The perennially entertaining Discovery Institute is at it again — if you don’t know, the DI is the foremost organisation devoted to Intelligent Design. This time, they’ve done themselves proud. It seems that an astronomer by the name of Professor Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure at Iowa State University because he believes in Intelligent Design. At least, this is what the DI would like you to believe. They’ve certainly been issuing press statements and blog comments to that effect. The truth is rather more prosaic: the Iowa State astronomy department rejects about one in every three tenure applications, so it is hardly a rare event, and more to the point than his ID credentials, in seven years at Iowa State, Gonzalez has not had a great track record with publishing new papers, attracting research grants, or supervising PhD students to completion. With that record, Gonzalez wouldn’t get tenure if he was the Dean’s secret boyfriend. Nobody has questioned the quality of the research Gonzales has published — by all accounts, his papers are excellent and have made solid contributions to astronomy. But his best work was ten years ago.

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Many things have been said about Al Gore, except the obvious.

Gore is looking more and more like Dracula. The transformation will be complete when he dons a velvet smoking jacket and adds a silver streak to his hair. Clearly, he is planning to have another run at President and is trying to create a new, harder, image. Save the glaciers? Sure. They’re a long way away and don’t contain haemoglobin. But illegal immigrants shall be treated as Vlad the Impaler treated his peasants: good only for backbreaking labour and their rich, dark blood. At first I was skeptical. I thought, why would anyone vote for the undead, the scourge of innocence, the rancid, coffin-snoozing aristocrat? But think about it. The US has elected in succession: a cowboy, a deputy sheriff, a satyr, and a zombie*. Is a vampire really out of the question?

* not the George Romero, brain-eating-corpse zombie but the traditional Haitian zombie sapped of all mentation and controlled by shadowy masters. 

Over on No Fear of the Future, Jess Nevis has posted an entertaining historical retrospective of Chinese science fiction that could only be made better if it had actually happened.

Fanqi Mieville’s Mengzi Street Station (4698). Mengzi Street Station may be a controversial choice. Mieville seems to have as many detractors, or at least readers who are unable to derive any enjoyment from his work, as devotees. But Mieville is the leading figure in what might be called the New Decadence.

And our own Stephen Dedman chips in with an instalment in what should prove to be a fertile field: a history of films that fell foul of circumstance, ego-clash, or Hollywood politicking and were either cancelled or transmuted into something unrecognisable from the source material. Anyone who has ever wanted to see Orson Welles’s original vision for The Magnificent Ambersons will be a sucker for this stuff. Stephen has written the untold story of Starship Troopers, the version that clung to Heinlein’s story.

Unlike Paul Verhoeven and Edward Neumeier, writer/director/producer Smithee was not only a huge fan of the novel but a great believer in the idea that films should be as faithful as possible to the source material - as evidenced by his thirteen-hour director’s cut of Atlas Shrugged.

OK, I’ve delayed long enough on returning to my previous post to discuss judicial activism. Having thought about this I have decided that the amount of reading I would have to do to make my argument is beyond my desire and current capacity, so I will refer readers to Mitchell J. Freedman’s blog entry listing some legal arguments against the Gonzales v. Cathcart decision, as well as pointers to other legal counter-arguments. It seems to this non-legal expert to be well-written and knowledgeable.

But the point I still want to make for myself is the one I raised originally. The justices of the Supreme Court made a number of far-reaching decisions, including the overturning of precedents that had survived several prior Supreme Court decisions and a concurring brief signed by Thomas and Scalia that, to many people including myself, looks like an invitation for anti-abortion groups to pepper the court with appeals against Roe v. Wade until the justices come across a submission that can be used to justify a reversal.

The point I was trying to make was directed not so much at the justices themselves. Whether or not this ruling counts as “judicial activism” as opposed to judicial over-reach or judicial revisionism or judicial wisdom or whatever one might choose to describe it, I was aiming my comments at the conservative opinion bloc which has the hypocrisy to label every decision they don’t like “judicial activism.” The most egregious example followed Judge John E. Jones’s stinging rebuke to intelligent design in the classroom. Jones referred to precedent that had been established in several prior cases, as well as the basic Constitutional separation of church and state. Despite upholding every precedent and Constitutional principle, and despite Jones pre-emptively denying any activist leanings, the conservative opinion bloc was quick to label him a judicial activist simply because he rejected the conservative case. That is, “judicial activism” has become a term of abuse, like “liberal”, which bears absolutely no relation to the actual meaning of the term and is used to dismiss opponents without grappling with their arguments.

