May 2012
1 post
What do spoilers spoil?
In his New York Times blog Stanley Fish argues that being spoiled cannot ruin a good piece of entertainment, only a poorly constructed one. Having spoiled the end of the Hunger Games books for his readers, he tries to argue that doing so would not ruin the “suspense” of the story.
The suggestion is that there is a trade-off in the pleasures available to first-time readers or...
March 2012
3 posts
2 tags
How Do You Respond to Racism in Older Scifi?
The other day on io9, Charlie Jane Anders asked a very good question: what do you do when you encounter racism in old science fiction books?1 Do you grit your teeth and just move, knowing the writer lived in a different time and such things were culturally acceptable? Or, do you toss the book aside and read more modern, racism-free literature?
The majority of commenters, and most people I...
2 tags
Slavery and the Fate of the Jedi
In the last post, I looked at a fundamental question the Fate of the Jedi series began with but quickly abandoned in favor of the status quo.1 Reading only that post would give the impression that I dislike the series, or at least that I find nothing of value in it, but actually there are a number of very good things about Fate of the Jedi.
One of those very good things is the abolition movement...
2 tags
The Big Question in Fate of the Jedi
This week the final book in the latest Star Wars series, Fate of the Jedi: Apocalypse, hits store shelves, which should make a few thousand people happy.1 I haven’t had time to read, but I’m sure I’ll put a review once I’ve finished listening to the audiobook.
The Fate of the Jedi series has been fairly disappointing for a lot of reasons. The characters are uninteresting,...
February 2012
1 post
Book Review: Robopocalypse
Following in the footsteps of World War Z, Robopocalypse is a “found footage” novel1, a work of fiction that reads more like non-fiction. It is the literary equivalent of Cloverfield, Chronicle, or Paranormal Activity.
The story follows humanity’s struggle to fight a war against robots that have risen up against their creators. For the most part, the main characters are the...
April 2011
1 post
2 tags
On Violence and Children's Stories
A wonderful post by Ben Myers on the role of violence in children’s stories. The key quote:
There are people – mostly people with PhDs who have never met a real child – who say the old fairytales and adventures are too violent. For my part, I tend to avoid contemporary children’s writing because it is, for the most part, not violent enough. Only an expert could think that what children...
March 2011
2 posts
3 tags
On the Limits of Prescience
Like many American boys my age, my first job was as a paperboy. For those who don’t know what that is, there used to be these things called newspapers that gave you all of yesterday’s news, and companies would hire local boys to hand deliver them to people’s houses. You could also buy a newspaper at a store, or through a machine that operated on the honor system, but many people,...
What is Starship Merlin?
Short answer: it’s Mike Frizzell’s personal blog. I am a nobody you’ve never heard of.
Slightly longer answer: In trying to come up with a name for this blog I wanted to combine two of my loves: science and fantasy. More specifically, the intersection of the magical and scientific with the imagination. Nowhere are we as humans more creative than when we imagine what can exist,...