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| 137,077
| Jun 04, 2015
| Jun 04, 2015
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Sep 18, 2024
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not set
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Sep 18, 2024
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| 0765391325
| 9780765391322
| B01AGCMO0U
| 3.71
| 139
| Feb 02, 2016
| Feb 02, 2016
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really liked it
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Jun 19, 2024
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Aug 11, 2024
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Jun 19, 2024
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| 0330514016
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| 0330514016
| 4.12
| 163,338
| 1953
| 2010
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it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages He could still see Konrad's tired blue eyes, and the golden stubble on his chin, as they shook hands an ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages He could still see Konrad's tired blue eyes, and the golden stubble on his chin, as they shook hands and parted in that ruined Prussian village, while the refugees streamed endlessly past. It was a parting that symbolized everything that had since happened to the world- the cleavage between East and West. He had laboured to take men to the stars, and in the moment of success the stars- the aloof, indifferent stars- had come to him. This was the moment when history held its breath, and the present sheared asunder from the past as an iceberg splits from its frozen, parent cliffs, and goes sailing out to sea in lonely pride. All that the past ages had achieved was as nothing now: only one thought echoed and re- echoed through Reinhold's brain: The human race was no longer alone. For more than a hundred years, the Republic of South Africa had been the centre of social strife. Men of good will on both sides had tried to build a bridge, but in vain- fears and prejudices were too deeply ingrained to permit any cooperation. Successive governments had differed only by the degree of their intolerance; the land was poisoned with hate and the aftermath of civil war. "The French produce the best second- raters in the world." Duval was the sort of man who supported that statement. Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias- boredom. Rashaverak's wings were folded so that George could not see them dearly, but his tail, looking like a piece of armoured hose- pipe, lay neatly curled under him. The famous barb was not so much an arrowhead as a large, flat diamond. Its purpose, it was now generally accepted, was to give stability in flight, like the tail- feathers of a bird. From scanty facts and suppositions such as these, scientists had concluded that the Overlords came from a world of low gravity and very dense atmosphere. Man was, therefore, still a prisoner on his own planet. It was a much fairer, but a much smaller, planet than it had been a century before. When the Overlords had abolished war and hunger and disease, they had also abolished adventure. Much of the Colony's musical experimenting was, quite consciously, concerned with what might be called "time span". What was the briefest note that the mind could grasp- or the longest that it could tolerate without boredom? Could the result be varied by conditioning or by the use of appropriate orchestration? Such problems were discussed endlessly, and the arguments were not purely academic. They had resulted in some extremely interesting compositions. But they knew in their hearts that once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization.... This, then, was New Athens and some of its dreams. It hoped to become what the old Athens might have been had it possessed machines instead of slaves, science instead of superstition. But it was much too early yet to tell if the experiment would succeed. Six coloured suns shared its sky, so that there came only a change of light, never darkness. Through the clash and tug of conflicting gravitational fields the planet travelled along the loops and curves of its inconceivably complex orbit, never retracing the same path. Every moment was unique: the configuration which the six suns now held in the heavens would not repeat itself this side of eternity. And even here there was life. Though the planet might be scorched by the central fires in one age, and frozen in the outer reaches in another, it was yet the home of intelligence. It was the end of civilization, the end of all that men had striven for since the beginning of time. In the space of a few days, humanity had lost its future, for the heart of any race is destroyed, and its will to survive is utterly broken, when its children are taken from it. There was no panic, as there would have been a century before. The world was numbed, the great cities stilled and silent. Only the vital industries continued to function. It was as though the planet was in mourning, lamenting all that now could never be. "In the centuries before our coming, your scientists uncovered the secrets of the physical world and led you from the energy of steam to the energy of the atom. You had put superstition behind you: Science was the only real religion of mankind. It was the gift of the western minority to the remainder of mankind, and it had destroyed all other faiths. Those that still existed when we came were already dying. Science, it was felt, could explain everything: there were no forces which did not come within its scope, no events for which it could not ultimately account. The origin of the universe might be forever unknown, but all that had happened after obeyed the laws of physics. "Yet your mystics, though they were lost in their own delusions, had seen part of the truth. There are powers of the mind, and powers beyond the mind, which your science could never have brought within its framework without shattering it entirely. All down the ages there have been countless reports of strange phenomena-poltergeists, telepathy, precognition-which you had named but never explained. At first Science ignored them, even denied their existence, despite the testimony of five thousand years. But they exist and if it is to be complete any theory of the universe must account for them. It would not have been a threat to us, and therefore we do not comprehend it. Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds. "We held the clock back, we made you mark time while those powers developed, until they could come flooding out into the channels that were being prepared for them. What we did to improve your planet, to raise your standards of living, to bring justice and peace-those things we should have done in any event, once we were forced to intervene in your affairs. But all that vast transformation diverted you from the truth, and therefore helped to serve our purpose. We are your guardians-no more. You called us the Overlords, not knowing the irony of that title. Let us say that above us is the Over-mind, using us as the potter uses his wheel. And your race is the clay that is being shaped on that wheel. We believe-it is only a theory-that the Overmind Is trying to grow, to extend its powers and its awareness of the universe. By now it must be the sum of many races, and long ago it left the tyranny of matter behind. It is conscious of intelligence, everywhere. "When our race is forgotten, part of yours will still exist. Do not, therefore, condemn us for what we were compelled to do. And remember this-we shall always envy you." At the end of one path were the Overlords. They had preserved their individually, their independent egos; they possessed self-awareness and the pronoun "I" had a meaning in their language. They had emotions, some at least of which were shared by humanity. But they were trapped, Jan realized now, in a cul-de-sac from which they could never escape. "The arrangement has some advantages: besides, no-one of intelligence resents the inevitable." That proposition, Jan reflected wryly, had never been fully accepted by mankind. There were things beyond logic that the Overlords had never understood. Six thousand million kilometres beyond the orbit of Pluto, Karellen sat before a suddenly darkened screen. The record was complete, the mission ended; he was homeward bound !br the world he had left so long ago. The weight of centuries was upon him, and a sadness that no logic could dispel. He lid not mourn for Man: his sorrow was for his own race, forever barred from greatness by forces it could not overcome. For all their achievements, thought Karellen, for all their mastery of the physical universe, his people were no better than a tribe that had passed its whole existence upon some flat and dusty plain. Far off were the mountains, where power and beauty dwelt, where the thunder sported above the glaciers and the air was clear and keen. There the sun still walked, transfiguring the peaks with glory, when all the land below was wrapped in darkness. And they could only watch and wonder: they could never scale those heights. ...more |
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Jun 11, 2024
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Jun 21, 2024
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Jun 11, 2024
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Paperback
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| 1473222370
| 9781473222373
| 1473222370
| 3.72
| 3,630
| Feb 01, 1955
| Feb 07, 2019
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really liked it
