Posted on 05/10/2011 12:11:36 PM PDT by Abin Sur
I'm a big fan of written SF. I can enjoy reading authors whose political views differ from my own so long as their politics don't clumsily interfere with the story. I recalled an essay by Arthur C. Clarke that illustrates just how whacked out his views were. and was able to find it online. I present to you an excerpt from "Scenario for a Civilized Planet", in which he outlines what weaponry would be permitted. Mind you, he thinks this will apply to the entire planet:
http://www.lightmillennium.org/2006_18th/arthur_c_clarke_civilized.html (yeah, it's looney webite...what a shock)
High-tech weapon systems are the crutches of impotent nations; nukes are just the decorative chromium plating. Let us see what crutches we can throw away, to walk proudly into a decent future.
The first criterion for civilized weaponry should be the total avoidance of collateral damage (to use another piece of mealymouthed Pentagonese, like friendly fire). In fact--don't laugh--no device that could kill more than the single person targeted should be permitted. A larger radius of action could be allowed only for instrumentalities that produced temporary disablement e.g., the "gas of peace" in H.G. Wells's Things to Come, acoustic or actinic bombs, water cannons, hypodermic guns, etc. Many more could be found if a fraction of the effort devoted to slaughtering people was spent devising ways of immobilizing them.
To deal with the sort of minor disturbances that may require police action even in the most utopian society, here are the minimum-force items that would be added to the above:
Nonlethal martial-arts devices, like quarterstaffs (Robin Hood had the right idea).
Genetically modified feline, canine, ursine, or simian aides, preferably in the five-hundred-kilogram class, playing the same role as today's guard dogs, but with higher IQs.
Passive defense robots (Robocop plus Asimov's three laws).
The permitted delivery systems for all these would include bicycles, scooters, jeeps, hovercraft, and helicopters.
So much for basic law and order. But for real emergencies, which will occasionally arise even in utopia, single-shot rifles and handguns could be issued, perhaps only under presidential orders...
And that's it.
In fact, his list of supposedly kick-ass activities appears to me to be someone who's trying too hard at concealing his true nerdiness, which, ironically, means he's a dork.
So there.
He’s Buckaroo Banzai!
Yes, realizing that fact makes me a geek as well.
I’ve met him. You haven’t. Dr. Taylor is more like “hyperactive.” Can’t stop doing stuff. EVER. Back when Hank Rheinhart was still alive, it was fun to watch him learn to cut stuff (like helmets and mail shirts) with various sharp implements that Hank brought to Liberty Con.
As for “Geek” what about David Drake? I don’t think a former tanker, history professor and SF Author fits your image of geek.
Arthur C. Clarke is a wonderful SciFi & popular science writer but as is the norm for UK intellectuals he is your typical Fabian socialist(particularly true of the early to mid-20th Century!). I define Fabian socialists as the “This-Time-Socialism-Wil-Be-Different!” crowd.
I’ve loved much of Clarke’s works. It’s sad to see that he understood so little about good and evil and the right to defend yourself whether you are an individual or a nation.
So you wrote a hate filled, sneering, juvenile crude rant about people that you call dorks. Then you sit and count your applause / jeer responses on an internet forum.
Pot - kettle.
Don’t go aggroing on me. Save your Assassination Rogue’s combat points and Sinister Strike for the arena versus a Ret Paladin, okay?
Did someone pee in your Wheaties today?
(5/10/11) Comic Book Artist In Custody On Child Pornography Charges
Did your wife leave you for a geek with a job or something?
Go get your own. I saw this one first.
You win. You’ve out dorked me. I have no idea what you are talking about.
Heinlein's work has actual characters in it; Clarke's has plenty of big ideas...but the his people tend to be cardboard cut-outs.
Clarke never has, and likely never will...
A safe bet. He died 3 years ago.
We could tweak this a little:
1. When a distinguished but elderly science fiction writer states that something is possible, he is almost certainly talking out of his rear end. When he states that something is impossible, it has probably already happened.
2. Venturing too often beyond the limits of the possible to give you an understanding of what actually is possible eventually gets you confused about what is possible and what is impossible and about everything else.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from science fiction (or vice versa, I forget which).
In the Jasper Fforde book 'One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing' (2011) he writes about Clarke's Second Law of Egodynamics: "For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert."
In the first non-Asimov Foundation novel, Foundation's Fear, the emperor declares, "If technology is distinguishable from magic, it is insufficiently advanced". This is a paraphrase of Gehm's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law, "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced".
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
1 Corinthians 13:11
..sci-fi is for nerds and dorks..
as writer Harry Crews (USMC, Ret.) once put it, “She chewed gum and read science fiction because she said it made her think, which meant she was the gravest kind of dumb.”
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
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