Waldenbooks was; it was bought by Borders in the 90s and liquidated in 2011.
Kay-Bee was a toy store (the "hobby" part of the name referred to things like model railroads). I'm not sure why they were the first major retailer in our area to carry Dungeons and Dragons books. I guess since they also carried board games and D&D started out as a wargame played with miniatures? Eventually, RPGs became big enough that my hometown could support one or two dedicated gaming stores, but that was after I'd moved away.
This take shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire purpose and function of fiction. Scifi novels aren't technical manuals; they're just a form of speculative fiction with technological trappings. Fantasy novels are speculative fiction with magical trappings. (And science fantasy is speculative fiction with both.) Speculative fiction is what happens with the writer asks themselves, "Yes, but what if..." and then tries to follow that to its logical conclusion.malloc wrote: ↑Wed Apr 26, 2023 12:37 pmI should have noted that this is merely my personal and subjective opinion and not intended as an objective repudiation of fantasy. None the less, I find it way easier to imagine AI taking over the world or space colonization becoming a reality than magic being shown to exist. I worry everyday about AI becoming too powerful for us to control, whereas I've never once worried about a dragon laying waste to my hometown.
There's a famous quote from LeGuin which I think sums this up very nicely:
So reading a novel about a future dystopia where AI has run amok and thinking that this has prepared you to live in a future world where AI has run amok is naïve to say the least. The best it can do is to give you some things to think about. But you're going to need some pretty crunchy understanding of what our real-world AI is like (and how that differs from the novelist's depiction of it) in order to apply those thoughts to real-world circumstances.LeGuin wrote:The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future--indeed Schrödinger most famous thought experiment goes to show that the "future," on the quantum level, cannot be predicted--but to describe reality, the present world. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
A lot of novelists say that their subject is humanity or the human condition. The best ones, IMNSFHO, are the ones who really understand people, their aspirations and motivations, their limitations and inhibitions. A lot of "Golden Age" authors were--to put it mildly--not great at this and, as a result, their work doesn't hold up. You can learn as much about humanity and its behaviour from a well-written fantasy novel as you can from a well-written science fiction novel or work of literary fiction. Fantasy novels, for instance, have powerful nonhuman intelligences which humans attempt to make do their bidding, with mixed results. How they attempt this, what they expect to achieve, and what the actual consequences are directly relevant to pondering what humanity's interaction with powerful AIs might look like. (Similarly, dragons--depending on the writer's conception--are either powerful environmental threats humans attempt to ward off or mighty weapons of destruction they attempt to wield. How the characters in a fantasy novel go about this tells you a lot about how the author thinks people are deal with powerful threats or wield dangerous weapons, and this information is as relevant to living in the present day as a similarly talented scifi author's take on cyborgs or laser cannons or whatever.)
