There is no question that science-fiction writers have become more ambitious, stylistically and thematically, in recent years. But this may have less to do with the luring call of academic surroundings than with changing market conditions—a factor that academic critics rarely take into account.
Robert Silverberg, a former president of The Science Fiction Writers of America, is one of the most prolific professionals in a field dominated by people who actually write for a living. Unlike mystery or Western writers, most science-fiction writers cannot expect to cash in on fat movie sales or TV tie-ins. Still in his late thirties, Silverberg has published more than a hundred books, and he is disarmingly frank about the relationship between the quality of genuine prose and the quality of available outlet. By his own account, he was “an annoyingly verbal young man” from Brooklyn who picked up his first science-fiction book at the age of ten, started writing seriously at the age of thirteen, and at seventeen nearly gave up in despair over his inability to break into the pulp magazines. At his parents’ urging, he enrolled in Columbia University, so that, if worst came to worst, he could always go to the School of Journalism and “get a nice steady job somewhere”. During his sophomore year, he sold his first science-fiction story to a Scottish magazine named Nebula. By the end of his junior year, he had sold a novel and twenty more stories. By the end of his senior year, he was earning two hundred dollars a week writing science fiction, and his parents were reconciled to his pursuit of the literary life. “I became very cynical very quickly,” he says. First I couldn’t sell anything, then I could sell everything. The market played to my worst characteristics. An editor of a schlock magazine would call up to tell me he had a ten-thousand-word hole to fill in his next issue. I’d fill it overnight for a hundred and fifty dollars. I found that rewriting made no difference. I knew I could not possibly write the kinds of things I admired as a reader—Joyce, Kafka, Mann—so I detached myself from my work. I was a phenomenon among my friends in college, a published, selling author. But they always asked, “When are you going to do something serious?” —meaning something that wasn’t science fiction—and I kept telling them, “ When I’m financially secure.”
The Success Of Robert Silverberg
Tags: characteristic, fiction, market, secure
Music Culture
Material culture refers to the touchable, material “things”—physical objects that can be seen, held, felt, used—that a culture produces. Examining a culture’s tools and technology can tell us about the group’s history and way of life. Similarly, research into the material culture of music can help us to understand the music-culture. The most vivid body of “things” in it, of course, are musical instruments. We cannot hear for ourselves the actual sound of any musical performance before the 1870s when the phonograph was invented, so we rely on instruments for important information about music-cultures in the remote past and their development. Here we have two kinds of evidence: instruments well preserved and instruments pictured in art. Through the study of instruments, as well as paintings, written documents, and so on, we can explore the movement of music from the Near East to China over a thousand years ago, or we can outline the spread of Near Eastern influence to Europe that resulted in the development of most of the instruments on the symphony orchestra.
Sheet music or printed music, too, is material culture. Scholars once defined folk music-cultures as those in which people learn and sing music by ear rather than from print, but research shows mutual influence among oral and written sources during the past few centuries in Europe, Britain and America. Printed versions limit variety because they tend to standardize any song, yet they stimulate people to create new and different songs. Besides, the ability to read music notation has a far-reaching effect on musicians and, when it becomes widespread, on the music-culture as a whole.
Music is deep-rooted in the cultural background that fosters it. We now pay more and more attention to traditional or ethnic features in folk music and are willing to preserve the folk music as we do with many traditional cultural heritage. Musicians all over the world are busy with recording classic music in their country for the sake of their unique culture. As always, people’s aspiration will always focus on their individuality rather than universal features that are shared by all cultures alike.
One more important part of music’s material culture should be singled out: the influence of the electronic media—radio, record player, tape recorder, and television, with the future promising talking and singing computers and other developments. This is all part of the “information-revolution”, a twentieth century phenomenon as important as the industrial revolution in the nineteenth. These electronic media are not just limited to modern nations; they have affected music-cultures all over the globe.
The Ingredients of Drama
One meaning of the Greek word “dran” is to accomplish, and in this meaning lies a further key to the structure of drama. A play concerns a human agent attempting to accomplish some purpose. In tragedy his attempt is, in personal terms at least, unsuccessful; in comedy it is successful; in the problem play final accomplishment is often either ambiguous or doubtful.
