"Fantascienza" is the Italian word for science fiction, but fantascienza has its own tropes, rhythms and conventions that set it apart in hard-to-summarize ways; these unique characteristics have fired the Italian imagination for generations.
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Very little fantascienza (or any other foreign literature) gets translated to English. There's a kind of circular reasoning behind this: there's so much stuff produced in English that there's no market for foreign works, and no one reads foreign works so why translate any?
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Which brings me to a very odd, very wonderful book: ROBOT ARTISTS AND BLACK SWANS, @bruces's collection of fantascienza stories originally published under his Italian pseudonym, "Bruno Argento."
I am no expert on fantascienza, so I don't know if these are representative of the field, but I am here to tell you that they are completely different from any other sf I've read, including Sterling's, and yet utterly and unmistakably Bruce Sterling stories (a neat trick).
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They are mostly set in and around Sterling's adopted hometown of Turin, and though they span a range from the Middle Ages to the late 22nd Century, they paint a vivid picture of an ancient city whose fortunes have ebbed and flowed through the centuries.
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Turin - the city of a fake shroud, the once-upon-a-time capital of silent horror film production, home to the once-high-tech giant Olivetti and the once-industrial-titan Fiat - is arguably the most interesting character in these tales.
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A city that once-was, will-be-again, where life is both literarily genteel and haunted by militarism, crisis and political upheaval. Sterling gives us stories of crusader-era innkeepers, dimension-hopping hackers, art-obsessed robot-chasers, all blended into Turin's stories.
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These are wry and sardonic stories in the Sterling mode, and filled with the kinds of technosocial insights that define his work, but they are also madcap tales, Italian farces full of earthy humor, bunga-bunga strongmen getting their comeuppances, all the grand passions.
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Sterling - "Chairman Bruce" - was instrumental to the founding of both cyberpunk and steampunk; started one of our most influential and visionary "bright green" environmental movements, and serves as an electronic art impresario.
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He relishes the esoteric and his fiction brings it to life in ways that no one else can match. In his Bruno Argento guise, he is both utterly strange and wonderfully familiar, a new chapter in the weird, engrossing artistic life of Bruce Sterling.
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I'm helping Bruce launch this book on Thursday, in a free, livestreamed event at Austin's @BookPeople, a truly wonderful store.
ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Inside: Robot Artists & Black Swans; Klobuchar on trustbusting; Pharma's anti-generic-vaccine lobbying blitz; Unpack the court with judicial overrides; Lexmark's toxic printer-ink; and more!
Next Thursday, I'm helping Bruce Sterling launch "Robot Artists & Black Swans," a book of sf short stories in the Italian "fantascienza" mode, at Austin's Book People!
"Every pirate wants to be an admiral." That is a truism of industrial policy: the scrappy upstarts that push the rules to achieve success then turn into law-and-order types who insist that anyone who does unto them as they did unto others is a lawless cur in need of whipping.
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This is true all over, but there's an especial deliciousness to see it applied to printers and printer ink, always a trailblazer in extractive, deceptive and monopolistic practices of breathtaking, shameless sleaze.
Pierre Beyssac, a director of Internet Europe, recounts his campaigns in the Printer Wars, which start when he ordered a non-wifi-enabled @lexmark printer but got shipped the wifi version.
One of the GOP's tells is that it accuses Democrats of its own sins. Take "packing the court," a process we watched unfold with Trump's appointments of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett.
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A Supreme Court filled with Federalist Society sociopaths chosen by Donald Trump is scary, for two reasons: first, they are apt to take up extreme Constitutional interpretations, and second, because they will distort Congress's intent to serve the wealthy.
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There's not much we can do about the former, but the latter is fully addressable through lawmaking. Take SCOTUS's recent ruling that the FTC doesn't have the authority to extract cash penalties from predatory lenders to compensate their victims.
2.5 billion people in the Earth's 125 poorest countries have received zero vaccine doses. The 85 poorest countries are projecting full vaccination in 2023 or 2024. This isn't just a form of racist mass-killing, it's also a civilizational and species-wide risk.
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Every infected person, after all, makes billions and billions of copies of the virus, and these copies are imperfect, producing mutations. Eventually, there will probably be a mutation so contagious that it bypasses vaccine-based defenses.
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Worse still, if the virus circulates widely enough for enough time, the likelihood that a mutant strain will emerge that is both more infectious AND more deadly goes up and up.
A half-vaccinated world is like a swimming pool where only one end has a "no pissing" rule.
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When @amyklobuchar introduced her Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act (CALERA), I called it a "big fucking deal," because it would do away with Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork's "consumer welfare" standard for antitrust action.
Prior to the Reagan years, US courts and prosecutors went after monopolies because monopolies were considered harmful on their own - they gathered too much power into too few hands, to the detriment of workers, suppliers, the environment, policy, and consumer pricing.
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But Robert Bork - a Nixonite criminal whose actions were so odious the Senate refused to confirm him for the Supreme Court - promoted a bizarre Qanon-like theory that if you looked hard enough at the laws, that's not what they said at all.
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