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★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book The line of darkness moved so slowly here that, with a little effort, a man could keep a ★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book The line of darkness moved so slowly here that, with a little effort, a man could keep abreast of it, could hold the sun balanced on the horizon until he had to pause for rest. Even then, it would slip so reluctantly from sight that more than an hour would pass before the last dazzling segment vanished below the edge of the Moon, and the long lunar night began. Ancient man, he remembered, had once been defined as a tool- making animal. He often felt that the best description of modern man would be a paper- wasting animal. The human race had been born on a world unique in the solar system, loaded with a mineral wealth unmatched elsewhere. This accident of fate had given a flying start to man's technology, but when he reached the other planets, he found to his surprise and disappointment that for many of his most vital needs he must still depend on the home world. It was a heart-freezing thought. At any moment, as likely as not, somewhere in the universe a whole solar system, with strangely peopled worlds and civilizations, was being tossed carelessly into a cosmic furnace. Life was a fragile and delicate phenomenon, poised on the razor's edge between cold and heat. But Man was not content with the hazards that Nature could provide. He was busily building his own funeral pyre. There were still those who believed that Man would have been happier had he stayed on his own planet; but it was rather too late, now, to do anything about that. In any case, had he remained on Earth, he would not have been Man. The restlessness that had driven him over the face of his own world, that had made him climb the skies and plumb the seas, would not be assuaged while the Moon and planets beckoned to him across the deeps of space. Sadler was struck by a sudden, somber thought. They had been built to withstand the forces that Nature could bring against them--but how pitiably fragile they would be if ever they faced the fury of Man! "It's difficult to say. They were very open and friendly with us, but then we were all scientists together and that helps a lot. It might have been different if we'd been politicians or civil servants." "Dammit, we *are* civil servants! That fellow Sadler was reminding me of it only the other day." "Yes, but at least we're *scientific* civil servants, which makes quite a difference. I could tell that they didn't care a lot for Earth, though they were too polite to say so. Legal arguments don't carry much weight when you're fighting thousand-atmosphere pressures on Jupiter, or trying to thaw out the frozen moons of Saturn. Don't forget, as you enjoy your mild spring days and peaceful summer evenings, how lucky you are to live in the temperate region of the solar system, where the air never freezes and the rocks never meltÉ Loyalty isn't just a matter of birth, but ideals. There can be times when morality and patriotism clash." High above the horizon was a ball of violet flame, perfectly spherical, and rapidly losing brilliance as it expanded. Within seconds, it had faded to a great cloud of luminous gas. It was dropping down toward the edge of the Moon, and almost at once had sunk below the skyline like some fantastic sun. He had been caught, though he did not know it, by the deadly glamor of war. There is a fatal strain in men that, whatever reason may say, makes their hearts beat faster when they watch the colors flying and hear the ancient music of the drums. Nothing is so demoralizing as to know that great shattering events are taking place, but to be totally unaware of their outcome. There are five hundred and twenty-seven names on that column, in alphabetical order. No mark distinguishes the men who died for the Federation fron those who died for Earth, and perhaps this simple fact is the best proof that they did not die in vain. "I came across a quotation once," he said, "that's been a considerable comfort to me. I'm not sure whether it was supposed to be cynical or not, but there's a great deal of truth in it. It was made, I believe, by a French statesman named Talleyrand, about four hundred years ago. And he said this: *What is treason? Merely a matter of dates.* You might care to think that over, Mr. Sadler." Against a landscape four hundred thousand kilometers away in space and two centuries ago in time, spy and counterspy drank the toast together. Each was full of memories, but those memories held no bitterness now. There was nothing more to say: for both of them, the story was ended. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 05, 2024
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Jun 10, 2024
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Jun 05, 2024
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Paperback
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| 1884612091
| 9781884612091
| 1884612091
| 3.82
| 145
| Dec 01, 1991
| Dec 22, 1998
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it was ok
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★★☆☆☆ (2/5) • The word is Hainish and means “making a beginning together,” or “beginning to be together,” or, used technically, “the period of time and ★★☆☆☆ (2/5) • The word is Hainish and means “making a beginning together,” or “beginning to be together,” or, used technically, “the period of time and area of space in which a group forms if it is going to form.” A honeymoon is an isyeye of two. • Unbreathing, the ghosts flitted, shifted, in the ghost shell of a cold, dark hull floating near a world of brown fog, an unreal planet. They spoke, but there were no voices. There is no sound in vacuum, nor in nontime. • “Do you mean,” Lidi said in a tone of deep existential disgust, “that we have to believe in it to make it work?”“You have to believe in yourself in order to act, don’t you?” Tai said. “No,” the navigator said. “Absolutely not. I don’t believe in myself. I know some things. Enough to go on.”“An analogy,” Gveter offered. “The effective action of a crew depends on the members perceiving themselves as a crew—you could call it believing in the crew, or just being it—Right? So, maybe, to churten, we—we conscious ones—maybe it depends on our consciously perceiving ourselves as…as transilient—as being in the other place—the destination?” ...more |
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Apr 24, 2024
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Apr 25, 2024
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Apr 24, 2024
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Audio Cassette
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| 4.32
| 5,770
| Mar 05, 2002
| Oct 13, 2009
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really liked it
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★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book Coming of Age in Karhide ★★★★☆ (4/5) • Time is different here. I learned in school how the ★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book Coming of Age in Karhide ★★★★☆ (4/5) • Time is different here. I learned in school how the Orgota, the Ekumen, and most other people count years. They call the year of some portentous event Year One and number forward from it. Here it’s always Year One. • We had dozens of different words for the way snow falls, descends, glides, blows, for the way clouds move, the way ice floats, the way boats sail; but not that word. Not yet. And so I don’t remember “flying.” I remember falling upward through the golden light. • I was sick. My back ached all the time. My head ached and got dizzy and heavy. Something I could not locate anywhere, some part of my soul, hurt with a keen, desolate, ceaseless pain. I was afraid of myself: of my tears, my rage, my sickness, my clumsy body. It did not feel like my body, like me. • A half year in pain from a shattered leg had darkened and matured the adventurous, mischievous child, teaching anger, pride, endurance. The Matter of Seggri ★★★★☆ (4/5) • Their gender imbalance has produced a society in which, as far as I can tell, the men have all the privilege and the women have all the power. • Maybe some day it will be possible for a boy to choose his life. Among your peoples a man’s body does not shape his fate, does it? Maybe some day that will be so here. • However well- meaning they were, they mostly frightened and confused me. But fear and confusion were an appropriate preparation. • “How you play is what you win,” • What is it like to return from the dead? Not easy. Not for the one who returns, nor for his people. The place he occupied in their world has closed up, ceased to be, filled with accumulated change, habit, the doings and needs of others. He has been replaced. To return from the dead is to be a ghost: a person for whom there is no room. • This was our freedom: we were all ghosts, useless, frightened, frightening intruders, shadows in the corners of life. We watched life going on around us— work, love, childbearing, childrearing, getting and spending, making and shaping, governing and adventuring— the women’s world, the bright, full, real world— and there was no room in it for us. All we had ever learned to do was play games and destroy one another. • That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence. Un Chosen Love ★★★★☆ (4/5) • They forget that human beings, while whining after the simple life, thrive on complexity. • None of the flocks belonged to Meruo, whose people looked only to the sea, and farmed only the sea, and never walked if they could sail. • One such night in early winter his feeling of being chafed, rubbed raw, like an animal fretting in a trap, all his nerve- ends exposed, was too much to endure. He dressed, very quietly for fear of waking Suord, and went barefoot out of their room, to get outdoors— anywhere out from under the roofs, he thought. He felt that he could not breathe. • “Why do you stay?” she asked, not accusingly, but asking for an answer. “I love him,” Hadri said. “I don’t want to hurt him. If I run away I’ll be a coward. I want to be worth him.” They were four separate answers, each spoken separately, painfully. • but what he wanted was to get Hadri alone, in a boat, where Hadri was not only useless but slightly uneasy and had no escape at all. • These people had a capacity for remaining perfectly motionless and silent, like predatory animals, or fishing birds. Mountain Ways ★★★★☆ (4/5) • Then for half an hour nothing but the crisp whisper of the combs, the flutter of the unceasing wind over stones, the soft bleat of a calf, the faint rhythmical sound of the nearby beasts biting the thin, dry grass. • Four souls and bodies and all the years of their four lives to come are in the balance in each of those decisions and invitations; passion, negative and positive, must find its channels, and trust must be established, lest the whole structure