Reflections Collections -- 3/13/11

I am writing this post while watching CNN and the reports on Japan's disastrous situation following the earthquake, the tsunami and the partial meltdown of its nuclear power plant. The Arab League is discussing making a no-fly zone over Libya. The Arab nations are in turmoil with the potential of democratic change. Union bashing is the new tactic of Conservative American politics. Into these challenges comes the fan-based mission of RFF to foster literacy among our youth. It is, after all, the youth who will solve such problems in our future. Meanwhile, our thoughts and prayers and mental focus are with those of our world who are dealing with the problems of today.

Our heartfelt sympathies go out to all who have lost loved ones during these tumultuous weeks.

Image is Alien © julien tromeur - Fotolia.com
Alien ©julien tromeur - Fotolia.com. Used with permission by Valerie Coskrey only.

Most of what I would have to say this month has been posted in the blog as articles. So this issue is mostly links to those posts.

During the last month, there have been 3 FB Reports: First; Second, 2/18/11; and 3/6/11.

Dave has sent in information on Renovation and the work that RFF and AboutSF is doing getting ready for the workshop for teachers, parents, librarians and fans who are interested in teaching with science fiction and fostering literacy. This day-long workshop is sure to be interesting and informative. Read more about it in these blog posts: "Announcement: RFF Teams with AboutSF for Roadshow at Renovations" and Spotlight: Who I Would Like to See at Renovations 2011. The Spotlight features information about authors that have assisted in the mission of RFF in the past.

David Brin provided RFF with an excerpt of his Skeptical Environmentalist.

Two book reviews were posted this past month: Summers at Castle Auburn reviewed by Lynda Williams, and Space Winners reviewed by Rozalyn Mansfield. I will add that I found another reference to G.R. Dickson's book in which the person called it Space Swimmers. Additionally, two authors have asked me to review their newest books.

Three posts dealt directly with teaching with science fiction. If you add the comments in Rozalind's book review, that makes four. Three of the 4 are by Rozalind, so became an interlinked series.

• "What SF Story for YA is This?" is Rozalyn's puzzle starting the 3-part series.
  
• "Book Review: Space Winners by Gordon R. Dickson" is Rozalyn's book review.
  
• "Teaching with Science Fiction: Social Studies and ..." concludes Rozalyn's series with teaching suggestions and is a part of the Reflections series Teaching with Science Fiction."
  
• "Teaching with Science Fiction: 10 Reasons for Use of SF in the Science Classroom" is by Valerie Coskrey.
  

Another series with a blog posts this past month is To Share or Not to Share: How does one decide..." a continuing dialog on what criteria is used to recommend a book to youth. It expands on the question I am exploring on how to evaluate children's literature. This post is Part 2 in the series, and the 3rd post on the central question.

Happy St. Patrick's Day. And thank our lucky stars that we are able and willing to help those in the disaster zones of our earth today.

Reflections Collections -- 2/15/11

What a busy few weeks! Some activities listed below will be discussed in this blog post, some in other blog posts. Watch for the links. (Check back in few days for some items that are not yet posted. I will edit this page by adding links when these are posted.)

Alien ©julien tromeur - Fotolia.com
Licensed for use only by Valerie Coskrey

• A committee is working on setting up the newly incorporated RFF, Inc. Mission, goals, bylaws, projects, officers--all must be finalized. Look for an official report on all this activity soon when the Board of Directors authorizes a press release.
• Dave Anderson took part in a couple of book give-aways to young readers. In one, he gave 40 books to a kindergarten class, commenting that it was hard to find this many quality books of speculative fiction for this age group. All in all, he has recently donated 119 books to 3 kindergarten classes. He claimed to have learned that a ratio of just slightly more than 2:1 books per child seems to work best.
• Links to lessons using science fiction are in the first post of the new series "Teaching with Science Fiction." To introduce the series, Andy Love sent links to his educational essays;  Michael Kingsley sent a link to a short paper on Steppenwolf, the Rogue Planet; and Dave Anderson instructs us in what not to ask during a lesson.
• Several conversations at the rff Yahoo! Group, called Talking RFF, produced additional information of interest, including a booklist, opinions on what to call science fiction, how to decide what to recommend to youth, and personal opinions on numerous books. Read about them in the linked individual blog posts.
• A friend sent in a book review on The Grandmother's' Hive, a book suitable for youth written by new member Donna Barr.
• A new series of blog posts called "To Share or Not to Share" continues the search for a rubric began last month.
• David Brin sent an excerpt from his new non-fiction book in a topic called "Skeptical Environmentalist".
• Facebook links were highly informative, as always. Read the FB Reports for 2/3/11 and 2/18/11.
• Review the stats for this blog and the RFF Facebook page.
• Finally, there are additional snippets of historical information contributed by Dave Anderson and by Andy Love and others.

Snippets of History

Dave Describes the Past and Present of RFF

Reading for the Future enters our sixteenth year. RFF, Inc is meeting on line working on bylaws and nonprofit status. RFF, Inc is made up of the old guard and the young turks.

In 1995, Dave Brin, Greg Bear and Gregory Benford were the Killer Bs or young turks who wanted kids to read science fiction. I joined RFF in 1997 when Dave was CONduit's writer guest of honor who asked us what were we doing to get science fiction to the kids. CONduit is Utah's spring sf convention.

RFF will always be a grassroots organization with a common mission. I am giving a Kindergarten 40 pass-it-along books Monday..Friday I gave two Earthsea books to a sixth grader. Not all books are sf. The first word in RFF is reading. So if a kid reads Ender's Game that I passed it along to him -- success. Will he read more sf? Chances are good.

