Hughtopias

 What makes Ken McLeod and Stan - Kim Stanley - Robinson still worth reading long after most of the SF on my bookshelf no longer holds my interest? My best guess is that they care about people, about people's lives, about how people interact with each other within an environment, and how that interaction of real people shapes history. And, in Stan's case, he cares deeply about how we interact with our biological context. Frank Herbert shared a little of the same interest in how people lived on a planet - Dune was a whole planet with an ecology - but the books devolved into the politics of hierarchy.  Larry Niven is another who has given the topic of humans and their planet some serious thought. His future Earth, overwhelmed and shaped by the sheer numbers of people, his Ringworld, his Fleet of Worlds,  all follow a plausible logic, assuming some magical gadgetry. The most carefully crafted of all his creature/planet combos might be Mote Prime, a collaboration in conservat...

Checking Your Facts - The Power of Pragmatic Curiosity  - notes by Hugh Tayler, 2024 October 24 Years ago, carpenter Bob asked me to cut him a piece of two-by-four blocking fourteen and a half inches long. I got out the saw, measured and cut the piece and handed it to Bob. He automatically took out his tape measure and checked the length of the piece. I said, half-joking, "You don't trust me, Bob?" And Bob looked me straight in the eye and said, "I don't trust myself." That simple statement, reminding me to observe and check rather than trust other fallible human beings, has stayed with me for three decades. My brother Randy says that the first step in troubleshooting an issue with equipment is to diplomatically check the symptoms for yourself, regardless of the opinions of your customer, your co-worker, or your boss.  I am fascinated by how often social pressure stops from us from simple fact checking that could solve a problem. Our Ford Focus started makin...

  Alexandra ver1c Short fiction by Hugh Tayler, 2022 September I had the garden hose and a trigger sprayer out washing pickle juice off the front sidewalk before it dried in the hot sun. I hoped it was pickle juice and those green things were pickles. Funny things happen when people put food on the Free Table. The table is mostly unsupervised and about 15% of the population has trouble behaving when not watched. I washed the pickles into the gutter and got the hose out of the way because there was a woman walking a dog down the sidewalk. She held up her hand to get my attention as she got closer. "Say there. Could I get some water for the Duke here? If it wouldn't be too much trouble, a bowl would be lovely." There were some mixed toys on the table in a small plastic bin. I dumped them gently onto the table, rinsed out the bin and filled it with water. She took it from me and put it down for the big short haired dog. "Danke - thanks. Thank you so much." She wa...

A lot of fiction is cranked out to pay the rent. I understand and I admire the skills. I can type, but I found it easier to pack lumber and shovel concrete and dig splinters out of carpenters than to learn to write for a living.  But I was - am - addicted. First to comic books, then to speculative fiction. I am used to the regret of reading fiction that is a waste of time, short stories that lack personal insight and grand novels that show us no better way forward. But what I really regret are books with disturbing imagery that I wish I could un-read or just forget. Zelazny's "Creatures of Light and Darkness", Chabon's "Adventures of Kavalier and Klay", and Larry Niven's later Ringworld books with ghouls are a few examples.  And there are authors that I have learned to just stay away from: Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and Jim Grant writing as Lee Child. And there are movie makers that I feel the same way about, with Tim Burton at the top of the list. So ...

Roger Zelazny's science-fantasy novel Lord of Light is widely regarded as one of the best SF novels ever written. It sets up a series of puzzles, the action is non-stop, and plot still gave me small surprises even though this is the fourth time I have read it. It uses Hindu mythology to re-envision the often-told story of a planetary colony that develops an oppressive ruling class. It is clearly a work by an exceptional poet and professional writer at his best. It shares a core narrative with many other Zelazny stories: a seriously imperfect self-centred immortal protagonist surrounded by vividly defined supporting characters. If you take a look at Isle of the Dead, Lord Demon, and the carefully crafted Roadmarks you will see a pattern that evolves to its most profitable form in the Princes in Amber potboilers. Zelazny was part of the New Wave of science fiction of the 1960s, postwar writers who had the freedom to challenge the dominant social ideas about religion, sexuality, socia...

 I have accumulated way too many non-fiction books. So why don't I just read them and pass them on? It turns out that learning useful information by from most books is massively inefficient. Most non-fiction authors don't write handbooks or reference materials, the kind that are dense with information. Instead, they sprinkle a few key points - less than a couple of pages worth - over two hundred pages. The other 198 pages are often well-written and interesting and insightful and personal. A perfect example is James Lovelock's "The Ages of Gaia". I found myself digging through pages of chatty personal opinion to find out simple information on how the history of our atmosphere matches the geological record. The problem is human memory: we don't easily sort out and memorize the critical insights, the ones that fit with other knowledge and give us new tools for understanding humanity and the world around us. Instead we remember the narratives, the stories, pretty ...