fail to found itself solidly, or destroy itself in selfishness and jealousy and grief. • Akal had followed her far up the mountain, but would not follow her over a precipice. • In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting. Solitude ★★★★☆ (4/5) • After the certain star sets you sleep until dawn wakes you. Then as always you greet the sunrise with aware silence. • but my education was very difficult, sometimes. If only there were more stories and songs in her teaching, and not so many words, words that slipped away from me like water through a net! • The Golden Time passed, and the beautiful summer; the Silver Time returned, when the mists lie in the valleys between the hills, before the rains begin; and the rains began, and fell long and slow and warm, day after day after day. • The difference seemed total. He had been alone, without food, without shelter, a frightened boy trying to survive among equally frightened rivals against the brutality of older youths intent on having and keeping power, which they saw as manhood. I was cared for, clothed, fed so richly I got sick, kept so warm I felt feverish, guided, reasoned with, praised, befriended by citizens of a very great city, offered a share in their power, which they saw as humanity. He and I had both fallen among sorcerers. Both he and I could see the good in the people we were among, but neither he nor I could live with them. • thinking is one way of doing, and words are one way of thinking. • “You will never give in, will you, Ren?” she said to me one morning out of the silence of our breakfast. I had not intended the silence as a message. I had only rested in it. • Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself. • A woman’s solitude in the auntring is, of course, based firmly on the presence of others at a little distance. It is a contingent, and therefore human, solitude. • The mind always wants new happenings. So for the young soul there is wandering and scouting, travel, danger, change. But of course travel and danger and change have their own dullness. It is finally always the same otherness over again; another hill, another river, another man, another day. The feet begin to turn in a long, long circle. The body begins to think of what it learned back home, when it learned to be still. To be aware. To be aware of the grain of dust beneath the sole of the foot, and the skin of the sole of the foot, and the touch and scent of the air on the cheek, and the fall and motion of the light across the air, and the color of the grass on the high hill across the river, and the thoughts of the body, of the soul, the shimmer and ripple of colors and sounds in the clear darkness of the depths, endlessly moving, endlessly changing, endlessly new. • By solitude the soul escapes from doing or suffering magic; it escapes from dullness, from boredom, by being aware. Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating, but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think. Old Music and the Slave Women ★★★☆ ☆ (3/5) • Most of it still stood, most of its fifteen million people were still there, but its deep complexity was gone. Connections were broken. Interactions did not take place. A brain after a stroke. • Idle thoughts. During a revolution you don’t choose. You’re carried, a bubble in a cataract, a spark in a bonfire, an unarmed man in a car with seven armed men driving very fast down the broad, blank East Arterial Highway… They were leaving the city. • His lungs were squeezed in his ribcage so that each breath was extremely difficult. He tried not to suffocate. He tried not to panic. He tried to be aware, only to be aware, but awareness was unendurable. • He was glad, indeed, not to be obliged to talk about it, and hoped not to think about it. His body thought about it for him, remembered it precisely, in every joint and muscle, now. The rest of his thinking about it he would do as long as he lived. He had learned things he had not known. He had thought he understood what it was to be helpless. Now he knew he had not understood. • The flowerbeds and shrubberies were untended, overgrown, but not yet gone wild. The gardens of Yaramera were utterly beautiful in their desolation. Desolate, forlorn, forsaken, all such romantic words befitted them, yet they were also rational and noble, full of peace. They had been built by the labor of slaves. Their dignity and peace were founded on cruelty, misery, pain. • She nodded. The Werelian nod was a tip back of the head, not a bob down. He was completely used to it after all these years. It was the way he nodded himself. He noticed himself noticing it now. His captivity, his treatment here, had displaced, disoriented him. • “I am not one of you. I neither own nor am owned. You must redefine yourselves to include me.” • “A beautiful name. How old is he?” In the language they spoke that was, “How long has he lived?” Kamsa’s answer was strange. “As long as his life,” she said, or so he understood her whisper and her dialect. Maybe it was bad manners or bad luck to ask a child’s age. • We followed his weakness. His incompleteness. Failure’s open. Look at water, Esi. It finds the weak places in the rock, the openings, the hollows, the absences. Following water we come where we belong.” • This was a strange place to come to learn the quality of joy. Water is my guide, he thought. His hands still felt what it had been like to hold the child, the light weight, the brief warmth. • He shouted once, “Let me out of here!” then got control of himself, returned to the cot, and after a minute sat down on the floor between the cot and the wall, as sheltered a place as the room afforded, trying to imagine what was going on. The Birthday of World ★★★☆ ☆ (3/5) • Maybe there would be no more time— no time coming behind our backs, only what lay before us, only what we could see with mortal eyes. Only our own lives and nothing else. • The wars at the borders, the wars of conquest, had made our land too large. The people in the towns and villages knew no more who I was than I knew who they were. Paradises Lost ★★★★★ (5/5) • Their life is on another order. Orders, as a rule, cannot perceive one another except with instruments which allow perception of a different scale. With such an instrument one gazes in wonder at the world revealed. But the instrument has not revealed one’s larger- order world to that smaller- order world, which continues orderly, undisturbed and unaware, until the drop dries suddenly on the glass slide. Reciprocity is a rare thing. • Dreams could also be convincing, beautiful, frightening, important. But she didn’t want to live in dreams. She wanted to be awake in her body touching true cloth, true metal, true skin. • No danger from anything in the world but the danger the world itself was in. But that was a constant, a condition of being, and therefore hard to think about, except sometimes in dream; the horrible images. The walls of the world deformed, bulging, shattering. The soundless explosion. A spray of bloody mist, a tiny smear of vapor in the starlight. They were all in danger all the time, surrounded by danger. That is the essence of safety, the heart of it: that the danger is outside. • The arrangement is, in fact, unfair. Sexuality and justice have little if anything in common. Love and friendship and conscience and kindness and obstinacy find ways to make the unfair arrangement work, though not without anxiety, not without anguish, and not always. • History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again. • If everybody has access to the same food, clothing, furniture, tools, education, information, work, and authority, and hoarding is useless because you can have for the asking, and gambling is an idle sport because there’s nothing to lose, so that wealth and poverty have become mere metaphors—“rich in love,”“poor in spirit”—how is one to understand the importance of money? • No matter how you civilised it, the body remained somewhat wild, or savage, or natural. It had to keep up its animal functions, or die. It could never be fully tamed, fully controlled. • He mentally perceived words as having various sizes, densities, depths; words were dark stars, some small and dull and solid, some immense, complex, subtle, with a powerful gravity-field that attracted infinite meanings to them. Freedom was the biggest of the dark stars. • “To speculate about our destination,” Tan said, “is to increase anxiety, impatience, and erroneous expectations.” He smiled slightly. • “I don’t want to be in another person’s world, I want to be in mine,” she said. “You read novels,” he said. “Sure. But I do reading. The writer puts the story there, and I do it. I make it be. The v-programmer uses me to do his story. Nobody uses my body and my mind but me. OK?” She always got fierce. • Within itself it was entirely self-sustaining, self-renewing. Every cell shed by human skin, every speck of dust worn from a fabric or a bearing, every molecule of vapor from leaf or lung, was drawn into the filters and the reconverters, saved, recombined, re-used, reconfigured, reborn. The system was in equilibrium. • What did they need to know that they didn’t know? They knew that life was inside: light, warmth, breath, companionship. They knew that outside was nothing. The void. Death. Death silent, immediate, absolute. • The “division of labor,” perhaps the oldest and deepest-founded of all the institutions of power-imbalance—was that irrational, fanciful set of prescriptions and proscriptions to be reinstituted here, where sanity and balance must, at the cost of life itself, be preserved? • Shame and honor are powerful social engines. If enforced by total publicity and attached to rational need, rather than to hierarchic fantasies and the will to dominate, shame and honor can keep a society running steadily for a long time. • Beneath their friendship was something that was not public, and was not friendship: a pledge made without words, but with the body; a non-action with profound results. They were each other’s privacy. They had found where away was. The key to it was silence. • Inbliss has gradually changed the emphasis of this vision. Here is all. There’s nothing outside the ship—literally nothing, spiritually nothing. Origin and destination are now metaphors. They have no reality. Journey is the sole reality. The voyage is its own end.” ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 02, 2024
