Post by Scott LurndalPost by Ted Nolan <tednolan>Post by Andrew McDowellPost by Andrew McDowellPost by James NicollFive Sympathetic Science Fiction Bureaucrats
https://www.tor.com/2021/08/11/five-sympathetic-science-fiction-bureaucrats/
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Ivan Vorpatril as a sympathetic bureacrat? In 2021?
This is the Ivan Vorpatril possessed of a sex drive so powerful that
he propositions every woman who crosses his path on the basis that one
success compensates for many rejections.
I don't see the problem.
In fact, it's a pretty well known joke (cleaned a bit): "Yeah, I get
slapped a lot, but I get lucky more often that you might think".
Wasn't there a rather famous sci fi author who famously made
a similar claim?
Well, Norman Spinrad in _Bug Jack Barron_ (1969)
made Jack tell it to colleagues.
What Jack actually did was to sleep with his
television network PA whom he believed, wrongly
as I recall, to have been told by management
although not by him that that was part of the job,
and also to cruise bars after his show to pick up
any random willing woman who looked like
his ex-wife.
Wikipedia thinks that the "feminist" typesetters
of Michael Moorcock's _New Worlds_ objected
to the book. I don't know what that means -
did they make Moorcock re-type it himself?
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_Jack_Barron>
Reading it much later, I assumed it was something
you could already do... if you lived where Jack Barron
lives - New York or Los Angeles, I suppose, I don't
remember. He lives in the near future - counting from
1969 - and he hosts a call-in TV show with videophones.
I suppose that techniques such as live picture in picture
may have been futuristic?...