Posts Tagged ‘science fiction’

The Ten Best Robert Heinlein Novels

Posted: October 10, 2024 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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For more than four decades I have been a huge fan of the Science Fiction author Robert Heinlein.  There are three primary reasons why this is true. 

Robert Heinlein wrote extremely imaginative stories, most often with very unique plotlines.  Over and over again I’ve read the description on the back cover of one of his novels and said to myself that can’t possibly work, only to be proved wrong after being thoroughly entertained.

Robert Heinlein was not an ordinary science fiction author.  He was one of the pioneers of science fiction.  All of his novels and short stories were infused with exceptionally accurate science.   Science was the mainstay of all his works.

Robert Heinlein was a Libertarian in the truest sense of the word.  I’m not talking about the pseudo-libertarian tripe peddled by the Libertarian Party.  In just about every novel or short story he championed individualism and vilified collectivism.  He was not heavy handed about his libertarianism in his works.  Most often one of the main characters served as a spokesman for libertarian beliefs.

If was extremely difficult for me to select just my ten favorite Heinlein novels, out of the 40 plus I read.  I enjoyed every single one, with the exception of those written after 1980.  Beginning in 1980 Robert Heinlein suffered a series of mini strokes. These strokes, as he put it himself in an interview, scrambled his brains.  The five novels written after 1980 of his that I read were all lousy.

During his career Robert Heinlein wrote 13 juvenile novels.  These are among his best works.  They are only juvenile in the sense that the main characters are high school aged.  He did not talk down to his target audience.  The science is not watered down at all.

10. Space Cadet:  I know you are skeptical of this one based on the title.  I was too.  It was a thoroughly enjoyable juvenile novel about a group of teens who attend a service academy for the space patrol

9. Sixth Column: This novel is about a war where the United States is invaded and conquered by communists.  The strategy used by a small band of rebels to gain victory is truly imaginative.

8. Between Planets:  The plotline of this juvenile novel is impossible to describe because it is such a unique story idea.

7. Red Planet:  This juvenile novel starts off as a simple story about human colonists on Mars.  It ends up being a story about a battle for independence

6. The Puppet Masters: This novel is all about individualism versus collectivism.  Amoeboid alien creatures take total control of human beings

5. The Star Beast:  This juvenile novel about a teenaged boy and his truly unique alien pet is a most enjoyable roller coaster ride with so many plot twists.

4. Have Space Suit Will Travel:  In this juvenile novel, the main character is obsessed with traveling to the moon.  He eventually gets there and travels far beyond.

3. Starship Troopers: The movie based on this novel got one thing right, a war between humans and alien bugs takes place.  In the novel Progressive policies destroyed every nation including the US. Veterans fixed things, they alone took responsibility.  Because of this only veterans were allowed to vote and hold office. Many claimed that Heinlein sold out to the military industrial complex when he wrote this.  That is most untrue. 

2. Stranger in a Strange Land:  This is a philosophical treatise wrapped in a very unique and imaginative story.  With this novel Robert Heinlein proves that he is even more of a libertarian than I am, which is saying a lot.  He advocates for tearing down not only the state, but all societal norms such as monogamy and traditional Judeo-Christian values on sex.  The fact that I do not agree with everything he has to say here does not take away from my enjoyment of this novel.

1. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: This novel is a libertarian and a science fiction masterpiece.  The moon is a penal colony controlled by an oppressive earth federation. With the help of a sentient computer the moon gains its independence.                                                                       

The Biden Regime Has Gone Full Dystopian Science Fiction

Posted: November 30, 2023 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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I am a huge fan of dystopian Science Fiction, especially those with a pronounced Libertarian slant.  My favorite authors in the genre are Robert Heinlein, George Orwell, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournell, Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand, and Suzanne Collins. 

Joe Biden’s handlers have been following the plot lines featured by those authors, all from the point of view from the villains.  They most likely have never read any of these great works.   Their dystopian playbooks are based on the collective works of Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Chairman Mao.  Joe Biden’s Cabal should have read the same works I have read; they would have learned some valuable lessons about the various levels of hell created by collectivist policies.

Robert Heinlein wrote a short story, Free Men, and a novel, Sixth Column, where communist nations launched nuclear strikes on the US, and then invaded.  In both stories, written in the late 1940s, the communist invaders completely curtailed travel to ensure control over the conquered US.  Curtailing the freedom of movement is one of the favorite ploys used by dystopian regimes to exert complete control over a population.   The Biden Regime is using safety and climate change as a justification to curtail the freedom of movement of Americans, as chronicled in the following two articles:

NTSB Recommends All New Cars Be Equipped With Technology to Make Speeding Difficult or Impossible (thefederalistpapers.org)

In a recent development, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has proposed a measure that has sparked considerable debate.

