I’m British (with a fairly British view of English) and have long been aware of the duplicitous nature of cleave, to split (Old English clifan) or to join/stick (Old English cleofan). I believed ‘hew’ unhampered by such contradictory problematics and that it could mean only split/chop, but it seems you’re correct. It, too, may mean either. Can it be that Beenhouwersstraat in Brussels might refer not to the Butcher (the bone hewer) but to the Maker (of artificial animals)? I suppose either way, it’s still a good place to eat in.
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Au contraire, the BBC had been broadcasting tv for decades by 1954.
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The effect may be sinister, but I think the cause was less so. As I understand it, Campbell challenged Godwin to write a science fiction story that followed all the rules of Greek tragedy: limited characters, single venue, all the action taking place on the same day, and a tragic flaw in one of the characters causing all to suffer disproportionate punishment (whether by an angry god or an offended Nature). I’d say that Godwin succeeded, if people go on discussing his story sixty years later.
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Something from a sci-fi book that made me shudder was the “turtles” in Vernor Vinge’s ungoverned lands. So post-apocalyptic libertarian utopia. A small minority of the population which seems to be regarded as a bit eccentric would dig in in their bunkers defended by who knows what and cut them and their family off from the world.
It occurred to me that there are families who’s head of household attempt that sort of isolation today and when we find out why we often wish we didn’t know.
You should; it happens at the very start of the book, and is referenced near the end when the title character meets one of her rapists again – and shacks up with him. The gang-rape and mutilation is never depicted thought; it happens between scenes.
I totally agree with you. Spock’s death was pointlessly heroic, it was completely unnecessary and would have been avoided with proper starship engineering. In fact, with so many redshirts murdered to sell the idea that “space is dangerous”, I’d say Star Trek is the most morally bankrupt science fiction franchise written.
Well, after Star Wars, which genocided the people of an entire planet, on screen.
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In general, though, I didn’t read the novel as sexist. I saw it as an intriguing description of a strong woman. I should probably reread it and man up for the disappointment.
Yes, we all remember the big brouhaha when the Nazis broadcast the Berlin Olympic Games of 1948…
Amazing! I’ve wanted to explore the piece properly for a long while now.
Thank you so much for helping me find the information I need to do so! 
Sixteen, pardon. Although even that is wrong due to a miscalculation on my part.
A typo, I meant sixteen, but also I misremembered the year of Germany’s broadcast, 1936, not 1938. Correcting it now.
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There’s a dramatisation of it in the Douglas Hofstadter DocuDrama “Victim of the Brain”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F_4BeK4EjY#t=643
This is from his story called “The Ungoverned” set in the region of the former United States after a big war. Most of the area is ungoverned where people have organized into groups that I will poorly describe as libertarian cooperatives (anarcho-capitalists?). Detective Wil Brierson (and friends) defeats one of the last “traditional” governments in North America, the Republic of New Mexico, by tricking them into driving their invasion of the ungoverned lands of Kansas over the home of an extreme individual survivalist type that took his right to bear arms so seriously that he has nuclear weapons.
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the probability of the 100’th time coming up 6 is 1/6 not 1/(6^99)
If it’s a fair die.
You are correct, presuming the die is perfectly fair and each cast is truly random.
However, @niczar did not say that the probability of getting that 100th 6 in a row was 1/(6^99). Instead, he proposed that extreme low probability as a metric for detecting interference with the previous 99 results.
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The article would be valid if the universe and human nature were derived from the pages of fiction. Unfortunately, they’re well established prior art.
Great article.
It points toward why I always found Robert Heinlein unreadable, even as a kid, even the less obviously offensive stuff – because I could always detect, operating just under the surface, the logic Doctorow describes here.
Woosh!
^ not a factorial
It’s time SF grew up a little, damn it, and started confronting hard questions […]
…he said, talking about adapting an SF story that was thirty years old by that time that does precisely that. I don’t think it was SF that needed to grow up, but television.
