Skip to main content

Two related thoughts

Event #1: I have reached the Stone Ages in my Ancient Civ class. Always a merry time, I get to talk about the rise of human civilization, and the great changes that brought about the rise of agriculture, villages and cities in rapid (relatively speaking) succession. One small part of today's lesson was giving a definition of religion (yes, I talk about religion in my history class). Let me write it down and see what you think of it.
Religion is the belief in the unseen. If you can't see it, hear it, touch it, smell it or prove that it exists and yet you still know that it exists -- that's religion. It's one of the most basic characteristics of the human species. The odd pile of flowers over dead Neanderthals aside, we seem to be the only hominid capable of such an interesting assumption. I might quibble with the definition but it seems to work for seventh grade history.

 Event #2: This blog popped up on Twitter today and I was blown away by the force of its argument and the clear-eyed, sober realism it expresses. I am a speculative fiction writer. Like the writer of Starship Reckless, I write because the far-fetched ideas of FTL, personality uploading, and radical economics of Cory Doctorow appeal to me. I have faith that even though we haven't seen much space exploration, we will in the near to middling future. I have faith that although artificial intelligence (to borrow a phrase from an RPG I like, Diaspora) has a lot more of the former than the latter, some day computers will meet and quickly exceed our own intelligence. I have faith.

 Am I just a religious writer in speculative drag?

 I do not have a strong science back ground. I took undergrad anthropology and psychology and left math to the people who liked it. I read a lot of popular science but I'm not so foolish to think that in anyway makes me an expert biology, physics, or computers. I like science. I believe in science. I have faith that the view expressed through science is the correct one although I might not have the best metaphor to explain why.

 I felt chastened by Athena Andreadis's blog not because I thought we were going to Alpha Centauri next week but because when something like an earth-sized planet is discovered in a neighboring star system I begin to dream. Dreaming is not rational but it is necessary for life. Dreaming rises above the disordered meaningless clutter of politics, daily life, and the odd natural disaster and casts our eyes upwards. 

 Dreaming is not always practical though. I doubt I or anyone I know will ever see what world circles Alpha Centauri and I'm glad blogs like Starship Reckless exist to remind me of that. 

 Anyway, read the blog, it's an elegantly phrased, well-supported downer and someone needed to say it.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation.  Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Reaction to Peter Watts' "Echopraxia"

Peter Watts’ Echopraxia  is a side-sequel to his previous hard sf horror novel  Blindsight . Daniel Bruks, a biologist in the Eastern Oregonian desert, gets stuck in the middle of a war between a fugitive vampire and a cult of rewired post-humans called Bicamerals, ultimately kidnapped by them as they head towards the sun. The goal of post-human and vampire alike is to investigate a possible alien intelligence gaining strength there, to determine if it poses a threat, or offers a weapon for the two sides as they struggle for advantage. Bruks' goal is simple survival. Reading Watts is a simultaneously bracing and discouraging experience. Bracing because his depiction of the future and the oddities who inhabit it continue to get better and better, his plots more complicated and more involving, his characters less like sock-puppets for his ideas and more like actual human beings (or whatevers). Discouraging because Watts uses his considerable gifts, artistic and academic, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Dorsia Brevia Solution

While "Green Mars," didn't include nearly as much mind-blowing speculative awesomeness as the first book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, it did include one set-piece that I enjoyed very much: The Dorsa Brevia Declaration. As mentioned in my review earlier this week, the plot of Green Mars focuses on the approach of a second Martian revolution. The first revolution, as described in Red Mars, was a spasm of senseless violence, mayhem, and targeted assassination, accomplishing little besides the deaths of many, many important characters in the story. As would-be revolutionaries gather in an enormous lava tube named Dorsa Brevia, the central question is how would any future revolution escape the fate of the first. The process, which I'll describe below, was very familiar to me. During the course of my path to teaching history in Middle School, I worked at an afterschool program named Citizen Schools based in Boston. Citizen Schools had its ups and down...
Post a Comment
Read more