 Suggested wording for illustrated display commemorating the 150th anniversary of BC's entry into Confederation, to be located in Strathcona Park. Strathcona British Columbia joined Canada in 1871 on the promise of a transcontinental railway within ten years. That promise was derailed by the Pacific Scandal that brought down John A MacDonald's government in 1873. One of the Conservative mutineers that ended the corrupt deal between the government and Hugh Allan was Donald Smith. Smith's own associates then built the railroad and acquired huge quantities of real estate, Smith himself bending the last spike in 1885. Smith was a central or background figure in the Hudson's Bay Company, industry and banking, the CPR, Vancouver real estate and just about everything else in the massive expansion of Canadian colonial industrial capitalism of the late 1800's. A loyal supporter of British imperialism, he was sober, hard-working, incredibly wealthy and well-connected, and a s...

I went through a lot of material about how Color Theory is taught to artists and selected only the essentials. It could use a lot more illustration, but I kept it under 20 pages. Google Drive displays only the text in the RTF file, so you will have to download it to read it. RTF files usually display fine on almost any system. The link is here:    Deconstructing Color Theory ver 18 Header picture:  

 Here's a comment that I did for a Youtube video about the Alec Baldwin firearm death: Thank you KB32 for showing us how to check a revolver just like the one Alec Baldwin is alleged to have misused. Hollywood has lots to answer for. The Wallechinsky family documented decades ago how the place runs on money, power and exploitative sex. And you are right that Hollywood is the home of gun porn (which bears the same relationship to real life firearm use that commercial porn does to real life sex). Hollywood uses firearms and weapons so much that people who work in props - just the guys in the shop - have to take a firearms course. Props people here in Vancouver have a rule: never hand an actor anything - anything - that they can mis-handle. Because they always do. If you hand them a sword, someone has to make that sword duller than a toddler's dinner knife. If you hand them a fire extinguisher, a prop person has to take the extinguisher and discharge it first. If you hand them so...

  To: Bob MacDonald and Producers, Quirks and Quarks, CBC Topic: Russell Funk and the low-hanging fruit Your show always has some good factual stuff that counterbalances the excesses and distortions of the news entertainment industry. But Russell J. Funk caught my attention. I automatically thought of the science and tech scammer Elizabeth Holmes, venture capitalism in a lab coat. When Funk started, I expected a classic discussion about Kuhnian paradigms and progress. (Like this one: ) https://stmuscholars.org/misunderstood-or-mistake-paradigms-shifts-and-the-growth-of-science/ The first clue that some different game was afoot was the straight-faced use of the term "disruptor", a word that is usually a joking term, as in the recent dark satirical comedy "Glass Onion" . "Disruption" is a trendy compression of the concepts nicely laid out by Andy Kessler in his "Running Money". https://www.amazon.ca/Running-Money-Honchos-Mons...

Santa Buddha                            Short Fiction by Hugh Tayler 2022 December ver02a   I was picking up spilled Lego around the Free Table when someone famous and her two daughters walked up to the table.  She's one of those people who always says hi or makes a thoughtful remark that gets others talking. She seems instantly familiar, so I think she's famous, but I'm not sure for what.   The girls found a banana box under the table and dragged it out to look at what was in it. I said, "Yeah, there must 15 dolls in that box but someone took their feet off. It's creepy but I haven't had time to reinstall them." One of the girls said, "We'll do it!"  And their mum said, "But you can only take one doll each. We have so many toys already." I said, "So you don't need more Christmas stuff?" I pointed to a small stack of random decorations wit...

Here are contents of an email to reporter Erica Hellerstein, who did a piece in Coda Story with the title "Grieving California".  Thank you for saying what Joan Didion isn't here to say. I'm sorry, but I skimmed your piece on grieving California. Twice. I just could not look too closely at the degree of personal loss it contained, the loss that so many of us share. I became fascinated by the geography of California when our daughter's husband moved to Mountain View to work for "a company that sells advertising". Every year for five years we drove down from Vancouver BC to visit them. I found a bicycle and used to go riding on the Bay Trail between Alivio and Palo Alto. I read about the history of the Bay Area, then I read David Carle's "Water and the California Dream" and the place took on a whole different dimension. And, of course, I found Joan Didion's California essays. We had one last trip planned, one last chance for me to see the...