The recommendation is for all new automobiles to be equipped with intelligent speed assistance (ISA) technology, a system designed to make speeding difficult or impossible.

The proposed ISA technology works by utilizing GPS and sign recognition to adapt the vehicle’s speed to the local limit.

Its approach is distinct from traditional speed limiters as it varies the maximum speed based on the location.

‘Dystopian Science Fiction’: Thomas Massie’s Amendment to Stop ‘Kill Switch’ in Vehicles Fails (breitbart.com)

Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) amendment to stop what has been dubbed a “kill switch” in vehicles beginning in 2026 under the guise of “passive drunk driving technology” failed last week — something that largely fell under the radar as all eyes remain on newly-elected House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Congress passing his stopgap funding bill this week.

This battle broke out last week, as Massie presented an amendment, which essentially states that none of the funds made available in the Biden-approved Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed in 2021, may be used to implement Section 24220 of the bill.

George Orwell’s 1984 has long been the playbook for dystopian regimes: Biden Admin ‘Working With’ Social Media to ‘Counter Misinformation’ on Economy – The Political Insider

“The White House official said the administration is working with TikTok creators to tell positive stories of Biden’s economic stewardship while also working with social media platforms to counter misinformation.”

If it seems strange to you that the government would just brazenly admit to making naked propaganda, well, that’s just where we are now.

We’ve witnessed what that entails thanks to the release of the Twitter Files that uncovered that the administration, via the arm of the Department of Justice and various aspects of the Intelligence Community, manipulated and infiltrated social media companies to bury factual news stories and infringe on the First Amendment rights of countless users.

NewsGuard Sells Government-Funded Censorship Tool (thefederalist.com)

The for-profit censorship giant NewsGuard is now selling its “Misinformation Fingerprints” technology to private companies to silence Americans’ speech — technology the federal government helped NewsGuard develop to the tune of nearly $750,000 in taxpayer funding. So while NewsGuard is now making headlines for trying to take down Elon Musk’s X, the bigger story concerns the federal government’s funding of the censorship-industrial complex.

In September 2021, NewsGuard was awarded a grant through the Small Business Innovation and Research program, which funds early-stage companies to develop products and technologies that can be helpful for government,” NewsGuard announced in its 2021 Social Impact Report. “Under the grant,” the report explained, “NewsGuard plans to further develop the Misinformation Fingerprints tool and test the effectiveness of the Fingerprints in detecting state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.”

Federal records show the Department of Defense funded the Small Business Innovation and Research program’s award of nearly $750,000 to NewsGuard for the further development and testing of the Misinformation Fingerprints tool. And according to NewsGuard’s 2021 Social Impact Report, its “Misinformation Fingerprints” catalog traced “762 false narratives,” “providing one-of-a-kind tracking seeds for the AI tools used by defense industry clients.”

This whole transgender craze is right out of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: Even the Census Bureau Is Trying To Promote Radical Gender Ideology | The Heritage Foundation

The Census Bureau is asking Congress for $10 million to figure out how best to promote the fiction that sex is assigned at birth, rather than the scientific fact that it is present at conception. It is part of a new set of questions on sexual orientation and gender identity that the bureau wants to ask residents even as young as 15.

This expansion beyond race and ethnicity represents a new foray into sexual identity—one more step in the bureau’s decadeslong degeneration into an agency completely captured by the identity-mongering industry, and which produces the supposedly “victim” categories that the industry requires.

The Biden Administration Is Scheming To Take Your Kids Away (thefederalist.com)

Democrats have been suggesting taking children away from ‘non-affirming’ parents for years now, but Biden’s HHS is getting the ball rolling…The Biden administration has proposed new rules for foster care, which would treat any parent rejecting LGBT ideology as a child abuser.

Disney’s Fahrenheit 2023

Posted: June 11, 2023 by John Ruberry in business, entertainment, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

Ray Bradbury in a way predicted Disney’s latest outrageous move.

Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, is a dystopian novel that is overshadowed by two other great 20th century works about an unpleasant future, Brave New World and 1984. Fahrenheit 451’s lead character is Guy Montag, a fireman, only in Bradbury’s world, buildings are fireproof; Montag and other firemen are dispatched to homes to burn books. Nearly of them. Only comic books are permitted in that unhappy future. 

Michiko Kakutani, in a New York Times career appraisal written on the day after Bradbury’s death in 2012, remarked that Fahrenheit 451 “is at once a parable about McCarthyism and Stalinism, and a kind of fable about the perils of political correctness and the dangers of television and other technology.” Yep, Kakutani said “political correctness,” the term for “woke” from that not-too-distant time.  In a 1994 interview Bradbury, in very blunt language even for the 1990s, attacked that PC culture while discussing Fahrenheit 451. “Political correctness is the real enemy these days,” he said. “The black groups want to control our thinking and you can’t say certain things. The homosexual groups don’t want you to criticize them. It’s thought control and freedom of speech control.”