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Apr 23, 2024
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Mar 31, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| Liu, Ken
*
| 3.93
| 6,873
| Feb 25, 2020
| Feb 25, 2020
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it was amazing
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]★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book NOVA PACIFICA, 2313 “The past,” Ms. Coron continued, “thus accumulating bit by bit throug ]★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book NOVA PACIFICA, 2313 “The past,” Ms. Coron continued, “thus accumulating bit by bit through recursion, becomes the future.” Western-style cottage, paper suits, paper dress “See how the universe is straightforward, but to understand it with the intellect, to turn it into language, requires a twist, a sharp turn? Between the World and the Word, there lies an extra curve. Family is a story that is told to you, but the story that matters the most you must tell yourself.” Sometimes understanding comes to you not through thought, but through this throbbing of the heart, this tenderness in the chest that hurts. Maxwell’s Demon A war opened a door in men, and whatever was inside just tumbled out. The entropy of the world increased, in the absence of a demon by the door. That was the way of war, wasn’t it? The Reborn “Do you not alter your behavior, your expressions, even your speech when you’re with your childhood friends from your hometown compared to when you’re with your new friends from the big city? Do you not laugh differently, cry differently, even become angry differently when you’re with your family than when you’re with me?” The idea of a justice system so limited by the opacity of the individual that it must resort to ritualized adversarial combat rather than direct access to the truth of the mind must seem to them a barbarity. The past does not die; it seeps, leaks, infiltrates, waits for an opportunity to spring up. You are what you remember.…” Thoughts and Prayers From afar, I watched the trolls swarm around my brother’s family with uncoordinated precision, with aimless malice, with malevolent glee. Rather than focusing on judging the behavior of speakers, they’ve devoted resources to letting listeners shield themselves. That this pro- free- speech ethos happens to align with more profit is no doubt a mere afterthought. Sometimes I wonder if we have misunderstood the notion of freedom. We prize “freedom to” so much more than “freedom from.” A public life is an inauthentic one. Anyone who enters the arena must be prepared for the consequences. Byzantine Empathy Smells probed into the deepest part of your brain and stirred up the rawest emotions, like the blade of a hoe breaking up the numbed clods of modernity to reveal the wriggling pink flesh of wounded earthworms. A consensus of feelings had replaced the consensus of facts. The emotional labor of vicarious experience through virtual reality had replaced the physical and mental work of investigation, of evaluating costs and benefits, of exercising rational judgment. Once again, proof- of- work was used to guarantee authenticity, just a different kind of work. As she put it, “America is only a democracy for those lucky enough to be Americans. To everybody else, it’s just a dictator with the biggest bombs and missiles.” She wants the perfection of disintermediated chaos rather than the imperfect stability of awed institutions that could be perfected. Just because there’s suffering doesn’t mean there is always a better choice; just because people die doesn’t mean we must abandon greater principles. The world isn’t always black and white. “Empathy isn’t always a good thing,” I say. “Irresponsible empathy makes the world unstable. In each conflict, there are multiple claims for empathy, leading to emotional involvement by outsiders that widens the conflict. To sort through the morass, you must reason your way to the least harmful answer, the right answer. But I’ve learned over the years that rationality with her, as with many, is just a matter of rationalization. She wants a picture just big enough to justify what her government does. Empathy for you is but another weapon to be wielded, instead of a fundamental value of being human. The Gods Will Not Be Chained The brain is holonomic. Each part of the mind, like points in a hologram, encodes some information about the whole image. We were arrogant to think that we could isolate the personality away from the technical know- how.” Once you’ve experienced the impossible, no conspiracy seemed unbelievable. Staying Behind “They think they can cheat death. But they died the minute they decided to abandon the real world for a simulation. So long as there’s sin, there must be death. It is the measure by which life gains meaning.” In my old existence, I felt life but dimly and from a distance, cushioned, constrained, tied down by the body. But now I am free, a bare soul exposed to the full tides of eternal Life. She taught me that our mortality makes us human. The limited time given to each of us makes what we do meaningful. We die to make place for our children, and through our children a piece of us lives on, the only form of immortality that is real. The Gods Will Not Be Slain “The cables that make up the internet with pulses of light follow the right- of- way of nineteenth- century railroads, and those followed the wagon trails of pioneers, who followed the paths of the Indians before them. When the world falls apart, it falls apart in layers, too. We’re peeling away the skin of the present to live on the bones of the past.” Apocalypse did not come with a bang, but slowly, as an irresistible downward spiral. The Gods Have Not Died in Vain The amount of energy it takes to run the infrastructure that would support the creation and delivery of a single tomato is many times what it took to build the Great Pyramid. Is it really worth enslaving the whole planet so that you can have the experience of a tomato through the interface of the flesh instead of generating the same impulse from a bit of silicon?” Would that bring people closer, so that they all shared the same universe without the constraints of scarcity? Or would it push them apart, so that each lived in their own world, a king of infinite space? Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts “But what does the job a person has been channeled into have to do with who they are?” One night, as I lay in the habitat drifting over the balmy subtropical Pacific, the stars spun over my face in their habitual course, a million diamantine points of crisp, mathematical light. I realized, with a startled understanding reminiscent of the clarity of childhood, that the face of the heavens was a collage. Only in solitude it is possible to live as self- contained as a star. I am content to have this. To have now. “Who are we to warm a planet for a dream and to cool it for nostalgia?” Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard miniature electronics that put brains in grains of rice, continent- spanning networks that fulfilled every desire, virtual gold summoned out of thin air… The laws of nature our ancestors thought they understood no longer applied, and monsters sprang forth in sea and on land, punishing them for their hubris. She would listen, she would hide, she would scheme, she would even fight— but she would never turn away from the essence of compassion. A Chase Beyond the Storms: An excerpt from ‘The Veiled Throne’, The Dandelion Dynasty, book three To the south, the meteorological wonder loomed like a mountain range sculpted out of cyclones, typhoons, sheets of rain so dense that they might as wel be solid water, and roiling clouds lit up from within by bolts of lightning, “Where does this obsession with living on in song and story instead of thriving in this world come from? The world right here, right now, between the Veil of Incarnation and the River- on- Which- Nothing- Floats, is where we can make the most difference. ‘Sometimes a paving stone is essential on the path to mine pure jade.’ Even an impractical idea may spark a better plan down the road.” The Hidden Girl “We’re all thieves in this world of suffering,” “What is your code then?” “To disdain the moral pronouncements of hypocrites; to be true to my word; to always do what I promise, no more and no less. To hone my talent and wield it like a beacon in a darkening world.” I laugh. “What is your talent, Mistress Thief?” “I steal lives.” “This is a time of chaos,” Teacher said. “The great lords of the land are filled with ambition. They take everything they can from the people they’re sworn to protect, shepherds who have turned into wolves preying on their flocks. They increase the taxes until all the walls in their palaces are gleaming with gold and silver; they take sons away from mothers until their armies swell like the current of the Yellow River; they plot and scheme and redraw lines on maps as though the country is nothing but a platter of sand, upon which the peasants creep and crawl like terrified ants.” “We are the winter snowstorm descending upon a house rotten with termites,” she said. “Only by hurrying the decay of the old can we bring about the rebirth of the new. We are the vengeance of a weary world.” Seven Birthdays “I wish the kite could y higher,” I say, desperate to keep the words owing, as though unspooling more conversation will keep something precious aloft. “If I cut the line, will it fly across the Pacific?” It isn’t right for one species in the latest stage of a planet’s long history to monopolize all its resources. It isn’t just for humanity to claim for itself the title of evolution’s crowning achievement. Isn’t it the duty of every intelligent species to rescue all life, even from the dark abyss of time? There is always a technical solution. But isn’t it the dream of every species to have the chance to do it over? To see if it’s possible to prevent the fall from grace that darkens our gaze upon the stars? She wraps me in a fierce hug, squeezing my face against hers. She smells like the glow of new stars being born in the embers of a supernova, like fresh comets emerging from the primeval nebula. Cutting The act of remembering is an act of retracing, and by doing so we erase and change the stencil. ...more |
