Assuming full eye transplant (or artificial replacement) becomes possible: What happens when a colorblind man receives a normal eye? Has science-fiction addressed this question?

Relayed through at least two discreet mailing-lists, a thought attributed to “a Croatian writer”:

For years I’ve been frustrated by those claims by non-sf readers that SF is not literature (compare “comics are not art”). Frustrated, because you can’t defend SF as literature w/o accepting the analysis apparatus of literature-cognoscenti and moving to their turf – therefore losing. What I did to calm myself, after a while, was to accept their claim: okay, SF is not a literature.

So, what it is?

A philosophy.

Think about it: SF a) is about ideas and b) it is a continuous dialogue about some hypothetical questions that continues through generations. So is philosophy.

I feel much calmer these days, reading belles lettres to satisfy my aestethics and SF to feed my mind.

(The answer does not apply to “are comics art”, however).

miller@i330.org quotes Charles Krauthammer:

Whenever I hear Sept. 11 referred to as just a tragedy, I wince. The San Francisco earthquake was a tragedy. The Johnstown flood was a tragedy. Hurricane Andrew was a tragedy. A tragedy is an act of God. Sept. 11 was no act of God. It was an act of man. An act of war.

miller adds:

Yes, in common parlance, the word “tragedy” has come to mean “a really bad thing.” For speechwriters, reporters and the man on the street, it is simply a shorthand way of describing the more properly phrased, “terrorist attacks,” “terrorist act of mass murder,” “terrorist conspiracy that took the lives of our fellow citizens.” But it’s a sloppy shorthand that prevents more disciplined thinking – as represented by Krauthamer’s clear-headed column. It just gets my goat.

Classically, a tragedy is a kind of drama, in which a hero is brought down by his own character flaw (such as pride or jealousy). I don’t insist that the word be reserved for events that fit the Greek dramatic form, but a tragedy ought to be a story that contains a moral lesson. An act of god is not tragedy; nor is a common murder.

A few months ago, on seeing the newspaper headline Search ends in tragedy, my first thought was: did the search itself cause someone’s death? No, it’s merely that the missing child was found dead. A more accurate (and shorter) headline would be Search ends in sorrow.

The deaths at Jonestown resulted from the followers’ abdication of personal sovereignty; that’s tragic. The sinking of the Titanic, being an act of god, was not itself tragic; but most of the deaths were preventable, and therefore tragic.

Subsidizing autocratic states, and driving their opposition into radical Islam, was a tragic blunder.

(Ultimately, I’m told, tragedy (trag-oidia) is Greek for ‘goat song’; I bring that up only to ask whether Miller had that obscure pun in mind.)

Was anyone else disappointed by the portrayal of Thing in the Addams Family feature films? In the tv series, I understood Thing to be a person (of unknown nature) who dwelt in a parallel space, intersecting with ordinary space only in the boxes. Thing frequently demonstrated the ability to ‘go’ from one box to another without passing through ordinary space between; indeed one of Thing’s regular chores was to fetch mail from the outside box and bring it to where Morticia was sitting, and another was to light Gomez’s cigar by popping out of the nearest box. None of this undignified scampering about on fingertips!

Virginia Postrel observes:

So here’s the question: What happens when we find ourselves facing militant reactionaries who, for purely pragmatic reasons, are willing to use adaptable, decentralized organization and technologies against us? Unlike our Cold War adversaries, the militants who want to build an unchanging Islamicist world have no ideological dedication to central planning and control. They’re nimble, they’re transnational, they’re adaptable, they’re quick. And our defenses depend in large part on hypertrophied technocratic institutions — sluggish, highly bureaucratic, and driven as much by poltics as pragmatism. If we can’t respond by playing to our dynamist strengths, rather than our technocratic weaknesses, we’re doomed.

If this were in Mad, it would be called Crop Circles We’d Like To See.

“Soap on a Rope” recently marked its thousandth strip. You could do worse than to read it from the beginning.

Just think: after tomorrow we may never hear that hideous pleonasm “one year anniversary” ever again.

I can dream, can’t I?