{"id":15397,"date":"2012-06-07T10:08:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-07T14:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2012\/06\/07\/fiction-of-ideas\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:50:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:50:14","slug":"fiction-of-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2012\/06\/07\/fiction-of-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiction of ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time””developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species””have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery.”
<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

-Ray Bradbury in The Paris Review<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I half-agree with Bradbury here. I love that term, “fiction of ideas”. I’d like to think that’s what I write.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

And he’s right about intellectual snobbery — in many cases, that’s all it is. There are, however, lots of SF books that are all about the ideas at the expense of characters who might help us care<\/em> about what’s being discussed.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The other danger is falling in love with technology, which is inherently empty, a cipher that reveals our true commitments. I recently had to write some copy about a book by an entrepreneur who claims that in the future technology will make everything in our society better. What he misses, though, is that we could already<\/em> solve all of the problems he mentions””if we weren’t so damned smitten with money and business instead of people.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time””developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species””have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}