Thought(less)

 

“What is most thought-provoking in these thought-provoking times, is that we are still not thinking.”

 – Martin Heidegger

 

Oh how I pine for the misspent days of my youth, pre-Internet, where anything worthy of interest had to be diligently sought out, read, pondered, and re-read, soul stirring stuff rarely transmitted in 280 pages, let alone 280 characters.

Quick example? I fondly think back on the hours and hours spent wandering the book shelves in the Rutgers library on College Avenue, five floors worth of rickety metal shelving holding dusty dusky books dozens and decades years old. The frayed cloth jackets of those esoteric relics from prior ages, cradled reverently in my hands, fingerprinted with ghosts of students past. My initial forays into religious and philosophic ideas, unguided (and, hence, usually unfruitful), a drunken ramble through pre-modern thought (and modern does not necessarily mean “better”). One key phrase or paragraph or reference would lead me to another book, and another, and another.

The good old days.

When I learned to think.

 

A Sane Take

I despise the state of politics since 2016. Actually, since 2008. I can think of few things worse to dwell on and be obsessed with than politics. The dumb jerk at my office is going to be in hysterics over the events of yesterday. I have no interest in it. But, as the saying goes, “you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”

Here’s the sane take:

You have 5 percent of the left that are the crazy true believers. You have 5 percent of the right that are the crazy true believers. They see violence as a legitimate means of gaining power. Their cause is the true cause, and those diametrically opposed to them are pure evil.

These two groups are inflamed by politicians and certain groups to nudge the culture in the direction that will obtain power for said politicians and certain groups.

One side has academia, tech, the media, and, now, sports. The other has talk radio, the military, and a great swath of America between the coasts. One sides holds an idealized image of an America better than it actually is, the other holds a slandered image of an America worse than it is.

Ninety percent of us just want to live our lives in peace. We want to be free to work where we want doing what we want. We obey just laws. We attend religious services. We save for vacations and for retirement, for our children’s education and to have a better life in general. We care for our fellow man. We respect those who hold these similar beliefs. We are not racists, homophobes, or fascists. Nor are we communists or socialists. The Ninety Percent are the red blood cells of America, the engine of America, the heart and brains and marrow of America.

Like some invading pathogen, the extreme left and the extreme right need to be walled off and ultimately starved out. Never happen, but thanks to the omnipresent amplifier of anonymity that the Internet is, the voices of these extreme fringes, and those in power and/or political office or those seeking power and/or political office, seem louder than they actually are.

And that is what has led to all this talk of a second civil war.

Instead of Make America Great Again or Build Back Better, how about a

RETURN TO NORMALCY.

 

Hard SF on Deck

 

Over the past year or two I’ve found myself consuming lots of fantasy, historical, and horror fiction, in about that order of volume. All well and good. I enjoy my forays into fantasy, such as my travels in the Malazan Empire over the summer, my evenings spent in Victorian London on Baker Street, or the nightmares I’ve spent with Dr. Warthrop monster hunting.

But now that I’ve got a skeleton of an outline and fourteen pages of ideas to adorn it, I’m going to have to switch to hard SF. Science fiction that’s just as heavy on the science as it is on the fiction. It’s like a boxer getting ready to enter the ring again, or a football team advancing to the league championships. You gotta watch tape of your next opponent, to know where you stand. What needs to improve, what weaknesses need to be attacked, what’s been done to death and where advantages lie.

The genre this new idea I’ve been infatuated and on fire with since October 1 will be hard science fiction, and some things I’m going to have to address are such things as cultures and societies of different planets at war with each other, as well as how that war will be waged and what futuristic weapons will be waging it.

The last two books I put away since Thanksgiving past helped orient me to a proper frame of mind: The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl and As on a Darkling Plain by Ben Bova. To read over the next three months I picked five other paperbacks off my shelf as I’m completing my outline and my characters and plot and produce the rough draft:

Red Mars (1993) by Kim Stanley Robinson. Won Nebula Award for Best Novel, book one of a trilogy.

This one’s been on the shelf for nearly 20 years. I remember forging in 50 pages back around the time of 9/11. Then that whole thing happened and my interest in the book dropped overnight. A couple of jobs followed, then the wife and I bought a house, had children, I took other jobs, and all the while this book of man’s attempt to terraform the Red Planet gained dust on the far end of the bookshelf.

Count to a Million (2011) by John C. Wright

This book, on the other hand, I picked up six weeks ago, purely on the basis that the author has one of the greatest blogs on the Internet. I – and those whose blogs I read – have been reading him for years, but only now, unfortunately and to my shame, have I purchased a ticket into his SF world. Not sure what it’s about, exactly, though the back cover talks about gunslingers and apocalypses, cryosuspension and alien artifacts. Hmm. Sounds intriguing.

Nexus (2013) by Ramez Naam, book one of a trilogy

Picked this up Saturday purely on a whim and a quick scan of the summary. Could be crap, could be the Next Big Thing. Certainly it seems to be the exact type of story Hollywood would greenlight: a new drug sweeps society, allowing humans the mind meld with each other, and nefarious things are afoot once an innocent researcher comes across evidence of such afooted things of nefariousness. Seems a bit Crichtonesque, too, and I went through a late-90s phase were I read everything of his.

And a pair by Alan Dean Foster:

Voyage to the City of the Dead (1984)

Alan Dean Foster gained fame and fortune through SF movie novelizations – I first read him in the Alien novelization. Later I realized I had read him earlier, as a pre-teen, as he had ghost-written George Lucas’s Star Wars novel. Over the years I’ve read a bunch more, plus, and this is important, a very, very involving, suspenseful and original work, Midworld. My enjoyment with that book inspired me to pick this one up, a study of three alien cultures interacting on a river world. I bought it on vacation down in Hilton Head six years ago and read 40 or 50 pages, but put it down upon returning home and never picked it up again. Until now.

Phylogenesis (1999), book one of a trilogy

Not entirely sure what plot this one follows, but it involves a limited relationship between humans and an insect race in the years first contact. Both species find the other repulsive. But two misfits, a human and a Thranx, meet and momentous adventure ensues.

So that’s 2021 Q1 reading, so to speak. If I buzz through them I have a trio of Heinlein as backup – Between Planets, Citizen of the Galaxy, and a possible re-reading of Time for the Stars.