David-Glenn Anderson

Andy Asks for another Hugo Award Category

Andy Love sent a copy of a letter sent to WorldCon a while back. He provided Talking RFF with a copy of the letter during a recent discussion.

Andy Love

Who was Hal Clement, Really?

Some of our members of Talking RFF attended sci fi conventions with Hal Clement, author of numerous SF books suitable for youth; some worked with him on convention projects; some know him personally. Some of these RFFers provided us with this information.

Hal [Clement] used a different name for his teaching life, his writing life and his art life.

Hal was once LGoH, FGoH, & AGoH at the same con using his different names. :-)

Hal's real name was Harry Stubbs.

George Richard was his name as an artist.

One of the organizations with which RFF works closely is the Golden Duck Awards committee of the organization Duckon. Along with the Golden Duck Awards presented annually by Duckon is the annual Hal Clement Award for YA science fiction.

In a message to the RFF member who is also active in Duckon, Dave Anderson offered this snippet of history:

"I presented the Golden Ducks at Conucopia, the 1999 NASFiC on Friday,Aug 27. [http://www.99.nasfic.org] The two real Golden Ducks advocates were at Aussicon Three, Mebourne Australia. Attendance at the presentation included Hal Clement."

Thanks to Dave, Jim, and others.

Stats

Reflections Collections Stats for 2/10/11

Pageviews for last month, January 1011: 160
Pageviews since creation, October, 2010: 889.
Most Popular Post: Wake, Far-Seer and their author Robert J. Sawyer (December 2010)
Second Most Popular Post: Reflections Collections -- 11/7/10 (November 2010)
Third Most Popular Post: Krysia Anderson, A YA herself, Writer and Poet... (November 2010)

Reading For the Future page on Facebook Stats for 2/11/11

214 monthly active users; 20 since last week
325 people like this; 7 since last week
20 wall posts or comments this week; 20 since last week
90 visits this week; 40 since last week

'Til next time~Valerie C.

A Grab Bag of Thoughts from William Wood on Strategies, Goals, the Emerging Science of Morality, and Science Fiction

William Wood, In a comment to David Brin's post on Facebook, 10/23/10,  wrote a thoughtful essay on values. He completed the essay with words on the usefulness of science fiction in exploring alternatives.

First, the question tossed out by David Brin.

David Brin If communism was a principal threat to freedom a generation ago, can there be any doubt that the madness and danger is coming from a different direction today?

The Real Reason for Tea Parties - David Brin - Open Salon

open.salon.com

Lighting the political lamp (it may be on for a couple of weeks), let me begin with a disclaimer, for those of you who don't know me ... I despise all dogmatists, including those on the far-left. As a one-time keynoter for a Libertarian Party Convention, I have the bona fides of someone who has re...

Source: http://www.facebook.com/thedavidbrin, [10/23/10]

Next the Essay in a Comment by William Wood

Here's a grab bag of not-entirely-related thoughts...

FIRST, David, I think you are absolutely right to point to measurables [sic] as a basis for evaluating the success of alternative strategies. This is hard won data that we should prize accordingly.

SECOND, I think that a large part of the problem is that parties in this discussion are at odds not only over methods but over goals. We can't even agree, for instance, whether addressing climate change IS a goal (i.e. if it is real and/or caused by humans having put trillions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere) let alone HOW we might address it.

One type of participant in the discussion will try to inventory worthy goals (based either on concrete issues such as climate change, defeating poverty, protecting the world from WMD proliferation, conquering cancer, etc., or on aspirations such as returning to the moon, placing humans on Mars, etc.), develop means to achieve them, then weigh priorities.

Another type of participate will enter the discussion not with projects such as these in mind, but with the goal to protect individual liberties. Projects such as the above, requiring collective, coordinated will (and expense), are most easily seen as a threat to one with individual liberties in the forefront of her values.

This second problem is caused by the immaturity of the emerging science of morality. For so long, people have thought of morality in either religious terms or intuitive terms. Conceived either way, morality is no more than a fiction, a contest of who can persuade better to get his way. It's clear, though, that if we swap out the term "morality" and instead speak of a "science of human well-being", there is content here that is real. As Derek Parfit says, "Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement." (Reasons and Persons, p.454).

Looked at in terms of a science of well-being, it is clear that there is no such "thing" as a "right" to individual liberties (what could such a "thing" be? point to one, please!); acknowledging liberties, instead, is a strategy for achieving well-being -- one that works quite well in many contexts. We need to ask the deeper, harder questions, though. WHICH contexts, specifically? Where will it not work well? How may promoting the concept of individual liberty affect the aggregation of wealth, and what affects will that have on well-being? Etc.

Alas, many unknowns.

My own view is that promoting individual liberties (and their corollary: individual responsibilities and accountabilities) is probably a good default strategy for promoting well-being -- but the ecology of our interconnectedness is so complex, so little-understood, that we should be wide open to exceptions and in full support of more study.

Which brings me to my THIRD (and last!) point: SF as a genre is uniquely poised to be the literature of this experiment. It is the genre where positing possible futures is the norm! Some are posited as cautions, others as choices we may wish to pursue. We can rally 'til we're blue in the face, but what will really change the world is when lots of people can understand and embrace a choice for the future together. Stories do this far better than argumentation or argument! (Although, to Stewert's and Colbert's credit, humor does a damn fine job, too.) We need to be able to see, smell, LIVE the possible futures, in advance, to be able to choose them.

And sadly, I don't think sf is succeeding here. Not for lack of quality or insight, mind you! Gad, no! It's a much simpler reason: to connect to lots of people, literary sf has got to get off its high horse and get into film and television. Much. Much. More. What I would give, for instance, to have a series similar to Masterpiece Theater / Mystery! devoted to high-quality sf! How can we make this happen?!