This action, from the beginning to the end of a movement toward a purposed goal, must also have a middle; it must proceed through a number of steps, the succession of incidents which make up the plot. Because the dramatist is concerned with the meaning and logic of events rather than with their casual relationship in time, he will probably select his material and order it on a basis of the operation, in human affairs, of laws of cause and effect. It is in this causal relationship of incidents that the element of conflict, present in virtually all plays, appears.
The central figure of the play—the protagonist—encounters difficulties; his purpose or purposes conflict with events or circumstances, with purposes of other characters in the play, or with cross-purposes which exist within his own thoughts and desires. These difficulties threaten the protagonist’s accomplishment; in other words, they present complications, and his success or failure in dealing with these complications determines the outcome. Normally, complications build through the play in order of increasing difficulty; one complication may be added to another, or one may grow out of the solution of a preceding one. At some point in this chain of complication and solution, achieved or attempted, the protagonist performs an act or makes a decision which irrevocably commits him to a further course, points toward certain general consequences. This point is usually called the crisis; the complications and solutions which follow work out the logical steps from crisis to final resolution, or denouement.
From Relativity To The Concept of Particle
Relativity theory has had a profound influence on our picture of matter by forcing us to modify our concept of a particle in an essential way. In classical physics, the mass of an object had always been associated with an indestructible material substance, with some “stuff” of which all things were thought to be made. Relativity theory showed that mass has nothing to do with any substance, but is a form energy. Energy, however, is a dynamic quantity associated with activity, or with processes.The fact that the mass of a particle is equivalent to a certain of energy means that the particle can no longer be seen as a static object, but has to be conceived as a dynamic pattern, a process involving the energy which manifest itself as the particle’s mass.
This new view of particles was initiated by Dirac when he formulated a relativistic equation describing the behavior of electrons. Dirac’s theory was not only extremely successful in accounting for the fine details of atomic structure, but also revealed a fundamental symmetry between matter and anti-matter. It predicted the existence of an anti-matter with the same mass as the electron but with an opposite charge. This positively charged particle, now called the positron, was indeed discovered two years after Dirac had predicted it. The symmetry between matter and anti-matter implies that for every particle there exists an antiparticles with equal mass and opposite charge. Pairs of particles and antiparticles can be created if enough energy is available and can be made to turn into pure energy in the reverse process of destruction. These processes of particle creation and destruction had been predicted from Dirac’s theory before they were actually discovered in nature, and since then they have been observed millions of times.
The creation of material particles from pure energy is certainly the most spectacular effect of relativity theory, and it can only be understood in terms of the view of particles outlined above. Before relativistic particle physics, the constituents of matter had always been considered as being either elementary units which were indestructible and unchangeable, or as composite objects which could be broken up into their constituent parts; and the basic question was whether one could divide matter again and again, or whether one would finally arrive at some smallest indivisible units.
From Watching To Participating
I am not one who golfs. The only time I tried it I was confident that a dozen balls would be an adequate supply. This is the sport of retired people: how hard could it be? The confidence was misplaced, also, one by one, the balls, and I had to quit somewhere around the seventh hole. On the sixth, actually, I hit a car—there was absolutely no reason for a highway to be that close to a golf course—but that’s another story. The point is that the game did not yield up its mystery to me; I remain, in the golfing universe, a child of darkness. I do find that I am able to watch golf on television, however, where it is possible to experience a calmness that the game itself sadly lacks. Spread out on a couch and indifferent to the outcome (very important), you watch tiny white balls sail improbable distances over the biggest lawns in the world, interrupted occasionally by advertisements for expensive cars. One of the players is named Tiger. Another is named Love. If you have access to a bottle of Martinis (optional), the joy potential can be quite huge.
There is usually a price for pleasure so mindless. In the case of TV golf, it is listening to the commentators analyze the players’ swings. What looks to you like a single, continuous, and not difficult act is revealed, via slow motion and a sort of virtual-chalkboard graphics, to be a sequence of intricately measured adjustments of shoulder to hip, head to arm, elbow to wrist, and so on. Where you see fluidity, the experts see geometry; what to you is nature is machinery to them—parallel lines, extended planes, points of impact. They murder to examine. Yet, apparently, these minutes and individualized measurements make all the difference between being able reliably to land a golf ball in an area, three hundred yards away, the size of a bathmat and, say, randomly hitting a car, which, let’s face it, only a fool would drive right next to a golf course. There is a major disproportion, in other words, between the straightforwardness of the game and the fantastic precision required to play it, a disproportion mastered by a difficult but, to the ordinary observer, almost invisible technique.