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it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book On Man and Machine • Somewhere along evolutionary chain from macromolecule to human brain ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book On Man and Machine • Somewhere along evolutionary chain from macromolecule to human brain self-awareness crept in. Psychologists assert it happens automatically whenever a brain acquires certain very high number of associational paths. Can’t see it matters whether paths are protein or platinum. • “You thinking of issuing more trick cheques? Don’t.” “Not?” “Very not. Mike, you want to discuss nature of humor. Are two types of jokes. One sort goes on being funny forever. Other sort is funny once. Second time it’s dull. This joke is second sort. Use it once, you’re a wit. Use twice, you’re a halfwit.” • I tried to explain. How Mike knew almost every book in Luna, could read at least a thousand times as fast as we could and never forget anything unless he chose to erase, how he could reason with perfect logic, or make shrewd guesses from insufficient data. . . and yet not know anything about how to be “alive.” • Wish she had asked him before we gave our opinions; that electronic juvenile delinquent always agreed with her, disagreed with me. Were those Mike’s honest opinions? • I suspect Prof enjoyed being rebel long before he worked out his political philosophy, while Mike— how could human freedom matter to him? Revolution was a game— a game that gave him companionship and chance to show off talents. Mike was as conceited a machine as you are ever likely to meet. • His voice when he first woke was blurred and harsh, hardly understandable. Now it was clear and choice of words and phrasing was consistent— colloquial to me, scholarly to Prof, gallant to Wyoh, variation one expects of mature adults. But background was dead. Thick silence. • I used to question Mike’s endless reading of fiction, wondering what notions he was getting. But turned out he got a better feeling for human life from stories than he had been able to garner from facts; fiction gave him a gestalt of life, one taken for granted by a human; he lives it. Besides this “humanizing” effect, Mike’s substitute for experience, he got ideas from “not-true data” as he called fiction. How to hide a catapult he got from Edgar Allan Poe. On Governance and Politics • So wardens didn’t fret about protest meetings. “Let ‘em yap” was policy. Yapping had same significance as squeals of kittens in a box. Oh, some wardens listened and other wardens tried to suppress it but added up same either way— null program. • “Even more lovely,” he said, “than I remembered!” She smiled, over her mad. “’ Thanks, Professor. But don’t bother. Nobody here but comrades.” “Señorita, the day I let politics interfere with my appreciation of beauty, that day I retire from politics. But you are gracious.” • “May I suggest a change in program? Manuel, the life of a conspirator is not an easy one and I learned before you were born not to mix provender and politics. Disturbs the gastric enzymes and leads to ulcers, the occupational disease of the underground.” • A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame. . . as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world. . . aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure. • In term of morals there is no such thing as ‘state.’ Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts. • An earthworm expects to find a law, a printed law, for every circumstance. Even have laws for private matters such as contracts. Really, if a man’s word isn’t any good, who would contract with him? Doesn’t he have reputation? • More than six people cannot agree on anything, three is better— and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest. • “But one thing must be made clear. Earth’s major satellite, the Moon, is by nature’s law forever the joint property of all the peoples of Earth. It does not belong to that handful who by accident of history happen to live there. The sacred trust laid upon the Lunar Authority is and forever must be the supreme law of Earth’s Moon.” • why do British still have Queen?--and boast of being “sovereign.” “Sovereign,” like “love,” means anything you want it to mean; it’s a word in dictionary between “sober” and “sozzled.” • Is mixed-up place another way; they care about skin color— by making point of how they don’t care. First trip I was always too light or too dark, and somehow blamed either way, or was always being expected to take stand on things I have no opinions on. • Think I prefer a place as openly racist as India, where if you aren’t Hindu, you’re nobody— except that Parsees look down on Hindus and vice versa. However I never really had to cope with North America’s reverse-racism • You have put your finger on the dilemma of all government— and the reason I am an anarchist. The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys. • It may not be possible to do away with government— sometimes I think that government is an inescapable disease of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive— and can you think of a better way than by requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby?” On Revolutions • Wyoming dear lady, revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup. Done clumsily or prematurely and the result is civil war, mob violence, purges, terror. I hope you will forgive me if I say that, up to now, it has been done clumsily.” • Organization must be no larger than necessary— never recruit anyone merely because he wants to join. Nor seek to persuade for the pleasure of having another share your views. He’ll share them when the times comes. . . or you’ve misjudged the moment in history. Oh, there will be an educational organization but it must be separate; agitprop is no part of basic structure. • As to basic structure, a revolution starts as a conspiracy therefore structure is small, secret, and organized as to minimize damage by betrayal— since there always are betrayals. One solution is the cell system and so far nothing better has been invented. • Revolution is an art that I pursue rather than a goal I expect to achieve. Nor is this a source of dismay; a lost cause can be as spiritually satisfying as a victory. • The thing to do with a spy is to let him breathe, encyst him with loyal comrades, and feed him harmless information to please his employers. These creatures will be taken into our organization. Don’t be shocked; they will be in very special cells. ‘Cages’ is a better word. But it would be the greatest waste to eliminate them— not only would each spy be replaced with someone new but also killing these traitors would tell the Warden that we have penetrated his secrets. • Prof claimed that communications to enemy were essential to any war if was to be fought and settled sensibly. • Here we were, in control too soon, nothing ready and a thousand things to do. Authority in Luna was gone— but Lunar Authority Earthside and Federated Nations behind it were very much alive. Had they landed one troopship, orbited one cruiser, anytime next week or two, could have taken Luna back cheap. We were a mob. • Distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional . . . for in the past mankind has not done well when saddling itself with governments. On Freedom • But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. • Was reminding her that anything free costs twice as much in long run or turns out worthless. • A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers…and its greatest strength is a ‘free press’ when ‘free’ is defined as ‘responsible’ and the managers define what is ‘irresponsible.’ • Comrade Members, like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have freedom— if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant. Move slowly, be hesitant, puzzle out the consequences of every word. World Building • Even p-suits used to be fetched up from Terra— until a smart Chinee before I was born figured how to make “monkey copies” better and simpler. (Could dump two Chinee down in one of our maria and they would get rich selling rocks to each other while raising twelve kids. Then a Hindu would sell retail stuff he got from them wholesale— below cost at fat profit. We got along.) • Nothing frustrates a man so much as not letting him get in his say. With luck and help from Warden, Chief Engineer would have ulcers by Christmas. • Then didn’t know whether I felt lucky or not. Only excuse I could see for a Family talk-talk was fact that I was due to be shipped Earthside next day, labeled as grain. Could Mum be thinking of trying to set Family against it? Nobody had to abide by results of a talk-talk. But one always did. That was strength of our marriage: When came down to issues, we stood together. Wise Gems to Ponder Upon • Terror! A man can face known danger. But the unknown frightens him. We disposed of those finks, teeth and toenails, to strike terror into their mates. • May I ask this? Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone? • Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated, since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg, but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws— always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. • Too many facts hamper a diplomat, especially an honest one. • Since they can inflict their will on us, our only chance lies in weakening their will. That was why we had to go to Terra. To be divisive. To create many opinions. The shrewdest of the great generals in China’s history once said that perfection in war lay in so sapping the opponent’s will that he surrenders without fighting. • If we used our last strength to destroy a major city, they would not punish us; they would destroy us. As Prof put it, “If possible, leave room for your enemy to become your friend.” • Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again. Beautifully Constructed Sentences • “It’s never too late for grief. I’ve grieved every instant since you told me. But I locked it in the back of my mind for the Cause leaves no time for grief. ” • Women are amazing creatures— sweet, soft, gentle, and far more savage than we are. • It was a fifteen-minute cast but that was essence: Go back to work, be patient, give us time. • and I finally got it through my confused head that was being done with breakneck speed because of my date to break my neck next day. • besides, if those last minutes were going to be my very last, I decided to experience them. Bad as they would be, they were my very own and I would not give them up. • never heard word “venereal” until first went Earthside and had thought “common cold” was state of ice miner’s feet. • No, my dear Colonel, we won’t shoot the cow…but we would, if forced to, let the cow know that it could be shot. • Was a mob, not a battle. Or maybe a battle is always that way, confusion and noise and nobody really knowing what’s going on. • Tried not to think about it, just as had been forced not to think too much about Ludmilla. Little Milla hadn’t carried a picnic lunch. She hadn’t been a sightseer looking for thrills. ...more |
