INTERACTION

Not sure if it's the one you're thinking of, but there's a Ballard short (the name of which escapes me) which runs something like that. Another sf trope becoming real, what with that Russian research experiment where they have a bunch of people sealed in a mock probe on the ground to simulate the effects of interplanetary missions ...

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"I have a fatal compulsion to find a kind of higher sense in things that make no sense at all."

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

VelcroCityTouristBoard

Surely that's a double negative, and therefore a positive. 'Normal SF', being perfidious perfidity, is therefore 'truthful', so Perfidious SF would be a perfidity of that perfidious perfidity and would therefore be actually perfidious, where as normal SF would simply appear to be perfidious.

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The future's going to be just like the present, but with more LEDs.

Me blog: http://dylan-fox.blogspot.com/
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The Ballard story was "Thirteen to Centaurus" I believe, but I think the film Des has in mind is "Capricorn One".

Thanks, Pete and Paul.

But where does Mundane SF come into all this?
I have a gut feeling it is a side-branch of Perfidious SF.

Foxie, shall we define Perfidious SF as "SF that paradoxically both belies and embraces SF by force of thematic double negatives."?

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MY WEBSITE: www.nemonymous.com

I think we should. That way, only you and I would really know what it meant, and so give ourselves a natural advantage. Then we can find really random stuff that makes no sense at all, stroke our chins and sagely mutter that it's Perfidious SF. Everyone else will be forced to agree with us, lest they be behind on current critical trends. In a decade or so, someone will work out rules for it and we can claim credit.

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The future's going to be just like the present, but with more LEDs.

Me blog: http://dylan-fox.blogspot.com/
And if that's not enough, I'm on Twitter, too: Foxie299

Indeed, Foxie. LOL!

But there is a serious strand here, I feel, that nobody has yet nailed. Perhaps later.

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MY WEBSITE: www.nemonymous.com

I propose Invidious SF - the movement to endlessly subdivide SF into sub-genres, starting with SplitF where all infinitives must die!

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http://www.icarusquay.org

I'm the last person to create genres. I think all fiction is just that - fiction.
Howvever, brainstorming divisions in SF is enlightening I feel - dividing not into sub-genres as such, but into descriptive areas like Mundane SF or Religious SF or Steampunk or Space Opera or Alternate World etc.

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MY WEBSITE: www.nemonymous.com

As a member of The Genre Critical Establishment (albeit an exceptionally junior and largely non-radical one), I should warn you that we have eyes everywhere.

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"I have a fatal compulsion to find a kind of higher sense in things that make no sense at all."

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

VelcroCityTouristBoard

"I have a fatal compulsion to find a kind of higher sense in things that make no sense at all."
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

I can really relate to that quote, Paul!

All this talk of perfidiousness reminds me of my favourite instrumental of the 60s: PERFIDIA by The Ventures.
http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/window/ ... LO,00.html

Time to get this thread on course again
Guidelines for 'Cone Zero':
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/cone_z ... elines.htm

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MY WEBSITE: www.nemonymous.com

BTW, the image somewhere above on this thread and also shown on the guidelines page is taken from this book:



which is ONLY CONNECT by DF Lewis and Gordon Lewis ( 1998 ) , a book publishing some of my collaborative stories with my father Gordon Lewis (1922-2007).

It is a very small black & white snapshot of the Abbey Ruins in Glastonbury which I took during a family holiday in the Seventies. My (then little) daughter is actually standing in the middle but you can't see her as the whole thing was artistically skewed by Andy Cox (TTA Press) who printed the book for me and designed the book cover using the snapshot in this way, to my delighted agreement.
I cannot now find the original snapshot although I know it is around here somewhere.

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MY WEBSITE: www.nemonymous.com

I still can't find the actual snapshot, but here is another photo of the same image:



=========

Other story collabs with my father are on-line and linkable from the top of this page:
http://newdfl.bloghorn.com/157

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MY WEBSITE: www.nemonymous.com

As the unintended coiner of the term 'perfidious SF' I'd like to say that I certainly didn't mean to launch yet another subgenre (let alone work out yet another manifesto). What I meant was that the title 'Cone Zero' left Nemonymous, which normally is a bastion of horror and slipstream, open to an invasion of SF: SF being treacherous and deceitful towards nemo's sensibility.

So, SF as perfidious to other other genres.

If one wants to see 'perfidious SF' as SF that is perfidious to SF itself: well, I think that depends very much on one's idea of SF, and in that manner there already have been several kinds of 'perfidious SF'.

When Mike Moorcock launched New World, the adherents of the old 'Golden Age' type of SF certainly thought that the 'New Wave', with its focus on the inner world, and its call for strong characterisation and more literary writing highly perfidious.

Later on, when the cyberpunks moved SF's focus to the (already rapidly growing) world of computers and internet, with a dark, noirish slant, this was considered highly perfidious to the apostles of a more humanist SF agenda.

(And fans of high fantasy might consider the new weird as highly perfidious to 'traditional' fantasy.)

And in the last couple of years the mundanistas (disciples of mundane SF) are consider highly perfidious to the fans of escapist, fun SF. Or, to paraphrase a certain fan:



To which a mundanista would reply: "No, please keep those giant floating alien brains there, and while you're at it, hold on to those other old and tired tropes, as well."

Perfidy abound!

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In the Plane of the Ecliptic

That's indeed what I took you to mean, Jetse. But then I got carried away with brainstorming, as is my wont!
seriously, I am indeed more on a SF kick these days, probably encouraged by reading yours and Andy's version of Interzone, which admittedly I wouldn't have read had I not already known you both.
des

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MY WEBSITE: www.nemonymous.com

I have to ask: where did you come up with this Cone Zero idea? Like Jetse said, the scientific application seems to be about theta particles in a vacuum (or some such . . . I'm yet to find any lay-persons explainations). Is that what you had in mind, or is it just a phrase you came up with one day?

(Oh, and I think you owe my girlfriend an apology, des. I spent last night ranting about the Geneva Convention . . .)

_________________
The future's going to be just like the present, but with more LEDs.

Me blog: http://dylan-fox.blogspot.com/
And if that's not enough, I'm on Twitter, too: Foxie299