Camestros Felapton

Far-from-the-edge cases

Back in 2025, I posted a list of science fiction edge cases, narratives in various media that were either science fiction (but which might be something else) or things not normally regarded as science fiction, but which have some elements. An extreme example (suggested in…

Also, Stephen Miller exists

As foretold in the lyrics of Rock Lobster by the B52s

Trek Tuesday*: Starfleet Academy s1e8: The Life of the Stars

So I forgot to post this one on Tuesday. If you are avoiding immediate spoilers, note that this is the episode from last week, not the new episode that is out today (which I haven't watched yet). The trauma of the events on the Miyazaki…

Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab

Starring Ray Bradbury as Abraham Lincoln

Timothy reviews Moby Dick

Cats like fish, but cats don't like water. When you are a famous writer, like myself, you recognise things like this about the world. We call this "conflict", a word that combines two ideas "con" and "flict". All great fiction must have its fair share of both con and…

Exactly

Woody Allen

A big difference between the start of the Iraq war & this new war is there is some right-wing opposition. True, it is mainly anti-semitic dipshits but also this current US administration is closely aligned to anti-semitic dipshits

Susan’s Salon:🌛♓️🐇 01-02 March 2026

Welcome to Susan's Salon. This post has an open comment thread for people to discuss any topic they would like. Happy, sad, weird or just catching up with events. Yes, you can promote things in the comments if you want. The only rules are: nothing hateful and no…

Reads very chat GPT - JDA boast about using LLMs

1. This meeting was held in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, on April 14-16, 2002. The meeting included the following partic- ipants: Larry Birnbaum (Northwestern Uni- versity), Ken Forbus (Northwestern Univer- sity), Ben Kuipers (University of Texas at Austin), Douglas Lenat (Cycorp), Henry Lieberman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Henry Minsky (Laszlo Sys- tems), Marvin Minsky (Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology), Erik Mueller (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center), Srini Narayanan (University of California, Berkeley), Ashwin Ram (Georgia Institute of Technology), Doug Riecken (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center), Roger Schank (Carnegie Mellon University), Mary Shepard (Cycorp), Push Singh (Massachusetts Institute of Technol- ogy), Jeffrey Mark Siskind (Purdue Univer- sity), Aaron Sloman (University of Birming- ham), Oliver Steele (Laszlo Systems), Linda Stone (independent consultant), Vernor Vinge (San Diego State University), and Michael Witbrock (Cycorp).

Yes - the conference was a known thing prior to the Epstein files. Part of Epstein's links with AI research. I think the participants should still have been asking why this rich guy wanted them on his island though

ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/i...

I mean obvious within the framework I’m talking about eg sci-fi includes rocketships so real non-sci-fi rocket ships get sucked in. People enforce arbitrary rules selectively so exclude litfic with sf elements but include non fiction with sf elements

Another favourite example: TV coverage of the moon landings winning a Hugo Award.… yes OBVIOUSLY sci-fi but also technically absolutely not (see also Apollo 13 or Hidden Figures)

...as in Plato was mistaking a quirk of our brain for some cosmic truth.

Yes, lots of things can have sci-flavour. They are all sci-fi because of that but some things fit closer to what we imagine scifi to be.

Sort of the opposite. Plato's view would be that there is an ideal form of a thing that really, really exists. This is more about a quirk of how mind works. Penguins & emus really are birds but there is a distance between them & the stereotype of "bird" in our heads (small & tweety)

Like the emoji for a fish 🐟 is a poor representation of the whole set of things that count as fish in English but it gets at what we think of as "fish"

I've become more convinced by prototype theory en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototy... as a way of thinking about genres. We have have prototype (or stereotype) of a definitve version of a story in a genre - but most examples are some distance from that hidden version in our heads.

I like how Emily St. John Mandel played with this in Sea of Tranquility and the companion novel The Glass Hotel, with one being more overtly science fiction & the other less so, but with an overlap of characters & events

I'll look it up

It has things in common with Ray Bradbury's Marionettes Inc stories. It's a great example of the Fear of Replacement theme in robot stories.

OK, now I feel stupid. I should have checked the date on that one. I thought it was a 70s/80s book but it looks like I was confused by the sequels that turned up in the 90s (which is when I would have read the first one)

Oh, that is an interesting one. I hadn't heard of it.
Notable that this is not an author thought of as a genre writer

Long or short fiction is fine. I'll check out the Killer Thing. Definitely not one I know.

I'm counting "The Girl Who Was Plugged in" by James Tiptree Jr (1974) and while robots aren't a major part of "The Female Man" (1975) by Joanna Russ, there's a notable one in it.

They are both at the edge of the time period I'm looking at 1960-75

I’m very short on robot stories written by women in the 1960s/early 70s. Stories about cyborgs or robot-like entities count.

What suggestions does the Blue Sky give mind have to offer?

Blue sausage sandwich!
I think people would be disappointed when I appeared

Damn - an incredible writer with some amazing books, and some truly bad books and many awful opinions.

Cats can be so demanding. You think you can stand up to them harassing you but in the end, you cave...