Word: horror
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...while sci-fi may never fully shed its dweeby image, the reality has evolved along with the rest of pop culture. Readers can choose from a wide array of subgenres, including Tolkienesque fantasy, high-tech cyberpunk, horror sci-fi, feminist sci-fi, techno-thriller sci-fi, gay and lesbian sci-fi and even sci-fi erotica. Readership and authorship have broadened too: women now account for a third of the science-fiction audience, compared with just 10% in the '50s, and such writers as Ursula Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler (one of sci-fi's few African-American authors...
...staple soap-opera plot line of the '70s: a young woman meets a young man to whom she is inexorably drawn, but to her horror she soon discovers that they are brother and sister. That a contemporary drama (one that is unconnected to Aaron Spelling) could fuel itself with such a story line seems absurd. That it would succeed in doing it so artfully is an unanticipated pleasure...
Once the pro side has flipped this card, the opposition responds by feigning horror and replying that allowing criminals to have, say, five appeals rather than 12 would completely eliminate the constitutionality of our justice system. Usually left to the side is any mention of the qualitative, if not quantitative, difference between spending money to execute a criminal and spending money to keep the criminal alive...
...Kabul's streets, battling from house to house, killing 45,000 in one six-month period. Jahannam, says the Koran, is a hellish place of "harrowing torment" where people are kept in "heavy fetters and a blazing fire." This is punishment for sinners in the afterlife; such a horror is not known on earth. Kabul must surely be close...
...summer of 1972, as she recounts in a wry, wondering memoir, Red China Blues (Anchor Books; 405 pages; $23.95), she flew to Beijing to join the workers' paradise. A valued propaganda asset, she was enrolled at Beijing University, along with minders assigned to ensure her political purity. To the horror of her fellow students, she clamored to experience the nobility of manual labor, and was eventually allowed to serve at a Beijing tool factory, pretending to make lathes. Her naivete proved to be almost, but not quite, invincible. She learned fluent Chinese by shouting ritual denunciations ("Down with counterrevolutionary element...