Chattacon 45 Report!

Post Panel Photo (L to R: Gregory Nicoll, Robert R. McCammon, Stephen Antczak, and me)

Last weekend I attended my sixth Chattacon here in Chattanooga, Tennessee! As has become tradition on this blog, I am also giving a Chattacon report!

The Precarity of Utopia: The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer

Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota continues to be a series that is obviously brilliant whether I understand it or not (and I often don't). How could I not love this third book in the series, where the reader is enlisted into a dialogue with Thomas Hobbes in the 25th century?

MLK Day 2020: Labor, Love, and Community

The MLK Day March in Chattanooga near the MLK mural (Jan. 20, 2020)

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day here in the United States. I’ve written before about why MLK Day is my favorite holiday, King’s relation to science fiction, the idea of a moral arc, moving beyond "MLK-Lite," and my visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. 

For 2020, I thought I’d discuss the labor movement, partly because I finally got around to participating in my local MLK Day March with fellow members of my union, United Campus Workers! (More pictures here and below). 

Of the many things people seem to forget in the midst of the Disneyification of Martin Luther King, Jr. is that he was a big proponent of the labor movement. He was murdered in Memphis while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike. His famous “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. 

You can read more about King’s connections with the labor movement here and here and here.  

Are We All Obnoxious Know-It-Alls?: Know-It-All Society by Michael Patrick Lynch

As a person on the internet I have come to dread the fact that everybody seems to have become an insufferable know-it-all, at least in their online interactions (I am not entirely immune to this tendency myself). In Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture, Michael Patrick Lynch does a great job diagnosing the problem and some of its causes. Like Lynch, I find this problem to be pervasive on both the political right and left. Although it takes different forms at opposing ends of the political spectrum, the phenomenon is annoying in both forms (although I think far more dangerous on the right these days).

Phantasmagoric American Myth: The Stand by Stephen King

A phantasmagoric fable, an American myth, a Christian allegory, apocalyptic science fiction, fantasy, horror, a cautionary tale about technology, a sociological and political thought experiment, a dramatization of the battle between the dualities of human nature: reason and magic, good and evil, selfishness and selflessness, fear and hope, cowardice and bravery, love and hate... The Stand is all of these things and more.