Due to some net-burp, yesterday's post didn't get posted! Here it is! Just pretend that the five is a four. Thanks!

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Five days till we launch and the buzz continues. The great cats down at SF Signal have been posting some great comments on world science fiction (see here, here, and here), and today's post on the subject has a wonderful observation from Yoshio Kobayashi on Japanese SF:

Japanese SF is traditionally focused on Hard SF, as we're accustomed to regard books as nothing but good learning tools, rather than mere entertainment. To our general public, science fiction is intellectual but difficult and weird stuff, and not silly escapist adventure as Hollywood treatment of it suggests. And the tradition lives. For example, at Nippon 2007, the first Worldcon in Japan, our current prime minister attended and gave a speech to the fans, even though he was not remotely a candidate.

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We take SF seriously, compared with the American public. ... And [Japanese SF writers] always build stories with scientific and technological ideas to solve the problems, rather than speculation for speculation's sake. So to unfamiliar eyes, our hard SF may look too optimistic and simplistic, a primitive form of scientifiction, but that's not true, I think. Foreign scientists used to dismiss the idea of humanoid robots, but we've developed ones like Asimo, which are not expensive toys, but actually intended and developed to serve the handicapped and elderly people more efficiently.

The whole series of posts is worth reading for anyone interested in how science fiction is developing outside the US and the UK. And in five days, you'll get your first taste. That number again is number five.