Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Science Fiction

  • Minor Thoughts on Science Fiction

    Today Crooked Timber has an interesting thread on types of science fiction movie, with lots of commenters bandying about various interpretations of different stories. My favourite is the comparison between Lord of the Rings and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (anxiety about the change in class structure after world war 1). Also, I’m not sure if I’ve…

  • Current Reading: Woken Furies

    This is the third book I have read in the Takeshi Kovacs series, by Richard Morgan. It’s set maybe 100 years after the last one I read, Broken Angels (which I seem strangely to have neglected to review) and features an older, much angrier Kovacs returning to his homeworld, Harlan’s World, for personal reasons. The…

  • Current Reading: The Windup Girl

    I received The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, as a christmas present, and the lazy season being as it is started reading immediately. I was initially interested and a little disappointed, but the book soon turned a corner and became an excellent and impressive read. The book is set in a medium-future post-collapse Bangkok, after…

  • Current Viewing: Inception

    This movie was, frankly, pretty stupid, though quite fun. It’s by Cristopher Nolan who made The Prestige so it should be good, but it was too self-consciously complex, if I bothered to trace the story through all its complex layers I’m pretty sure it would have huge internal holes in it, and most annoyingly the…

  • Current Reading: Surface Detail

    I’m always eager to read the latest Iain M. Banks novel, especially if it involves the Culture, because not only is Banks a great writer but his ideas and settings are really good, and I think the Culture novels have made a significant theoretical contribution to science fiction. So they’re always a pleasure to read…

  • Japanese Science Fiction

    Is a topic I don’t know much about, but James at Grognardia has been pondering how Japanese interpret Traveller and similar science fiction. To reproduce my comment to him there, the concept of the “Frontier,” which is important to Traveller, is not so relevant to Japanese literary history. Aside from a very brief and unfortunate period…

  • A Brief Look at the Mathematical Theory of Chess

    Professor Quiggin at Crooked Timber has introduced a discussion of what President Obama will do after the next senate elections with the title “Zero Dimensional Chess,” which led some of the bigger wankers in the audience to wonder how 0-D Chess could occur, and from there to ponder the deeper details of the mathematics of…

  • Cyberpunk Campaign Idea: HIV and Western Collapse

    This semester I’m teaching a course on Global Crime and Public Health as a special lecture series (in fact I should be preparing material now instead of posting here). This course represents a culmination of 15 years’ research experience in the service of a general model of what constitutes a “good” response to the public…

  • Weapons and Equipment of the Victorian Era: Samples from the Manchester Cornucopia

    At the end of the campaign described here, the characters destroyed a sinister force known as The Iron House. However, a previous group (run in Australia) played in a campaign set in 1872 where they worked for an organization known as The Iron House, in the interests of the Queen. In an early session, they…

  • Current viewing: Sky Crawlers

    This is basically Mamoru Oshii (of Ghost in the Shell fame) does dogfights. Great movie. Didn’t understand anything though. And what’s with the dog?