I think it says something about the narrow-minded intolerance of the current conservatism that an old-fashioned, devout Lutheran, Bush-appointed judge can so easily become an opponent of conservatism for doing his job and upholding established law. In actual fact, what the conservatives wanted was for Jones to overturn precedent and ignore the Constitution — Phyllis Shlafly went so far as to say that Jones had “stuck the knife in the backs” of the “evangelical Christians” to whom “he owes his position entirely.” That is, according to Shlafly and many other conservative pundits, Jones’s duty was not to be a judge but to be an appointed agent for his political handlers. Which would of course be judicial activism of a particularly corrupt nature. To have Jones labelled an activist by swathes of conservative opinion-makers demonstrates the utter emptiness of the term “judicial activism” in conservative thinking.

That was the point I was trying to make. Whether or not the Gonzales v. Cathcart decision counts as judicial activism, the fact remains that the Supreme Court was far more revisionist than Jones was — and so I ask again, how come Jones is called an activist for upholding precedent while Supreme Court justices are not when they overturn it? And I suggest again, this appears to be because only “liberal” decisions can be “activist” — even when they are made by conservative judges using conservative legal principles.

Addendum: in a stunning example of synchronicity, an hour after I wrote this the New England Journal of Medicine mass-emailed to announce another article examining Gonzales v. Cathcart, this time from a legal perspective. It’s freetext, and again, although author George Annas never uses the term “judicial activism,” it makes clear how far the Supreme Court has gone towards rejecting precedent and creating an entirely new extension of legislative powers.

There have been rumours of a new Iranian bicycle designed to protect women’s modesty by enclosing them in an opaque cabin as they ride. This is intended to assist women pursue sporting activities. While this has a suspiciously hoax-like ring to it, one can only hope that it is true. Consider this shameless female cyclist from the Victorian era:

One can see the woman’s outline and her face is uncovered to reveal an expression of irrestistible sexual promise. How was the poor male to withstand the unremitting carnal intensity of that exposed right ear? Given that this sort of immodesty was standard for the time, it is no surprise that Victorian cyclists eventually became desensitised to displays of outrageous public indecency such as this:

Now, at last, the Iranian republic has put its mind to developing a mode of bicycle that will cover most of a woman’s body. However noble the intent, though, one must admit that it does not go far enough. It still leaves a fair proportion of the female form visible. And let’s face it, even if the cabin covered every square inch of the woman within, the capacity of the male to sexualise and embroider fetishes is seemingly unlimited. Soon enough, a mere glimpse of a woman’s bicycle cabin would rouse men in the street to an erotic frenzy. Soon enough, women would feel violated by the slightest provocative glance at their cabins. Soon enough one would need to manufacture a drape to cover the cabin to enclose the burqa to hide the clothes that protect the precious female modesty within. And so on, ad infinitum.

My friends, this will not do. Clearly it is not enough to cover women in so many obscuring layers that a man on his wedding night will utter as many delighted squeals as a child playing Pass the Parcel when he’s the only competitor, his excitement mounting with every layer unwrapped and, when finally revealed, the gift at the centre will come as such a tremendous surprise that he will scratch his head and wonder how one is supposed to play with it. No, any viable solution to protecting female modesty must take into account the male of the species as well. Frankly, one can only marvel at how we got so far down the track of disguising femininity before we came to the unpleasant fact of the responsibility of the male. We need wait no more. I hereby announce my own patented bicycle for males that complements the Iranian women’s bicycle. If every male was to ride the streets in this ingenious velocipede, I have little doubt that sexual offences would soon become a thing of the past…

…outside the home, at least.

image modified from Tsuji FI. PNAS , 1985; 82: 4629-32

The firefly squid or hotaru-ika, Watasenia scintillans, is a tiny squid only 6 cm long and 9 grams in weight, but it spawns in such numbers that every year around April the ocean off the Japanese town of Toyama glows blue. Unlike many glowing sea creatures, the light of the firefly squid is not caused by bioluminescent bacteria. It is a biochemical reaction within the cells of the squid itself. As well as turning the seas a shimmering blue, the hotaru-ika is apparently delicious.

You want to know how bad scam agents can get? How about taking money from writers to represent them? (Note: if you are paying your agent, then they are not your agent and you are not their client, you are their mark.) This is how most scam agents work. But take it a step further: imagine an agent who takes that money and doesn’t even submit the manuscripts to any publishers. Imagine, furthermore, that said agent writes regular reports on how the book is doing with the publishers. Since the publishers never received any manuscripts, obviously there is never any news to report to the authors. Imagine, then, that said agent writes fake reports from publishers, and is so remote from the industry that the fake reports are full of rubbish that no publisher would ever write.

This agent is Christopher Hill, and the story of his scam has been told by Kate Hyde of HarperCollins and by Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware, who first unveiled the scam. Hyde was alerted to the scam by a rush of queries from unpublished authors asking why they had not heard back from the “Chief Editor”, a position which does not exist at HarperCollins, about their submissions, no record of which can be found in the HarperCollins files.

