Dan Simmons, l'intelligence, et la subtilité

[Lensman]

Une préface perdue de Gérard Klein, qui se demande si Dan Simmons est quelqu'un de raisonnable mais complètement ignorant, ou quelqu'un qui a perdu tout contact avec la réalité mais est intelligent, ou quelqu'un de subtil et intelligent. Au choix ! On doit même pouvoir envisager d'autres variantes plus compliquées...
http://www.quarante-deux.org/archives/k ... Flashback/

Oncle Joe
PS: le fait que l'éditeur (d'ailleurs, qu'appelle-t-on l'"éditeur", dans ce cas ??? l'imprimeur? le metteur en page? le correcteur ?) n'ait pas voulu publier ce texte me laisse... à vrai dire, je ne sais que dire...

[Eons]

PS: le fait que l'éditeur (d'ailleurs, qu'appelle-t-on l'"éditeur", dans ce cas ??? l'imprimeur? le metteur en page? le correcteur ?) n'ait pas voulu publier ce texte me laisse... à vrai dire, je ne sais que dire...

Perplexe ?

[Lensman]

C'est le mot que je cherchais... comme je cherche à savoir qui est l'"éditeur", dans cette affaire...

Oncle Joe

[bormandg]

Une indication toutefois: NotreDieu est "directeur de collection", SJNMT.

[Lensman]

Que veux-tu dire par "toutefois"?

Oncle Joe

[JDB]

Gérard Klein a des lacunes pour ce qui est de l'utilisation d'internet.
Dan Simmons n'a pas de blog : il a un site internet, sur lequel il poste régulièrement des "messages" (des sortes d'éditoriaux).
Ce site internet comporte un forum, sur lequel il relaie des articles de presse provenant de journaux tels que The Wall Street Journal et The National Review, dont je vous laisse le soin de déterminer l'orientation politique.
Et il précède ces publications d'un commentaire de son cru.

Quelques exemples récents :

A propos du départ de Lisa Jackson, qui quitte la tête de l'Environmental Protection Agency :

Lisa Jackson was the perfect sort of administrative tool for Barack Obama to work his intense but dimwitted will: arrogant, indifferent to Americans' lives and jobs, ignorant of how the economy works (or just willfully indifferent), a left-wing environmental ideologue, eager to regulate every single aspect our lives, an enemy of energy production in this country, immoral, imperial, and more than willing to disregard -- at every turn -- constitutional separation of powers, the stated will of the congress, existing legal restraints, and the actual democratic process by which laws and regulations are supposed to be made and passed in the United States.

She'll be replaced by someone just like her. Obama has shown that he will use agencies such as the EPA to "re-invent" this country since he can't do it all through legal and constitutional bounds. We already have tens of thousands of hastily passed or simply "announced" new regulations -- their effect on the economy and our citizens unknown but always tending to more and tighter control of everything -- flowing from Dodd-Frank, Obamacare, other gigantic (and largely unread)Obama-era Senate-passed regulations, and -- of course -- from department-head-director "Czars" like Lisa Jackson who suffer from no accountability or restrictions in their effort to remake America via edict.

(A suivre)
JDB

[JDB]

Suite du florilège :
A propos d'un article sur la fameuse "falaise fiscale" :

Doesn't this asshole Steyn ever get tired of saying that we're doomed? I mean WE ARE, as are our kids and grandchildren, running broker and broker as a nation and culture and people every hour and day and week and month, but does this shit-weasel have to keep TELLING US ABOUT IT?? Can't he just leave us the hell alone to enjoy our "American Idol" and "Downton Abbey" and video games while the nation falls apart around us and we ignore it and watch the heartwarming "Making a Difference" featurette on the CBS Evening Non-News every night?

I mean, it's not OUR fault that we're all where we are. Well, OK, it is . . . but we don't have to ACKNOWLEDGE IT, do we? In times of real disaster -- with a spittle-flying demagogue as our beloved Fuhrer and the Three Stooges (x 100) running the keelless, rudderless wreck that is congress, leave us to our own illusions, please, as that creaky, outmoded anachronism -- the United States (sic) of America (sic, sic) -- sinks beneath the waves for the last time.

et plus loin, en réponse à un internaute :

My prime resolution in 2013 is to cheer you up. The French during the German Occupation of Vichy France (and after that, all of France) continued to have a good time . . . ask Sartre! Londoners during the Blitz found ways to enjoy themselves -- between sprints toward the Underground. In May 1940 when the Phony War with Germany turned into the Real War, complete with German bombers overhead, Bertrand Russell -- no dummy, he (just a coward) -- announced that --a) he was renouncing his long-held pacifism and b) he was going to America to teach at Harvard. He had a GREAT time there!

