Random Fur & Intriguing SF Book
Saturday, April 23rd, 2011 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jesse_the_kAround noon I decided it was time to write a post. Around four I sat down to compose it. But what editor should I use? AH! the glories of open source. There are scores of free editors I can poke at and pick at instead of writing. Confirmed that I can't hook ScribeFire up to DreamWidth. See that LiveJournal has been removed from the supported list for MarsEdit. Ah screw it. Let's just write.
Things have been moving extra slowly lately. I've been sleeping one to four more hours a day. Industrial strength sloth. So let's contemplate the past instead.
Most recently, between noon and four I finished an intriguing, political, page-turning book recommended to me byteresan_vortex. It's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. The surprise for me was the writer's identity: Orson Scott Card. He's a prolific SF writer, a committed Mormon, and as conservative as one gets in the U.S.A. Since 2004, I've heard his name more often connected with his virulent opposition to same-sex marriage (and homosexuals in general) than for his SFF.
And yet I found this novel alive with the hope that humans can love and care for each other (not an exclusively Christian POV, but one that many Christians do share). It's also a recuiting novel for folks interested in history. His central characters are technomagicians, living in an environmentally degraded Earth, able to see the horrors of all history through a super one-way ansible. They seek a hinge-point to turn aside from the self-destructive path. Since these scholars come from parts of the world brutalized by colonialism, they see forbidding slaveholding while promoting equal rights and non-violence as the foundation for a better world. I was certainly intrigued by elegant time-travel and creative speculation on first causes. One portion of the novel was based on a novella titled Atlantis, available for free reading at this link.
Things have been moving extra slowly lately. I've been sleeping one to four more hours a day. Industrial strength sloth. So let's contemplate the past instead.
Most recently, between noon and four I finished an intriguing, political, page-turning book recommended to me by
teresan_vortex. It's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. The surprise for me was the writer's identity: Orson Scott Card. He's a prolific SF writer, a committed Mormon, and as conservative as one gets in the U.S.A. Since 2004, I've heard his name more often connected with his virulent opposition to same-sex marriage (and homosexuals in general) than for his SFF. And yet I found this novel alive with the hope that humans can love and care for each other (not an exclusively Christian POV, but one that many Christians do share). It's also a recuiting novel for folks interested in history. His central characters are technomagicians, living in an environmentally degraded Earth, able to see the horrors of all history through a super one-way ansible. They seek a hinge-point to turn aside from the self-destructive path. Since these scholars come from parts of the world brutalized by colonialism, they see forbidding slaveholding while promoting equal rights and non-violence as the foundation for a better world. I was certainly intrigued by elegant time-travel and creative speculation on first causes. One portion of the novel was based on a novella titled Atlantis, available for free reading at this link.
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Date: 2011-04-24 01:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-24 02:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-24 04:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-24 09:38 pm (UTC)None of my formative SF was exemplars of social or economic justice, anti-war, or feminism or any of the other causes that I embraced as a young woman.