Short stories are the same. A short story is not as restrictive as a sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. Its aim, as it was identified by the modern genre’s first theorist, Edgar Allan Poe, is to create “an effect”—by which Poe meant something almost physical, like a sensation or an extreme excitement.
Lottery Tickets
Nowadays, more and more people, especially in big cities, become interested in buying lottery tickets. According to chart 1, averagely 70 percent of those polled in the survey, held in three big cities, claimed to have dreamed of winning the big prize of five-million yuan. 85 percent of those polled in Guangzhou had had such a dream, compared with 65 percent and 60 percent, respectively, in Beijing and Shanghai.
The attraction of buying lottery tickets is obvious. The winner can get the biggest profit for the future with only a small investment. It realizes the beautiful dream of every participant-to be richer and to improve living standards. As is shown in Chart 2, should they win a big lottery, 81.3% of people would buy a new house, 61.9% would buy a car, and 61.7% would save the money for the education of themselves or their kids. And a great proportion of people say they would put the money in the bank or use it for investment or touring. Despite all the attractions brought by the lottery buying, it has also come under criticism. Some regard it as a kind of gambling, which is a potentially addictive behaviour.
In my opinion, buying lottery tickets is not so bad as some people think. Instead, it is good for society by creating new jobs and representing an important source of income for charity and sports causes. Of course, it is not a means of making money for individuals we should encourage, because the result is hardly predictable. Therefore, we should take a positive but cautious attitude towards lottery buying behavior.
Free Economy Favors
The provision of positive incentives to work in the new society will not be an easy task. But the most difficult task of all is to devise the ultimate and final sanction to replace the ultimate sanction of hunger—the economic whip of the old dispensation. Moreover, in a society which rightly rejects the pretence of separating economics from politics and denies the autonomy of the economic order, that sanction can be found only in some conscious act of society. We can no longer ask the invisible hand to do our dirty work for us.
I confess that I am less horror-struck than some people at the prospect, which seems to me unavoidable, of an ultimate power of what is called direction of labour resting in some arm of society, whether in an organ of state or of trade unions. I should indeed be horrified if I identified this prospect with a return to the conditions of the pre-capitalist era. The economic whip of laissez-faire undoubtedly represented an advance on the serf-like conditions of that period: in that relative sense, the claim of capitalism to have established for the first time a system of “free” labour deserves respect. But the direction of labour as exercised in Great Britain in the Second World War seems to me to represent as great an advance over the economic whip of the heyday of capitalist private enterprise as the economic whip represented over pre-capitalist serfdom.
Much depends on the effectiveness of the positive incentives, much, too, on the solidarity and self-discipline of the community. After all, under the system of laissez-faire capitalism the fear of hunger remained an ultimate sanction rather than a continuously operative force. It would have been intolerable if the worker had been normally driven to work by conscious fear of hunger; nor, except in the early and worst days of the Industrial Revolution, did that normally happen. Similarly in the society of the future the power of direction should be regarded not so much as an instrument of daily use but rather as an ultimate sanction held in reserve where voluntary methods fail. It is inconceivable that, in any period or in any conditions that can now be foreseen, any organ of state in Great Britain would be in a position, even if it had the will, to marshal and deploy the labour force over the whole economy by military discipline like an army in the field. This, like other nightmares of a totally planned economy, can be left to those who like to frighten themselves and others with scarecrows.
Tags: dispensation, incentive, pre-capitalist, sanction, self-discipline
Shakespeare’s Dramatic Career
As the greatest English and poet and dramatist, he has left us a great wealth of 154 sonnets, 37 plays, including 14 comedies, 12 tragedies, and 11 historical plays, as well as two long poems. But for such a great writer, we have very little definite knowledge about his life. Most of the information about him is largely guesswork.
