Dedicated to Archie Goodwin (1937-1998)

In the unjustly neglected classic Galactic Pot Healer you will find a tool that all the characters accept as a norm; these days we call this tool The Internet.

The characters communicate by video-conferencing; they play games with people they have never met in other countries; they access encyclopaedias and dictionaries without moving from their desks.

So what? you may ask. Just that the novel was first published in 1969 and written in 1967/8 when there was no video conferencing, no on-line games, no web encyclopaedias.

In the novel the police can monitor instantly who made a call - decades before 1471 numbers or cookies could provide such information effortlessly.

The characters have free access for a certain length of time and then they have to pay. Computer translating programs show odd quirks in rendering English into Japanese and back again. O, and everything is voice-activated and -enabled which commercially only happened in 1997, and even then not everywhere. And if too many people want access to something at the same time - even the Tokyo translating computer - the system gets "tied up". But when finally accessed, it's fast ("Without the passing of even a tenth second ..."

A "peculiar book ... in which, it is alleged, everything which has been, is, and will be, is recorded" empowers those who access it.

3-D projectors can create a virtual view from a window. Warning lights tell of mail arriving.

And all of this is incidental material in the first 24 pages of the novel.

Not many people are genuine prophets.

Philip K. Dick seems to be in this minority.

JMcS

Robert Carlyle will not get an oscar on Tuesday 24th March. This is notwithstanding the fact that he is one of the best actors in recent years and has been in quality productions such as Trainspotting, Carla's Song, and The Full Monty acting characters who are unlike each other and unlike himself (he has always been quiet, almost shy, when I have met him). No wonder Julie Christie and Judy Dench have not gone in for the self-promotion which could remind the deadheads in the academy who they are and could lead to an oscar; they must realise that many great performances are ignored.

Recent winners such as Jerry Maguire, Forest Gump, and The English Patient are far from being works of art - or, indeed, craft since each of these examples is over-long and over obvious, with more than a few flaws in storytelling (these guys should read Syd Field before they waste our time).

The oscars are not worthwhile. And they have nothing to do with quality. And nothing to do with Culture. I mention them at all merely to define something (Culture) by its opposite.

EMcG

Ninety-five percent of everything is rubbish.

That is it in a nutshell. Works of art can be found in every human endeavour; art has no time for snobbery.

Yes, most cartoon strips are rubbish; so are most operas. It is the five percent which are not that we spend our lives searching for.

Theodore Sturgeon was an author of science fiction - a genre derided by the mainstream until Huxley and Orwell adopted it. Sturgeon understood the law which he formulated perhaps because of the derided field that he worked in. Abusus non tollit usum.

Start that search now!

EMcG