The most interesting thing about this story can be found in the comments. A large number of writers who were taken in by Christopher Hill have written in. There are unpublished writers who came across Hill more or less by accident, such as “Millie”:

Hill’s were the first agent I contacted, with my first ms so I got carried away on my ego…I knew nothing of the industry, I sent Hills a query rather than a submission and before I knew it I was being sucked in. Now I’ve been spat out, I’m trying to find a reputable agent.

One’s sympathy runs deep for these writers. Others, like David McKenzie Bell, deal with their disappointment with an “older but wiser” sort of resignation:

My latest Bulletin at the end of August said that Spyglass had decided to make an offer for my screenplay. I was obviously “over the moon”. Well, it would appear that I’ve been landed with a bump on the head. Don’t really know what to do, I’ll probably try to get in touch with Spyglass. I’ll keep you informed.

But, you know, a common thread among the Hill victims is a strain of what can only be described as, well, cluelessness. From Edward:

I am one of the victims of Christopher Hill…If there are any real literary agents out there who would care to review my Manuscripts, please contact me.

No, Edward. You don’t ask agents to query you about manuscripts. You find agents and submit queries yourself. It would be nice to put this down to inexperience with the publishing industry, but no, it’s genuine cluelessness. I don’t care if you’ve never even heard of publishing before, who would honestly expect agents to do this? You might as well ask Stephen Spielberg to drop round to your flat because you’ve heard he’s casting for his next movie and you’d like a part. And you don’t write manuscript with a capital M unless it’s the first word of a sentence or you’re talking about the original copy of Genesis hand-written by god himself.

Sometimes the cluelessness evolves into egotistical ranting, as from Bettine:

The publishing industry must accept some of the blame for this. While they are grabbing at big sales for trash written by celebrities and ghost-written autobiographies of juvenile stars the unknown imaginative or creative writers are completely ignored. Do publishers feel no responsibility for encouraging new writers?

I’d like to ask Bettine how she thinks the first novels by J.K. Rowling, Alexander McCall Smith, and Alice Sebold appeared in bookshops. Actual publishers had nothing to do with it. Must have been the First-Time Author Pixie. And then there’s Gladys:

Having worked hard at improving my writing I had already self-published a few books, I know from feedback that I can write, and write very well, even if publishers are only interested in books with huge market potential. For eighteen months Hill lifted my self-esteem and helped me to believe in my talent, and to concentate on writing rather than the many tasks involved with self-publishing. Hill has made nothing out of his folly, rather he has paid dearly for his own dashed dreams. I have gained so much.

No, Gladys, Mr Hill did not help you. You don’t know how well you can write from feedback about your self-published books. Publishers are not only interested in books with huge market potential. You gained nothing from Hill apart from false hope and misdirection, which you seem reluctant to abandon. The only dreams of Hill’s that were dashed were that he could spin this scam indefinitely. I’m sorry to be so short, dear Gladys and Bettine, but as much as Hill’s scam disgusts me, I am almost as frustrated by the trite self-deception and scapegoating of professional publishers. Accept that you were conned. Get angry with Hill, not a bunch of publishers who never even received your manuscripts. Move on. If you are any good, you will be published. Eventually.

So here’s some brief advice on how not to get conned by a scam agent:

1. Read the SFWA’s Writer Beware pages.
2. Read Making Light every day.
3. Read Miss Snark every day.
4. Reject what Victoria Strauss calls the twin demons of denial and desperation, or to put it more bluntly,
5. Don’t be clueless.

original image by John Vachon

This worker from a carbon black plant comes from an amazing collection of photographs from WW2 era America. The image quality is poor — the online exhibition really could have done with better image management to prevent the huge chunks of pixelation that mar many of the shots (I felt obliged to modify the image excerpt above) — but the photographs are so impressive that they stand up anyway.

via Making Light

The SFWA has announced this year’s Nebula winners. Justine Larbalestier won the Norton Award for Young Adult Fiction after holding out against strong competition from her own husband, Scott Westerfeld. Other Nebula winners were Jack McDevitt, James Patrick Kelly, Peter S. Beagle, Elizabeth Hand, and Hayao Miyazaki/Cindy David Hewitt/Donald H. Hewitt, while lifetime awards went to James Gunn, D. G. Compton, and Brook and Julia West. That’s some damn fine company.

Consider, if you will, this studio publicity quote for the upcoming Captivity:

Held captive in a cell, Jennifer is subjected to a series of terrifying, life-threatening tortures that could only be conceived by a twisted, sadistic mind.

…and then we film it for your viewing pleasure.

A twisted, sadistic mind, eh? Is that description meant to apply to the film’s creative team? Or is it for the target audience?