A comment on fantasy

In a pair of recent posts, james_nicoll has been discussing breaking American fantasy writers out of the pseudo-Celtic mode. (This was probably inspired by reading a particularly bad pseudo-Celtic book, but he's discreet enough not to say which one.)

He implies in the later post that he thought that Kara Dalkey's Blood of the Goddess trilogy would have inspired others to venture into Indian settings. I said this in response:

I thought that Dalkey's Indian trilogy would have been a lot better at 500 pages than it was at 1000; I can't actually recommend it as published, though I would have loved to be able to. (It also would have been significantly better if even one of the Christian characters who was not the simpleton was actually a believing Christian rather than a garden-variety hypocrite and power-grubbing colonialist.)

And that tied in to something in his earlier post:

Boy, there's nothing quite like a modern fantasy with . . . the surprising revelation that while Wicca is true, Xtianity isn't.

Which combined to remind me that I've wanted for years to see a genre fantasy novel in which the new, vast, invader Monotheism which is trying to stamp out the old, local, virtuous, home-grown paganism is shown to be the better religion, with stronger magic that actually works better for most people and a nicer god who refuses to demand, say, human sacrifice. Just for a change. Note that even if I were the person to write genre fantasy novels, I would not be the person to write this book.

Wise comments on the current outbreak of war in the Levant

On LJ, no less: nancylebov points to a piece by osewalrus about what is allowed and what is smart. The outstanding part, though, is Nancy's frame:

[This is a] longish essay looking at all the major players in the Israel/Palestine/Lebanon conflict as though they have comprehensible motivations and aren't going to be willing to curl up and die because the other side is so obviously in the right. You'd think this would be the obvious way to think about the situation, but . . . It's harder than it looks when there's so much anger and fear and everyone is trying to grab the moral high ground.

And also

I think that if I were living [in Lebanon], it would be obvious to me that Israel is quite willing to screw up my life or end it at any time because of terrorist behavior I have no chance of controlling, and I'd be more inclined to blame the Israelis (who are operating on a much larger scale) than the terrorists.

Moore's Law, again

Almost as long as I have known nellorat and supergee, they have owned a home photocopier; they had one years before we moved to New York (and we're still grateful to cattitude for his help getting that one down the basement stairs during our move in 1992).

Not long after we moved, we had to replace the copier, and again circa 1998--they don't last forever. The second time, we went to an office supply company which we had reason to trust and found the model we needed. The key features that sold us on that particular model were a 1% zoom (which nellorat needed for her collages and for her work) and some ability to perform two-sided copying. The retail price of the copier was around $4200, which was (and is) a lot of money for us. So I went poking around on that newfangled web thing and quickly found the same model for $2200. I took a printout of the lower offer back to the local company, and the salesman immediately gave us a six year service contract free. (That was around an $1800 value; the extra money was worth it to have a local service contract at all.)

Time has passed. Our need for a copier is at least as great as it has ever been, probably higher. We've twice had to renew the service contract on the current machine in one-year installments, but now our fine new copier is so old that spare parts are hard to find, and last week it probably breathed its last. We asked our local company what they would recommend to replace it. They suggested the Ricoh Aficio 1515MF, which does everything our old machine does, plus has fax and network printer/scanner capability, plus a 70-page document feeder, plus "scan once/print many", plus automatic double-siding. No stapling, but man. And it's slightly smaller, and slightly lighter than our current machine. Their price: $4000, including three years of service.

So back I went to the web. There's a place selling brand-new 1515s--the basic version--for $990 on eBay ("Buy it now"). There's another place, AMatterOfFax.com, selling the MF for $1300 with free shipping. And we can get in-house service for the machine from our local supplier for $300/year, on a one-year contract.

Dear me. For some reason, it never occurred to me that Moore's Law was relentlessly driving the price of copiers down, too, but of course it is. I suspect that the next time we have to buy a copier, it will cost $3.75 and will be able to walk out to the car and bring in the paper from Staples. Heck, it will probably be able to call Staples and get the paper delivered.