1), The First Period (1590—1594)—- The Experimental Period
This is a period of experimentation. It is marked by imitation of exciting plays, by the spirit of youthfulness and rich imagination, by exaggerated language and by the frequent use of rhymed couplets. King Henry VI / Two Gentlemen of Verona / Love’s labour Lost
2), The Second Period (1595—1600) —The Period of Rapid Growth and Development
This is a period marked by more careful and artistic work, better plot, and a marked increase in the knowledge of human nature. Romeo and Juliet / The Merchant of Venice / Julius Caesar
3), The Third Period (1601—1608) — The Period of Gloom and Depression (or Tragedies)
During this period, Shakespeare’s belief and trust in mankind had been shattered. The world no longer seemed to be ruled by a just fate avenging crimes, but a putrid prison ruled by stupidity coupled with malevolence. “The time is out of joint:— O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right. 4 great tragedies: Hamlet / Othello / King Lear / Macbeth
4), The Forth Period (1609—1612)—- The Period of Restored Serenity
It is a period of calm after storm. It had neither the lightness of the beginning nor the somber violence of the middle period of his career. It had a spirit of serenity, and optimism. He again turned to comedies. The Winter’s Tale / The Tempest
Tags: career, Shakespeare
Gap Year In English
Talk to any parent of a student who took an adventurous gap year (a year between school and university when some students earn money, travel, etc.) and a misty look will come into their eyes. There are some disasters and even the most motivated, organised gap student does require family back-up, financial, emotional and physical. The parental mistiness is not just about the brilliant experience that has matured their offspring; it is vicarious living. We all wish preuniversity gap years had been the fashion in our day. We can see how much tougher our kids become; how much more prepared to benefit from university or to decide positively that they are going to do something other than a degree.
Gap years are fashionable, as is reflected in the huge growth in the number of charities and private companies offering them. Pictures of Prince William toiling in Chile have helped, but the trend has been gathering steam for a decade. The range of gap packages starts with backpacking, includes working with charities, building hospitals and schools and, very commonly, working as a language assistant, teaching English. With this trend, however, comes a danger. Once parents feel that a well-structured year is essential to their wouldbe undergraduates progress to a better university, a good degree, an impressive CV and well paid employment, as the gap companies blurbs suggest it might be, then parents will start organising—and paying for—the gaps.
Where there are disasters, according to Richard Oliver, director of the gap companies’ umbrella organisation, the Year Out Group, it is usually because of poor planning. That can be the fault of the company or of the student, he says, but the best insurance is thoughtful preparation. “When people get it wrong, it is usually medical or, especially among girls, it is that they have not been away from home before or because expectation does not match reality.”
The point of a gap year is that it should be the time when the school leaver gets to do the thing that he or she fancies. Kids don’t mature if mum and dad decide how they are going to mature. If the 18-year-old’s way of maturing is to slob out on Hampstead Heath soaking up sunshine or spending a year working with fishermen in Cornwall, then thats what will be productive for that person. The consensus, however, is that some structure is an advantage and that the prime mover needs to be the student.
The 18-year-old who was dispatched by his parents at two weeks’notice to Canada to learn to be a snowboarding instructor at a cost of ￡5,800, probably came back with little more than a hangover. The 18-year-old on the same package who worked for his fare and spent the rest of his year instructing in resorts from New Zealand to Switzerland, and came back to apply for university, is the positive counterbalance.
Scientific Theories
In science, a theory is a reasonable explanation of observed events that are related. A theory often involves an imaginary model that helps scientists picture the way an observed event could be produced. A good example of this is found in the kinetic molecular theory, in which gases are pictured as being made up of many small particles that are in constant motion.
A useful theory, in addition to explaining past observations, helps to predict events that have not as yet been observed. After a theory has been publicized, scientists design experiments to test the theory. If observations confirm the scientist’s predictions, the theory is supported. If observations do not confirm the predictions, the scientists must search further. There may be a fault in the experiment, or the theory may have to be revised or rejected.
Science involves imagination and creative thinking as well as collecting information and performing experiments. Facts by themselves are not science. As the mathematician Jules Henri Poincare said, “Science is built with facts just as a house is built with bricks, but a collection of facts cannot be called science any more than a pile of bricks can be called a house.”
Most scientists start an investigation by finding out what other scientists have learned about a particular problem. After known facts have been gathered, the scientist comes to the part of the investigation that requires considerable imagination. Possible solutions to the problem are formulated. These possible solutions are called hypotheses.
In a way, any hypothesis is a leap into the unknown. It extends the scientist’s thinking beyond the known facts. The scientist plans experiments, performs calculations, and makes observations to test hypotheses. Without hypothesis, further investigation lacks purpose and direction. When hypotheses are confirmed, they are incorporated into theories.