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it was amazing
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★★☆☆☆ (2/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • Politics were for those who had too much to eat. • I consider Betty’s words. It is the o ★★☆☆☆ (2/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • Politics were for those who had too much to eat. • I consider Betty’s words. It is the obsession of Americans to speak, to express opinions on things that they are ignorant about. They believe in drawing attention to things that other people may prefer to keep quiet, to ignore and forget. But I can’t dismiss the image Betty has put into my head: a boy stands in darkness and silence. He speaks; his words float up like a bubble. It explodes, and the world is a little brighter, and a little less stiflingly silent. • The design is simple: three ovals interlinked, a chain. These are the links that bound two continents and three great cities together, and these are the shackles that bound men whose voices were forever silenced, whose names were forgotten. There is beauty and wonder here, and also horror and death. • Make the secret a bit harder to keep. That counts for something. Merged review: ★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • My darling, my child, my connoisseur of sesquipedalian words and convoluted ideas and meandering sentences and baroque images, while the sun is asleep and the moon somnambulant, while the stars bathe us in their glow from eons ago and light-years away, while you are comfortably nestled in your blankets and I am hunched over in my chair by your bed, while we are warm and safe and still for the moment in this bubble of incandescent light cast by the pearl held up by the mermaid lamp, you and I, on this planet spinning and hurtling through the frigid darkness of space at dozens of miles per second, let’s read. • A joyful memory may be relived countless times, each replay introducing new discoveries. A painful memory may be replayed countless times as well, each time creating a fresh outrage. Eidetic reminiscence is a fact of existence. • Thus, while the Telosians do not forget, they also do not remember. They are said to never die, but it is arguable whether they ever live. • Time’s arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original. • By the time they part, they each have absorbed the experiences of the other. It is the truest form of empathy, for the very qualia of experience are shared and expressed without alteration. There is no translation, no medium of exchange. They come to know each other in a deeper sense than any other creatures in the universe. • And if others in the galaxy were also clever enough to harness the gravitational lenses of their own suns, we would be able to talk to them as well—though the exchange would more resemble monologues delivered across the lifetimes of stars than a conversation, messages set adrift in bottles bound for distant shores, from one long-dead generation to generations yet unborn. • most of our thoughts and memories are destined to fade, to disappear, to be consumed by the very act of choosing and living. Merged review: ★★★☆☆ (3/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • No, one did not go near the yamen courts unless one had no other choice. When you sought justice, you gambled everything. • To those who came to Tian for help, he was a songshi, a litigation master. But to the yamen magistrate and the local gentry, to the men who wielded money and power, Tian was a songgun, a “litigating hooligan.” • Tian closed his eyes and thought about Yangzhou, with its teahouses full of indolent scholars arguing with singing girls about rhyme schemes, with its palatial mansions full of richly robed merchants celebrating another good trading season, with its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants happily praying for the Manchu Emperor’s health. Did they know that each day, as they went to the markets and laughed and sang and praised this golden age they lived in, they were treading on the bones of the dead, they were mocking the dying cries of the departed, they were denying the memories of ghosts? • They had cut the Chinese off from their past, made them a people adrift without the anchor of their memories. • But the past lives on in the form of memories, and those in power are always going to want to erase and silence the past, to bury the ghosts. Now that you know about that past, you’re no longer an innocent bystander. If you do not act, you’re complicit with the Emperor and his Blood Drops in this new act of violence, this deed of erasure. Like Wang Xiuchu, you’re now a witness. Like him, you must choose what to do. You must decide if, on the day you die, you will regret your choice.” Merged review: ★★★☆☆ (3/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • My contribution to the eternal quest of capturing reality is the oneiropagida, through which a snapshot of the subject’s mental patterns—a representation of her personality—could be captured, digitized, and then used to reanimate the image during projection. The oneiropagida is at the heart of all simulacrum cameras, including those made by my competitors. • My father proclaims that he works in the business of capturing reality, of stopping time and preserving memory. But the real attraction of such technology has never been about capturing reality. Photography, videography, holography . . . the progression of such “reality-capturing” technology has been a proliferation of ways to lie about reality, to shape and distort it, to manipulate and fantasize. People shape and stage the experiences of their lives for the camera, go on vacations with one eye glued to the video camera. The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality. • Perhaps it is the dream of every parent to keep their child in that brief period between helpless dependence and separate selfhood, when the parent is seen as perfect, faultless. It is a dream of control and mastery disguised as love, the dream that Lear had about Cordelia. • But the oneiropagida is exquisite at capturing her mood, the emotional flavor of her thoughts, the quirky triggers for her smiles, the lilt of her speech, the precise, inarticulable quality of her turns of phrase. Merged review: ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • “I’ve always believed that one should pay for experiences rather than things.” • And he can always pay for another, later. He likes paying for things. Power flows to him when he pays. • Ruth refrains from explaining that the police detectives are all fitted with Regulators that should make the kind of prejudice she’s implying impossible. The whole point of the Regulator is to make police work under pressure more regular, less dependent on hunches, emotional impulses, appeals to hidden prejudice. If the police are calling it a gang-related act of violence, there are likely good reasons for doing so. • Information doesn’t want to be free. It’s valuable and wants to earn. And its existence doesn’t free anyone; possessing it, however, can do the opposite. • If a revolution were to come to China, Dagger quipped, it would be triggered by mistresses, not speeches. • The Regulator deadened the pain, stifled grief, and numbed the ache of loss. It held down the regret, made it possible to pretend to forget. She craved the calmness it brought, the blameless, serene clarity. • His voice dredges up memories of his raspy morning mumbles, his stentorian laughter, his tender whispers when they were alone, the soundtrack of twenty years of a life spent together, a life that they had both thought would last until one of them died. • It has always been the regular state of things. There is no clarity, no relief. At the end of all rationality, there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure. Merged review: ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • He always gave her time to come to her own conclusions about something new without his editorial comment. That was one of the first things she liked about him when they started dating years ago. • “They believe the gift of immortality should be shared by all of humanity,” João said. “Even the farthest wanderers.” • Rebel. Change is the only constant. • We stop being human at the moment we give in to death. • either. It is terrible to put such a choice before them, but to decide for them would be even more cruel.” • Bobby was frozen at the physical age of ten. He and the other perpetual children integrated only uneasily into the life of the colonists. They had decades—sometimes centuries—of experience, but retained juvenile bodies and brains. They possessed adult knowledge, but kept the emotional range and mental flexibility of children. They could be both old and young in the same moment. • Even eternal youth and eternal life did not appear so wonderful compared to the freedom of being a machine, a thinking machine endowed with the austere beauty of crystalline matrices instead of the messy imperfections of living cells. At last, humanity has advanced beyond evolution into the realm of intelligent design. • Maggie looked at her granddaughter, a miniature mechanical centaur, freshly made and gleaming, and also a being much older and wiser than she by most measures. • While they flew, they huddled together against the cold emptiness that was