Word: semis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...clear what they can do. In the University the persecution of liberals and leftists has been particularly intense, but the democratic movement is on the upswing. Those who have actively demonstrated their opposition to the regime were expelled from institutions of higher learning. But now a new movement of semi-legal syndicalism seems to be springing up, and this time the students are slightly more experienced. They know how to exploit legality better, they keep the rules of secrecy more conscientiously when it is necessary, and, most important, the numbers of consciously politicized students are increasing...
...fostering these illusions, the University does semi-consciously what it does with deliberation in its policy of budgetary non-disclosure: tactically rationing information. Decisions about budget allocations or investment policy are reached, we are told, by a mysterious but preeminently rational process. Criticism, groping in the dark, is offered a helping hand just after it has fallen off the cliff. A tactical reply to this procedure, of course, is to produce ever more detailed alternatives to those proposed by the University, thereby forcing it to reveal the contraband information in the course of its rebuttal--or else demonstrate its lack...
...logical place for a convocation of strangers who are terrorized yet basically humane. In the world's judgment, the characters in Small Craft Warnings are seedy derelicts: a strident middle-aged beautician (Helena Carroll) who rarely bathes and whose trailer shack-up is a monosyllabic semi-Neanderthal (Brad Sullivan); a red-headed hooker (Cherry Davis) whose hand is on every man's groin except that of her woefully plastered boy friend (William Hickey); a drunken doctor (David Hooks) who kills when he aborts and a sardonically nihilistic homosexual (Alan Mixon). The world casts stones; Williams applies the balm...
...almost no exposition of states of mind or feelings. Except for the straightforward action sequences, everything is conveyed by the dialogue. And the dialogue is tremendous: not an exact reproduction of lower-class Bostonese (that would simply get on our nerves), but a perfect simulation of the way semi-literates talk. This is Eddie Coyle talking to Jackie Brown...
Moreover, in spite of any general trend toward a broadening audience for Kubrick or Vonnegut, Fantasy and Science Fiction is permeated by a sense of its special readership. The editorial tone seems directed toward a circle as avid as the readers of pulp mystery magazines and as semi-expert as the clientele of Popular Mechanics. A typical introduction to one of the stories might read: "Now here's a story by an old friend of F& SF readers, one of the best young writers in the field. We think it's a story you're really going to like...