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Monday, March 06, 2006

New NYT Sci-Fi column is for "geeks" only

Besides the veiled shout out to Bookslut's Adrienne Martini for this article, Dave Itzkoff's inaugral column for his new sci-fi series in the NYT Book Review (barf!) is a wonderful exercise in terribleness. He is writing about David Marusek's book Counting Heads.

Here is the first graph:
Here's a question I don't expect to come anywhere close to answering by the end of the column: Why does contemporary science fiction have to be so geeky?

Here is the last:
Perhaps I've crossed the line here from criticism into outright advocacy, but who ever heard of a geek who could keep his opinions to himself?

Two stupid questions, with a lot of other stupid stuff in between. Itzkoff complains about the current state of sci-fi and gives no examples, he goes on oand on with plot details from Marusek's small catalouge of published stories and compares them favorably to Counting Heads, then says how good C.H. is, then complains that C.H. isn't "human" enough, and sounds crazy stupid the whole way through by saying things like this: "... perhaps he simply intended 'Counting Heads' to be an effective satire of life as we may someday know it, which it is, albeit one that might require ungrading your brain with the newest Intel microprocessor to comphrehend fully."

Read the whole mess here.

One thing I am happy about is that I ordered this from the library far ahead of this article, and now all you NYT zombies will have to WAIT!

PS- I love you LOCUS magazine and all your attention and clicky-click on this...

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