space. Intelligence, complexity, life, computation—everything seemed so small and insignificant against the great and eternal void. They felt the longing of distant black holes and the majestic glow of exploding novas. And they pulled closer to each other, seeking comfort in their common humanity. • She felt the loneliness of making the entire universe your playground, yet having no home. • Patterns of energy now, Maggie and the others learned to coalesce, stretch, shimmer, and radiate. She learned how to suspend herself between stars, her consciousness a ribbon across both time and space. • She had done nothing drastic, just a small adjustment, a nudge in the right direction. The change would continue to mutate, and the mutations would accumulate long after she left. In another few hundred generations, the changes would be enough to cause a spark, a spark that would feed itself until the creatures would start to think of keeping a piece of the sun alive at night, of naming things, of telling stories to each other about how everything came to be. They would be able to choose. Merged review: ★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • “I’m a literomancer.” “A what?” “Grandpa tells people’s fortunes based on the characters in their names and the characters they pick,” Teddy explained. • Lilly shook her head. Boys were simple, and fists could do the talking for them. The magic of words between girls was much more complicated. • “When American soldiers first went to Korea, they often heard the Korean soldiers say miguk. They thought the Koreans were saying ‘me, gook.’ But really they were talking about the Americans, and miguk means ‘America.’ The Korean word guk means ‘country.’ So when the American soldiers began calling the people of Asia ‘gooks,’ they didn’t understand that they were in a way really just speaking about themselves.” • The rich and educated had made a mess of things, so why shouldn’t the poor and illiterate have a chance at it? No one before the Communists had ever thought much of the lowly peasants, but when you have nothing, not even shoes for your feet, you are not afraid to die. The world had many more people who were poor and therefore fearless than people who were rich and afraid. I could see the logic of the Communists. • “The character for ‘mob’ is formed from the character for ‘nobility’ on one side and the character for ‘sheep’ on the other. So that’s what a mob is, a herd of sheep that turns into a pack of wolves because they believe themselves to be serving a noble cause. • “The ancient Chinese were called huajen by their neighbors because their dress was magnificent, made of silk and fine tulle. But I think that’s not the only reason. The Chinese are like wildflowers, and they will survive and make joy wherever they go. A fire may burn away every living thing in a field, but after the rain the wildflowers will reappear as though by magic. Winter may come and kill everything with frost and snow, but when spring comes the wildflowers will blossom again, and they will be magnificent. • The word “freeze” seemed to call for her attention. She closed her eyes and pictured the word in her head, examining it carefully the way she thought Mr. Kan would have. The letters jiggled and nudged against each other. The z took on the shape of a kneeling, supplicating man, the e the fetal curl of a dead child. And then the z and e disappeared, leaving free in its place. Merged review: ★★★☆☆ (3/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • I can’t keep her savage beauty out of my mind. I wish my soul was heavier, more solid, something that could weigh itself down. I wish my soul wasn’t this feather, this ugly wisp of goose down in my pocket, lifted up and buffeted about by the wind around her flame. I feel like a moth. • “This is what I live for,” Amy whispered to Rina, her pupils unfocused, wild. “All life is an experiment.” • People tended to have more to talk about at the beginning of the week and the end of the week, either about what they had done over the weekend or what they were about to do the next weekend. There was not so much to talk about on Wednesdays. • She thought she had so much to say to him that she would never have time to read again. • All my life I thought my soul was in those cigarettes, and I never even thought about the box. I never paid any attention to that paper shell of quiet, that enclosed bit of emptiness. An empty box is a home for lost spiders you want to carry outside. It holds loose change, buttons that have fallen off, needles and thread. It works tolerably well for lipstick, eye pencil, and a bit of blush. It is open to whatever you’d like to put in it. Merged review: ★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • Yan had explained to me that the hulijing chose to live near human villages because they liked to have human things in their lives: conversation, beautiful clothes, poetry and stories, and, occasionally, the love of a worthy, kind man. • It was strange, what Yan and I shared. She wasn’t exactly a friend. More like someone who you couldn’t help being drawn to because you shared the knowledge of how the world didn’t work the way you had been told. • “There’s only one thing I can do.” Her voice broke for a second and became defiant, like a pebble tossed into the pool. • Judging was the luxury of those who did not need to survive. • When I was young I had been trained to hear the scratching of a ghost’s fingers against a paper window, to distinguish the voice of a spirit from the wind. But now I was used to enduring the thunderous pounding of pistons and the deafening hiss of high-pressured steam rushing through valves. I could no longer claim to be attuned to that vanished world of my childhood. • From day to day, things never seemed to change much. But if you compared things over a few years, it was almost like you lived in a different world. • The old magic was back but changed: not fur and flesh, but metal and fire. Merged review: ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • Time devours all. Yet every species has its unique way of passing on its wisdom through the ages, its way of making thoughts visible, tangible, frozen for a moment like a bulwark against the irresistible tide of time. Everyone makes books. • The delicate proboscis vibrates in sympathy with the waveform of the groove, and a hollow chamber in the Allatian skull magnifies the sound. In this manner, the voice of the writer is re-created. • This stone is the seat of the Quatzoli mind. The stone organ is filled with thousands, millions of intricate channels, forming a maze that divides the water into countless tiny, parallel flows that drip, trickle, wind around each other to represent simple values which, together, coalesce into streams of consciousness and emerge as currents of thought. • Over time, the pattern of water flowing through the stone changes. Older channels are worn down and disappear or become blocked and closed off—and so some memories are forgotten. New channels are created, connecting previously separated flows—an epiphany—and the departing water deposits new mineral growths at the far, youngest end of the stone, where the tentative, fragile miniature stalactites are the newest, freshest thoughts. • And so the Quatzoli are themselves books. Each carries within its stone brain a written record of the accumulated wisdom of all its ancestors: the most durable thoughts that have survived millions of years of erosion. • Their great philosophers distrusted writing. A book, they thought, was not a living mind yet pretended to be one. It gave sententious pronouncements, made moral judgments, described purported historical facts, or told exciting stories . . . yet it could not be interrogated like a real person, could not answer its critics or justify its accounts. • An idea was worth keeping only if it led to victory. • Each planet contains a poem, written out in the bleak, jagged, staccato rhythm of bare rocky cores or the lyrical, lingering, rich rhymes—both masculine and feminine—of swirling gas giants. And then there are the planets with life, constructed like intricate jeweled clockwork, containing a multitude of self-referential literary devices that echo and re-echo without end. But it is the event horizon around a black hole where the Tull-Toks claim the greatest books are to be found. When a Tull-Tok is tired of browsing through the endless universal library, she drifts toward a black hole. As she accelerates toward the point of no return, the streaming gamma rays and X-rays unveil more and more of the ultimate mystery for which all the other books are but glosses. The book reveals itself to be ever more complex, more nuanced, and just as she is about to be overwhelmed by the immensity of the book she is reading, her companions, observing from a distance, realize with a start that time seems to have slowed down to a standstill for her, and she will have eternity to read it as she falls forever toward a center that she will never reach. Finally, a book has triumphed over time. Merged review: ★★★☆☆ (3/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • After all, the mission statement of Centillion was to “arrange the world’s information to ennoble the human race,” and what could be more ennobling than making work more efficient, more productive, more pleasant? • Centillion is an algorithm that’s gotten out of hand. It just gives you more of what it thinks you want. And we—people like me—think that’s the root of the problem. Centillion has put us in little bubbles, where all we see and hear are echoes of ourselves, and we become ever more stuck in our existing beliefs and exaggerated in our inclinations. We stop asking questions and accept Tilly’s judgment on everything. • “Back then, the government watched everything you did on the Network and made no secret of it. You had to learn how to keep the insanity at bay, to read between the lines, to speak without being overheard.” “I guess we were lucky, over here.” “No.” And she smiled at his surprise. He was learning that she preferred to be contrarian, to disagree with him. He liked that about her. “You grew up believing you were free, which made it even harder for you to see when you weren’t. • If cultural imperialism is what it takes to make the world a better place, then we’ll happily arrange the world’s informati ...more |
