Over on Astrogator's Logs, Athena Andreadis is introducing a new blog called Science in My Fiction by Kay Holt and Bart Leib, the founders/editors of Crossed Genres.
Kay Holt writes:
The purpose of the Science in My Fiction blog is to get science fiction and fantasy writers and fans thinking ahead of science again. Playful bloggers will take a look at recent scientific developments and extrapolate potential futures from them.
This is a fight for survival of the fiction. It’s time to seize culture and do science to it!
Looks promising.
While she's at it, Walhydra figures she might as well plug Crossed Genres: The magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy with a Twist, to which Athena's post has just introduced her. As their About page says:
Crossed Genres is a monthly Science Fiction/Fantasy magazine. It was founded in September 2008; Issue #1 was released on December 1, 2008.
Crossed Genres works a bit differently than most magazines. Every month, a new genre is chosen as the Current Genre; for that month, all Fiction and Cover Art submissions must combine that genre with some aspect of Science Fiction or Fantasy.
Another toy to play with!
When she was hunting for reviews of Avatar 3-D recently, Walhydra stumbled across Athena Andreadis' deeply thoughtful critical review, "Jar Jar Binks Meets Pocahontas," which was reprinted by the Huffington Post.
Athena originally posted the review on her Astrogator's Logs blog, which is part of a beautiful website called Starship Reckless.
Walhydra will let Athena describe it herself:
Ádh'ri Eránis, also known as the starship Reckless, is dedicated to writing and discussing science, science fiction, fantasy and the shared borders between them. Its founder is Athena Andreadis, author of The Biology of Star Trek, who also writes fiction.
Take a look.
BTW, even though she completely agrees with Athena's critique of Avatar, Walhydra and Hubby Jim loved the movie very much as fantasy.
Walhydra's favorite sequence was the trek into the Hallelujah Mountains for Jack Sully to catch and bond with his Banshee. It brought tears to her eyes.
Walhydra's disappointment with Avatar arose because all that beautiful envisioning of a new, sentient planet was backdrop to the same old testosterone-poisoned teen-boy-marketing violence.
[Here's a discussion on facebook, with very graceful rebuttals and messages of hope from Walhydra's cyberfriend Marsha.]
On Cameron's behalf, though, Walhydra also wants to point the gentle reader to this piece in The Australian.
[The film] contains heavy implicit criticism of America's conduct in the War on Terror....
Cameron said...[that] theme was not the main point of Avatar, but added that Americans had a "moral responsibility" to understand the impact that their country's recent military campaigns had had.
"We went down a path that cost several hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. I don't think the American people even know why it was done. So it's all about opening your eyes...."
Referring to the "shock and awe" sequence, he said: "We know what it feels like to launch the missiles. We don't know what it feels like for them to land on our home soil, not in America. I think there's a moral responsibility to understand that.
"That's not what the movie's about - that's only a minor part of it. For me it feels consistent only in a very generalised theme of us looking at ourselves as human beings in a technical society with all its skills, part of which is the ability to do mechanised warfare, part of which is the ability to do warfare at a distance, at a remove, which seems to make it morally easier to deal with, but its not."
Walhydra is willing to hope that the beauty of this movie will underscore Cameron's intended critique of violence...and not be outweighed by the typical moviegoer's visceral and unquestioning fascination with violence.
Ah, well....