Surely we can have a fun time in this new Post-America America. Somehow, freedom's loss will become our New Opportunity ($$$)! Didn't Nero enjoy fiddling while Rome burned? Turn up the music! Turn on, tune it, and drop out! (And no more gloomy CD's!)

(A suivre -- ou pas)

[JDB]

Suite et fin -- on revient à Flashback :

Hysterical amazon.com "reviews" by outraged liberals to the contrary, my 2011 novel FLASHBACK wasn't a political screed. It was a dystopian-future novel in which I used the tools of speculative fiction I'd been working with for 25 years to follow the thread of "what will happen" if the United States were actually to accrue so much debt, far outrunning the GDP by the 2020's, that a long-overdue rise in interest rates made it impossible for the federal government even to meet interest payments on that debt. I threw in the trend of states like California, Illinois, etc. becoming so "socially compassionate" (and responsible to union pensions) that they also run unpayable deficits into the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, followed by Jerry-Brown-like hiked taxation that drove out businesses and many successful entrepreneurs, further weakening the economies there.

In my speculative-fiction vision, that nation and those states which became unsupportable collapsed, along with the national currency. Economically viable states -- such as Texas, Alaska, and northern parts of California -- seceded so as not to be dragged down in the suction from the Titanic going under. (Other states, such as Hawaii, seceded in FLASHBACK primarily because they saw the opportunity for what they considered national and ethnic sovereignty once again. Other states such as Arizona and New Mexico and parts of Nevada were simply overrun and became part of the new Republic of Mexico when the tidal wave of refugees and warring drug cartels washed north across no-longer-existing borders.)

In the novel, the "political" aspect was there to show when and how such a national bankrupty, near-total devaluation of the dollar, and 1920's-style German economic collapse could be avoided by sane -- if politically "brave" (i.e. mildly painful to some who depend upon increasing entitlements) -- policies today. I wrote the novel 4 years ago and many of the "speculations" in it -- such as American Muslim groups wanting to build a mosque on or near the site of the World Trade Center slaughters -- were written long before the announced fact (but predictable, given 1000 years of Muslim armies and conquerors doing just that on all the sites of their military victories.)

My main reason for such speculation, of course, was to get almost all my characters on the drug "flashback" with which they could escape the misery and uncertainties of a post-collapse America and re-live, in real time, the good parts of their lives. I was primarily interested in an America given over to such a near-total addiction to an enhanced-happy-memories drug. The book is about addiction to false joys (and about a speculative-fiction America that turns its collective back on the future).

So far, all the milestones in the novel are coming true, right on the novel's "historical" timeline, except for the pharmaceutical breakthrough of "flashback". I wish they'd hurry up with that. We're going to need it.

JDB

[Lensman]

Res Futurae réfléchit aux préfaces et postfaces:

http://resf.hypotheses.org/1460

Oncle Joe

[Lensman]

Hum... vu les posts sélectionnés JDB, l'hypothèse de la pure folie n'est plus à exclure...

Oncle Joe

[Erion]

Peut-on dire que Dan Simmons est un Dieudonné américain ?

[JDB]

Peut-on dire que Dan Simmons est un Dieudonné américain ?

Plutôt un Philippe Val.
JDB

[silramil]

Moi, ce que j'ai bien aimé dans ce roman, c'est qu'un des éléments importants pour la spéculation est que les modélisations de bouleversements climatiques étaient en fait des escroqueries servant uniquement à financer des universités gauchistes. Une fois la vérité révélée, elles n'ont plus eu de financement, ce qui est bien fait pour elles.

[dracosolis]

salauds de gauchistes, même pas foutus de monter des escroqueries avec un motif valable : genre devenir maîtres du monde
enfin dan simmons est fou à manger de la paille verte, mais droods c'est un bon bouquin
(flashback, je sais pas , pas pu passer les dix premières pages Dieu me pardonne)
(sorry Gérard mais quand ça se voit trop... je peux pas... même bien écrit, bien traduit et tout et tout)

[Fifokaswiti]

salauds de gauchistes, même pas foutus de monter des escroqueries avec un motif valable : genre devenir maîtres du monde

Ben financer des universités où on lave le cerveau des jeunes pour en faire des hordes de gauchiss décérébrés, c'est pas mal comme première étape de plan pour devenir maîtres du monde. Je trouve.