In a memorable passage from Fahrenheit 451, Montag’s boss explained–without government involvement mind you–how books became toxic. 

The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals. 

Last week, Hollwood Elsewhere noticed the omission of the “N-word” from the Gene Hackman classic police thriller The French Connection from the Criterion Channel streaming service. The use of the racial slur helps define Hackman’s character, Popeye Doyle, as a great cop but a flawed man. 

Not as controversially, Doyle regularly refers to two French criminals as “Frog 1” and “Frog 2.” Those ethnic putdowns remain in the film. So does the iconic scene of Hackman gunning down Frog 2 on a set of stairs. For now, at least. 

It’s widely believed that Disney, which owns the rights to The French Connection, is behind the stealth editing. To use Bradbury’s words, “It didn’t come from the Government down.”

Disney of course has gone full-blown woke in recent years, the outrage prior to this one, from last month, involved a mustachioed man wearing a dress and eye shadow, a fairy godmother’s apprentice named Nick, greeting guests, including children, at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique at Disneyland. Before that, Disney’s prior woke atrocity there was an anti-white people song performed in the Disney+ children’s series, The Proud Family.

Disney’s theme parks are supposed to be “the happiest place on earth.” That’s it? Humans are only about happiness?

Back to Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451:

You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right?

We won’t be happy, I believe, as dumbed down dolts.

The entertainment industry, a fortress of the left, constantly reminds us, especially during award ceremonies, that they are the vanguard for free expression. Sure, a censoring of the “N” word doesn’t seem like a noble hill to die on but remember the dystopian world of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The slippery slope began in order to placate a few people who were offended.

Why stop with the “N” word? What about the French Connection’s Frog 1 and Frog 2? Smoking in movies? And what Donald Trump’s cameo in Home Alone 2?

Viewers might get triggered.

Don’t laugh about that Trump scene. The star of Home Alone 2, Macaulay Culkin. wants the Trump bit cut. And he’s not alone.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Go see Dune, and see it in the theater

Posted: October 23, 2021 by ng36b in entertainment
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Since the “2 weeks to stop the spread” back in March of 2020, I haven’t been inside a theater. Hollywood hasn’t exactly made me excited to go back either. Ooo, I can watch a mediocre Marvel film aimed at Chinese audiences? Or a homosexual adaptation of some previously great character? Or a film that will repeat “The Narrative?” My view on new Hollywood movies was pretty aligned with one of my favorite YouTube film critics, The Critical Drinker.

But then, the Dune trailer came out. And man, it looked cool. I had heard a lot about Dune, and I knew that it was probably one of the most influential science fiction novel series of all times, but I had never watched the movie (or TV mini-series). Since I had an extra Audible credit, I grabbed the predecessor book “The Butlerian Jihad,” a book written by Frank Herbet’s son Brian and Kevin J Anderson, who has written tons of science fiction books, including some in the Star Wars expanding universe (back before Star Wars was acquired by Disney).

Excited by the trailer, and even more so as I read through the books, I saw Dune last night with a group of friends in our local theater.

And it was awesome!

First, it was a movie that took itself seriously. The acting is great. The scenes are beautifully shot. The editing is really good, and there aren’t long moments of dead space for you to be bored.

Second, no woke BS. We have a diverse array of actors because that’s what the books had! The desert people of the planet Arrakis look, feel and act like people living in a desert. I immediately had Iraq/Afghanistan insurgency vibes when I saw them, and as people trying to fight off the control of the Emperor, that’s exactly what we’re supposed to feel. Female characters feel the same way. They aren’t made out to be super strong, take on everything without emotion monstrosities like Captain Marvel. Instead, we get an outstanding performance from Rebecca Ferguson (who plays Lady Jessica Atreides) that doesn’t look like she’s trying to outperform Timothee Chalamet (who plays Paul Atreides).

The movie is genuinely enjoyable to watch. Watching it in the theater was great because of the sound. The movie places big demands on low bass sound, especially when the giant sandworms of Arrakis make an entrance. The low rumblings as the sandworms approach genuinely fills you with dread, and the rest of the musical score is well composed.

The one issue with Dune is without understanding the lore, its hard to follow. Before you see it in theater, I’d recommend watching the Looper trailer that gives you much of the backstory of the main characters.

In a world full of dumb, woke, cringy movies, Dune is a bright spot of good story and good acting. It’s not the next Iron Man or Lord of the Rings, but if you have to pick a movie to watch, you can’t do wrong with Dune.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

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