Well, tomorrow I will be departing for VancouFur for the weekend, so fair notice, my beloved readers (the few, the mighty, the patient). odds are fairly good that I will miss at least one day of blogging, namely Saturday.

We are not leaving till the afternoon, as far as I know, so I should be able to squeeze out tomorrow’s Friday Science Whatever. And who knows, maybe we will be back early enough Sunday evening for me to get in a blog entry before the clock strikes midnight.

But Saturday, the chances are that I will not have access to a computer or the Internet, and I will hopefully also be too busy having fun to worry about blogging.

It’s not impossible that, say, early in the morning, if I wake up before anything is happening and then I can’t get back to sleep, I will wander the hotel looking for one of those neato keen public terminals that hotels provide these days.

But just as a forewarning, there might not be a Saturday entry, and Sunday isn’t a sure thing either.

I will, however, be doing my best to make some notes for a convention report that, god willing and the creek don’t rise, will grace the pages of BCSFAzine some time in the near future.

Now, to clear out some of the links from my browser.

First off, we have two letters from famous writers.

The first is one that Kurt Vonnegut wrote to the board of a high school in North Dakota which had not just banned but burned their copies of his novel, Slaughterhouse Five.

An English teacher there had assigned it as reading, and I guess some parents got a look and blew their collective shit out the window because a month later, the school superintendent ordered that all 32 copies of the book be burned in the school’s furnace.

Bad, dirty thoughts! Dirty thoughts must be cleansed! Cleanse it with fire!

How sad. I don’t blame Vonnegut for taking it personally enough to write the letter. We writers are a touchy bunch. And seriously, a school burning books? What could be more reprehensible?

And I am a big time Vonnegut fan, and quite radical in my support of free speech and freedom of thought and never shying away from teaching children the truth just because we get squeamish.

That said, I am pretty sure I get what set the parents off. I might even agree that maybe that particular novel, and Vonnegut in general, are best saved for college.

I mean, I got into Vonnegut in junior high, but I will not claim to be a typical case.

And Slaughterhouse Five in particular is a grim work even by Vonnegut standards. It is full of the brutalities (and banalities) of war, a lot of frank talk about sexuality, culminates in an assassination, and I am fairly sure that Slaughterhouse Five is the one where there is a running gag about a picture of a woman attempting to have sexual intercourse with an embarrassed looking horse.

Now see, that is literature right there, that the horse looked embarrassed. Genius.

Buuut even a libertine like myself can appreciate that hysterically minded parents might not quite see the humour in bestiality and be scandalized that their children have been exposed to it.

Especially before the Internet.

Again, in my perfect world, we grownups would get over this idea that information can hurt children and we would always answer their questions as openly and honestly as possible, keeping nothing from them.

But I can see the parents’ point of view.

Still, burning them seems a bit harsh and frankly a trifle atavistic. Surely they could have just asked for the books back and never assigned them again.

The other letter is shorter and is from the dean of detective novelists, Raymond Chandler, and is notable mostly because he talks about, of all things, science fiction.

Here is his impression of Science Fiction.

“I checked out with K19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Brylls ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Brylls shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn’t enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right.”

And he ends the letter by saying “The pay brisk money for this crap?”.

Now being a science fiction author (no, really), I should object, but the thing is, he wrote that in 1953 and in 1953, that was a fairly accurate assessment of the state of science fiction at the time.

Sure, there was a lot of great science fiction written then, but it was also an era when reams upon reams of pulp crap pretty much exactly like what Chandler wrote was published, both in novels and in the proliferation of science fiction magazines in that era.

So he is write to express incredulity at the brisk market for that kind of crap. The demand for content was high and that set the bar pretty low for entry into publication.

So while Sturgeon’s Law (80 percent of everything is crap) never varies, it is a relative rather than an absolute measure, and so the greater the volume of art in a category, the more crap there is out there in absolute terms, and the easier it is for an unversed outsider to get the impression that it’s all crap.

Plus, you have to admit, his example is somewhat amusing.

I think that’s it. Oh, and The Pope (or, by the time you read this, the Ex-Pope, and who would have thought that would ever be a thing) has a secret gay boyfriend.

Or not. Until they give us a satisfying answer as to why Benny is stepping down, we have no choice but to indulge in wild speculation to entertain ourselves.