Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Writing


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The politics of dancing

Boris+Vallejo+-+Conan+ouvrant+une+bouteilleAnd so the old story popped up again – the fact that certain genres and certain types of stories have an innate ideological color.
Stuff like, basically, “sword & sorcery is right wing literature“1.

I find the notion scary enough when expressed by people that usually do not read the genres they are politically or ideologically tagging. The thing becomes absolutely creepy when it’s writers that say stuff like that.

Is fantasy really intrinsically ‘fascist‘, horror ‘misogynistic’, science fiction ‘libertarian’ (whatever that means), steampunk ‘reactionary’…
Always and no matter what?
Isn’t it a little unlikely? Continue reading →


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Sheathed in a purple bodysuit

Good old Wally Wood

Good old Wally Wood

This is a third installment of what’s becoming a series – it began with the firm-breasted lawyers, it went on with the busty barbarian queens, now the time has come for astronauts sheathed in purple bodysuits.

The offending reference comes from the first lines of a recently-published, Italian science fiction ebook.
The very first line being

Sheathed in a purple bodysuit, So-and-So went to…

And then we are given a pretty insipid list of actions the purple-bodysuited So-and-So does.

Now, let’s make this clear. Continue reading →


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Coding & Writing or, last night as we compared scars…

I was talking about code, last night.
Code as in HTML, BASIC, COBOL, that sort of stuff.
Fact is, an ebook is basically a glorified HTML file – you can code it with an ASCII notebook.
You need the text, and a set of HTML tags.

As it usually happens, old code-monkeys slip in the classic mode of that scene from Jaws, where Brody, Quint and Hooper compare scars.

cabin-shot

Stories about static pages coded on the fly, physics simulation on old 5.1/4 floppy disks, ASCII tables and so on. And of course the discussion soon turned to “these kids today” that can do wonders with their big softwares, WYSIWYG graphical interfaces and whatnot, but when the going gets rough, they can’t get their hands on the code.
And my friend Hell (no, it’s not really his name) commented

It’s just like writing.

And you know – he’s right. Continue reading →