Our English instructor Phil Conte promised that this story would scare us as few things in literature could.  What was Jackson trying to convey with her tale?  The older I get the more I believe that "The Lottery" is a dark parable about rigid conformity and obedience to mob mentality.  Something that must be sacrificed to if it's to have any power.  In my mind the people of the town are no different from those among us who place party over all else, even if their loved ones must suffer for that.

Or, well... who knows what Jackson meant?  Almost eighty years later and here we are still debating it.

Anyhoo, enjoy the above adaptation.

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It's June 27th! Time to play... THE LOTTERY

The classic 1969 short film adaptation of Shirley Jackson's eternally controversial horror tale:

For a film now over fifty years old it holds up exceptionally well.  I think every college freshman English class in America shows this to its students.  Sharp-eyed viewers will spot a very young Ed Begley Jr. in this.

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn has passed away

The sad news is going out at this hour that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel-winning novelist who spent decades in exile from his homeland in the Soviet Union after describing the evils of its prison system, has died at the age of 89.

Solzhenitsyn served as an officer in the Red Army during World War II (and I don't care what some people might say about it, but the Russian men and women who defended their homeland against the Nazis were among the bravest and most noble of the past century, and I've nothing but the utmost admiration for them, regardless of how nuts Stalin was). After the war, Solzhenitsyn became one of his country's most prominent dissidents, and was quickly relegated to Siberia.

It was his experiences as a prisoner of his own government that Solzhenitsyn would draw from later on, when he wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and then The Gulag Archipelago. While the western world came to admire and love him, the Soviet leadership cast him out. He spent twenty years living abroad before being hailed as a hero when he returned to a now-free Russia in 1994.

You know, we don't have very many writers like that anymore. The kind whose works can get people thinking and rile them up enough to overturn entire corrupt nations. I sure don't know of any of Solzhenitsyn's stature among us today. There's a huge void, a need, for writers like that and with Solzhenitsyn's passing, the need became that much greater.

Don't know what else to say, except...

Бог благословляет, храбрейший ратник. Мы пропустим вас.

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"My God, it's full of stars!"

Arthur C. Clarke, the last of the original masters of science-fiction, has passed away at the age of 90 in Sri Lanka.

Even if he had never written books like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama (along with everything else in his prolific career) he would have gone down in history as the man who came up with the concept of the communications satellite. That billions around the world enjoy such conveniences as global television broadcasts, Internet service in remote locations and satellite radio in their cars is plenty enough testimony to Clarke's vision and brilliance.

Clarke was also one of the first enthusiastic adopters of e-mail. He used it almost every day to communicate with director Peter Hyams during the production of 2010: The Year We Make Contact. As far back as 1983, Clarke believed that this was revolutionary technology that would change the world. He was right.

It is his science-fiction work that he will be most remembered for, though. And that Clarke - along with his fellow masters Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein - would spark the imaginations of so many people with his writings... that is going to be the eternal legacy of this man, standing as tall and resolute as the monolith.

But tonight I am more than a little saddened, because one of the best dreamers of our era has left us.

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Ruminations on the postcyberpunk era

Lawrence Person has published "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto" on Slashdot. I used to be a bigtime reader of cyberpunk science-fiction in the early Nineties (William Gibson's Neuromancer was my intro to "hard" sci-fi, though I later thought Heinlein was much harder :-) and Person's treatise is an intriguing look at how that genre has now given birth to what is being called "postcyberpunk". Deep, heady stuff to be sure. Probably not something that most people will find exciting, but I thought it was a pretty good read.

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