... on The Power Of Science!
A hilarious PowerPoint presentation with attached audio-track can be found here. It takes about a half-hour to sit through and is definitely worth your time. Make sure you note the changing corporate motto on each slide.
I love mixtures of careful research and wild brainstorming like this. The best science fiction has this combination of discipline and creativity in it. Historical fiction (especially George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series) can also get the mix exactly right.
But there is one genre that almost always does it for me...conspiracy theories.
No other genre requires careful, painstaking research combined with the pattern-recognition powers of the human brain cranked up to 11. Holy Blood, Holy Grail may have been a crock, but there's no denying that some heavy research went into crafting it. Not Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire levels, but more than you'll see in most books.
Take for example Rigorous Intuition. The author of this site has some odd theories to put it mildly, but he knows his deep politics. Does a Satanic pedophile conspiracy control our government? Probably not, and he admits the idea is out there. But the work he puts into it compels you to give him a fair hearing.
Sadly in this day and age conspiracy theories have become a lost art. You can't just scream about Freemasons, Satanists and saucers. You've got to do the research and back things up with citations. Without footnotes you're just nuts. With the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers by your side you rise to the level of crank...or genius.
Of course the finest work in the conspiracy theory genre remains the one I just re-read. Foucalt's Pendulum by Umberto Eco is THE conspiracy theory. It is also the greatest critique of conspiracy theories I've read. If you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.
I love mixtures of careful research and wild brainstorming like this. The best science fiction has this combination of discipline and creativity in it. Historical fiction (especially George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series) can also get the mix exactly right.
But there is one genre that almost always does it for me...conspiracy theories.
No other genre requires careful, painstaking research combined with the pattern-recognition powers of the human brain cranked up to 11. Holy Blood, Holy Grail may have been a crock, but there's no denying that some heavy research went into crafting it. Not Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire levels, but more than you'll see in most books.
Take for example Rigorous Intuition. The author of this site has some odd theories to put it mildly, but he knows his deep politics. Does a Satanic pedophile conspiracy control our government? Probably not, and he admits the idea is out there. But the work he puts into it compels you to give him a fair hearing.
Sadly in this day and age conspiracy theories have become a lost art. You can't just scream about Freemasons, Satanists and saucers. You've got to do the research and back things up with citations. Without footnotes you're just nuts. With the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers by your side you rise to the level of crank...or genius.
Of course the finest work in the conspiracy theory genre remains the one I just re-read. Foucalt's Pendulum by Umberto Eco is THE conspiracy theory. It is also the greatest critique of conspiracy theories I've read. If you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.
posted by ElGrande at 6/13/2005 11:32:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home