Quote of the Day 5-10-20 (George Takei)

@GeorgeTakei

“I didn’t spend my childhood in barbed wire enclosed internment camps so I could listen to grown adults today cry oppression because they have to wear a mask at Costco.”

Our First 1,000 Posts — Best Science Fiction Posts

Sharp and Pointed has been around for just over three years, and we’ve put up just over 1,000 posts —  this  is number 1,001 — in 37 categories. Coincidentally, we reached 30,000 hits yesterday.

Science fiction is probably our most popular category, and we’ve put up nearly 100 sci-fi posts. Here, in no particular order, are those we consider the best.

• Anarchist Science Fiction: Essential Novels
• Positive Science Fiction: Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” Novels
• Quote of the Day 3-29-16 (Ken Macleod)
• Quote of the Day 3-6-16 (George Takei)
• Dominion, by C.J. Sansom
• The Martian, by Andy Weir
• Australian Science Fiction Great George Turner (Part I)
• Australian Science Fiction Great George Turner (Part II)
• Australian Science Fiction Great George Turner (Part III)
• He Is Risen
• Abductee Blues
• The Rhesus Chart, by Charles Stross
• Oblivion, Joseph Kosinski director
• A Neglected Sci-Fi Gem: Code of the Lifemaker, by James P. Hogan
• Another Neglected Sci-Fi Gem: The Immortality Option, by James P. Hogan
• Insistence of Vision, by David Brin
• A Cold War Curio: Tomorrow!, by Philip Wylie
• New Earth, by Ben Bova
• The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi
• Quote of the Day 11-16-15 (Cory Doctorow)
• Lucky Strike, by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Revisiting Silverberg
• Red Planet Blues, by Robert J. Sawyer
• Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson
• Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
• Intrusion, by Ken Macleod
• Quote of the Day 3-17-15 (Mick Farren)
• He Walked Among Us, by Norman Spinrad
• Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson
• We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• TVA Baby, by Terry Bisson
• Solaris Rising 2, Nick Whates ed.

This is the first of our first-1,000 “best of” posts. We’ll shortly be putting up other “best ofs” in several other categories, including Addictions, Anarchism, Atheism, Economics, Humor, Interviews, Music, Politics, Religion, Science, and Skepticism.

Quote of the Day 3-6-16 (George Takei)

“I was living in New York and I was doing fairly well, because I’d been lucky enough to get a part in a play. It was a musical called Fly Blackbird, and it ran for almost six months. However, when the play closed I began really struggling. I got nothing , no roles, no auditions, nothing. And when you’re struggling, you do whatever you can to survive. So my roommate had an aunt that catered these posh parties in Sutton Place, and for unemployed actors, these things were great. You’d go in for one night, hang up jackets, serve some food, clean up and go home. They paid well, and I always used to bring home the leftovers as a kind of bonus.

“At the same time, it was very hard for Asian actors to get cast in anything other than the role of a servant, and I’d made a vow to myself that I’d never play that sort of demeaning character. I felt like I had a real responsibility to try and fight that stereotype. In fact, in the middle of all this struggling, I actually turned down a role on Broadway because it was just another Oriental servant’s role.

“However that night I was back there in Sutton Place, with my little black bow tie and my little white jacket, standing at the front door, accepting all of these fur jackets and lugging them up to the coat room,. I was able to survive this paradox by telling myself, ‘This is not real. I’m really an actor.’ Y’know, I convinced myself that in real life I was just pretending to be a servant. At the same time, acting as a servant would have somehow seemed far more real, and far more degrading.”

–George Takei, quoted by William Shatner and Chris Kreski in Star Trek Memories