Tag Archives: science fiction

Islam and alcohol (and fantasy)

Tipsy taboo. I particularly noticed:

A handful of scholars permit alcohol as long as it is not made from grapes and dates, because these are specifically mentioned in the Koran.

I had run across this concept exactly once before, in Poul Anderson’s 1971 novel Operation Chaos. From a scene in chapter 5:

“I believe you are concealing something,” went on the emir. He gestured at his glasses and decanter, which supplied him with a shot of Scotch [This is a world of magic], and sipped judiciously. The Caliphate sect was also heretical with respect to strong drink; the maintained the while the Prophet forbade wine, he said nothing about beer, gin, whisky, brandy, rum, or akvavit.

Red-Shirt Risk

How Likely Is It That You’ll Die?

Reporting on Matt Bailey’s Analytics According to Captain Kirk, which begins with a quantitative summary of what all Star Trek fans know: “red-shirted crewmembers died more than any other crewmembers on the original Star Trek series.” — 73% of crew deaths.

However, Bailey does not stop there. The rate of red-shirt death varies considerably, and in some shows is much less than in others. Those shows share another well-known feature of the original series, which suggests a risk mitigation strategy:

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Faith, Myth and Star Wars

Monomaniacal

The newest George Lucas production, Red Tails, forces a Star Wars nerd to come to terms with a troubling philosophy

From faith stems nuance. From myth, generalities. And, sadly for us, the spirit of myth is winning: We revere Star Wars because to our minds—modern machines that equate religion with superstition and are willing to disregard imperfections in science but never in dogma—the movies represent transcendentalist humanism at its best, a perfect manifestation of that noxious label, “spiritual,” that people use to describe themselves when they’re too dull to believe in religion and too dim to understand science. This is why the Force has become the organizing metaphor of our time; there’s no better one for those who believe that if we only open our hearts and understand people are all the same and all good we’d be enlightened enough to lift rocks with a tilt of our heads.

Just how idiotic is this logic will become evident when we examine the controversy known in geekdom as the “Han Shot First” incident….

(My emphasis)

By way of the Episcopal Cafe.

A great collection of stories

The First Heroes

The First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age. The stories are a mix of Historical Fiction, SF, Fantasy, and one of Altenate History. Fantasy comes from the myths of the era being incorporated in several of the stories. The Greek world is well represented, but China, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Egypt, Northern Europe and even Peru appear. Continue reading