Fiction Addiction - rereading "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner Warning: All Spoilers, Not a Review If you are thinking of reading "Stand on Zanzibar" (SoZ),  it is worth trying at least a couple of hundred pages, especially if you are a developing writer.  It was a Hugo-winning blockbuster SF book when it came out in 1968: unique in style, massive in size and scope, and full of ideas and memorable characters. It is still in print as part of the SF Masterworks series. Born in 1934, Brunner would have been in his early thirties, a hard-working and skilled professional writer, someone who cared deeply about injustices and social problems. I couldn't put the book down when I first read it and I have re-read it at least a couple of times since then. Fifty-four years have passed since it was written, and ten years have passed since 2010, the year in which the book was set.  There are biographies of Brunner and retrospective reviews of the book on line, some of whic...

 For the first time in weeks I woke up with nothing to add to my color notes.  If you have suggestions, please share. If this version is solid, I'll break it into sections with running heads and turn it into a PDF. 2023 January 10: polished community version with improvements to Design Notes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12McGqItmmbJE_uP-uIC-jcPhk8xCZoiT/view?usp=share_link Color illustration by Lichtenberg from Tobias Mayer, who proposed a three dimensional model of color over two hundred years ago.  Old link to previous file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e4L7lI4ssqhhQU6LzlABg4h2GTQawVaj/view?usp=share_link

The latest version of my color notes, reorganized to take a closer look at Color Theory. Too big to post as a blog page, so it's a Google Drive download. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F6ZFIhhj9x4r5cC92-0irv1OF3p4j2C-/view?usp=share_link Let me know if you think of a way to make it more logical and useful. An image for a header:

  Improbable - by Hugh Tayler 2022 November 1st My next door neighbor was a documentary photographer and I collected cameras, but we always ended up talking about something else, usually bicycles. Four years ago, I gave him and his wife a lift to the hospital. He needed tests for something potentially serious, the kind of thing that happens to a lot of people our age.  The next morning my wife Joan and I loaded the station wagon and drove to California for a couple of weeks. We were a thousand miles away when we got the news that my friend and neighbor had died suddenly. I never really got to say good-bye to him. This year I was out on the sidewalk in front of our place getting ready for Halloween, sweeping leaves and picking up around the local Free Table. A woman who regularly tidies the free table was there, organizing the donated items. We happened to get talking about how this was a time of year to remember people who had passed away. According to the Old Traditions, the...

Local 1611 of the Laborer's Union ran a series of contests each month through 2022 to encourage member involvement. The theme for September was what Labour Day means: I was born on the first of September, so when I was a kid Labour Day meant that I never went to school on my birthday. As a young adult, Labour Day meant time to sign up for some fall courses: Concrete Repair, or Demolition Cutting Torch, or Non-Violent Social Action. No, the Training Fund did not teach me non-violent social action: that was the Quakers.  But every labour course or event I attended always carried the same underlying message: a better world is possible if we work for it. Together. As an old guy,  Labour Day is a reminder that we are all part of history. Labour Day in 2022 comes a hundred and fifty years after printers in Toronto went on strike as part of the Nine-Hour Movement. Twenty-four of them were arrested because trade union activity was a "criminal conspiracy". In the political fuss th...

To CBC Sunday Magazine:   Thank you sincerely for the piece you did with Joshua Knelman about Big Tobacco and its cozy relationship with government. I plan to listen to it again to see if I missed anything. A few points to file away for the next time you run a tobacco story: The industry had a deep connection to the Liberal Party decades ago. Tobacco farming was really profitable back in the 1970s. Our housemate Sylvie once worked on a tobacco farm where she had the best wages and working conditions of any of her jobs. Years and years ago I heard a health economist talking about tobacco. His take was that tobacco-related medical costs were misleading: heavy tobacco users typically died 20 years earlier and lung cancer moved fast and was inevitably fatal. When you look at the medical costs that people total up in that extra 20 years, every tobacco death is a net saving, and a significant one. Not sure what story today's numbers would tell, if you could get them. Pension...

My Color Tech posting was just too big for people who need a simple review of the fundamentals to build color confidence. "Color in 30 Pages - version 10a" is half the size and more focused. But it is still too big for a webpage, so here's the link to Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13b9RLyFaOb_LCEcrcsInZtkDCoUNsGRY/view?usp=sharing   It will get better again when Joan gives me a new and improved color wheel and a new color disc. We are also working on a "Cheat Sheet" version that will work as a blog page.