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it was amazing
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**spoiler alert** ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book - Our universe is ruled by physics and faster than light travel is not **spoiler alert** ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book - Our universe is ruled by physics and faster than light travel is not possible -- until the discovery of The Flow, an extra-dimensional field we can access at certain points in space-time that transport us to other worlds, around other stars. Humanity flows away from Earth, into space, and in time forgets our home world and creates a new empire, the Interdependency, whose ethos requires that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It’s a hedge against interstellar war -- and a system of control for the rulers of the empire. The Flow is eternal -- but it is not static. Just as a river changes course, The Flow changes as well, cutting off worlds from the rest of humanity. When it’s discovered that The Flow is moving, possibly cutting off all human worlds from faster than light travel forever, three individuals -- a scientist, a starship captain and the Empress of the Interdependency -- are in a race against time to discover what, if anything, can be salvaged from an interstellar empire on the brink of collapse. - The Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby was a fiver, a ship whose size and design meant that theoretically it could support a full complement of crew from its own resources for roughly five standard years before everything began to go bad, - “Nine months ago your sister ship, No, Sir, I Don’t Mean Maybe, arrived with a shipment of grapefruit graft stock that carried a new strain of virus. It spread through your licensed orchards and devastated your client’s crops.” - The committee sat, senior-most closest to the emperox’s chair at the head of the table, with the exception of Archbishop Korbijn, who sat opposite of Cardenia. Cardenia noted the dress of each—the church bishops in fine red robes lined in purple, the guild representatives in their formal black and gold, the parliamentarians in somber blue business suits. Her own Very Serious Uniform was imperial green, dark with emerald piping. We look like a box of crayons, Cardenia thought. “You’re smiling, Your Majesty,” Archbishop Korbijn said, as she sat. “We were remembering our father, who often spoke of meeting with this committee.” - And when we designed the church, we intentionally made the divine aspect of it as ambiguous as possible. People don’t mind having the mystical aspect of a church being poorly defined as long as you make the rules of the church clear. - Bomb Ubdal was to plant on Yes, Sir exploded on our ship, causing operational damage. Could not move to intercept and destroy. Captain Wimson unhappy Ubdal’s bomb came onto our ship. Sent Ubdal out the airlock in his medical gurney. - It was one thing to know intellectually that Hub, which included the namesake planet of Hub, its immense imperial station, the equally immense autonomous habitat of Xi’an, and dozens of other associated habitats, was the most populated and advanced human nation in the Interdependency. It was another thing for Marce to disembark from the Yes, Sir at Hub’s imperial station, several times the size of End’s station, and to take in the bustle and rush of so many humans arriving and departing and doing their business—and knowing that the planet below held even more people in even more crowded habitats, pressed together in underground domes or technologically advanced kilometers-long spinning cylinders, living their lives oblivious to, or simply unconcerned about, how close they were to the hard vacuum or cold rock or searing radiation that could kill them in minutes. - the human species was threatened with extinction, not in an abstract way or over a long period of time, but in a concrete fashion in the span of less than a decade. In less than ten years every human system would be isolated, alone and forced to survive solely on what resources existed in-system, and with what craft existed to exploit those resources. Habitats could theoretically last decades or even centuries before they failed, but there was the human element as well. Humans didn’t react well to the knowledge they were cut off and doomed to slow death by habitat failure. Cardenia recalled what they knew of the fall of Dalasýsla. The humans malfunctioned long before their habitat did. - “The Interdependency was built on a lie, you know,” she said, to Attavio VI. “Yes, I know. If not a lie, then perhaps on the least malignant projection of its original intent.” - “The Interdependency began with a lie.”“Yes.” Cardenia smiled. “I think it needs to end with another one,” she said. ...more |
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| 3.88
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really liked it
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★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • Climb up time’s threads into the past and make sure no one survives this battle to mudd ★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • Climb up time’s threads into the past and make sure no one survives this battle to muddle the futures her Agency’s arranged—the futures in which her Agency rules, in which Red herself is possible. She’s come to knot this strand of history and sear it until it melts. • Not every battle’s grand, not every weapon erce. Even we who ght wars through time forget the value of a word in the right moment, a rattle in the right car engine, a nail in the right horseshoe . . . It’s so easy to crush a planet that you may overlook the value of a whisper to a snowbank. • Who’s infecting whom? We know from our hoarse Trojans, in my time. Will you respond, establishing complicity, continuing our self-destructive paper trail, just to get in the last word? Will you cut o , leaving my note to spin its fractal math inside you? I wonder which I’d rather. • Red curses into the silence. Remembering the era, she invokes local fertility deities, frames inventive methods for their copulation. She exhausts her invective arsenal and growls, wordless, and spits into the abyss. After all that, as prophesied, she laughs. Thwarted, bitter, but still, there’s humor in it. • Will you go still or turn sharply when you know that I’m watching you? Will you see me? Imagine me waving, in case you don’t; I’ll be too far o for you to see my mouth. • Icicles drip and snap as the great trees fall, and felled, the trees leave gaps in green that bare the cold white sky. Warriors like those at clouds better than the forest’s gloom, but not so much as they loved the blue of home. • Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all. • The usual nonsense. I imagine you have something of the same: The Agency squats far downthread, issues agents up; then Commandant doubts the agents who return. Yes, we diverge in our travels; yes, we acquire shades; we round; we behave asocially. Adaption is the price of victory. You might think they would realize that. • There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the ies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for ve years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing. I prefer read-receipts, all things considered—the instant handshake of slow telepathy through our wires. • Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? • London Next—the same day, month, year, but one strand over—is the kind of London other Londons dream: sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow redolent of spice and petalled sugar. Mannered as a novel, lthy only where story requires it, all meat pies and monarchy—this is a place Blue loves, and hates herself for loving. • Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives. • You ask if I’ve been lonely. I hardly know how to answer. I have observed friendship as one observes high holy days: breathtakingly short, whirlwinds of intimate endeavour, frenzied carousing, the sharing of food, of wine, of honey. Compressed, always, and gone as soon as they come. It is often my duty to fall in love convincingly, and certainly I’ve received no complaints. But that is work, and there are better things of which to write. • We treat the past as trellis, coax our vineyard through and around, and harvest is not a word for swiftness; the future harvests us, stomps us into wine, pours us back into the root system in loving libation, and we grow stronger and more potent together. • but I look at you, Red, and see much of myself: a desire to be apart, sometimes, to understand who I am without the rest. And what I return to, the me-ness that I know as pure, inescapable self . . . is hunger. Desire. Longing, this longing to possess, to become, to break like a wave on a rock and reform, and break again, and wash away • It is difficult—it is very difficult, to befriend where you wish to consume, to nd those who, when they ask Do I have you still, when they end a letter with Yours, mean it in any substantive way. • So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am. • but Red’s letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her ngers’ tips, between the lines of her palms. • So in this letter I am yours. Not Garden’s, not your mission’s, but yours, alone. I am yours in other ways as well: yours as I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex; yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery; yours as I review your words by their sequence, their sound, smell, taste, taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn • In fourteenth-century Axum, Islamicized and strong in Strand 3329, Red, in shadows, stabs a man who’s about to stab another man who’s wandering home buzzed on espresso, sugar, and math. The man Red stabs dies. The mathematician wakes up the next day and invents a form of thought that, in another strand, much later, will be called hyperbolic geometry. Red’s already gone. • Red wrote too much too fast. Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself. She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it was true, and the writing hurt • To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside. • I like you to know, with my words in your mouth, the places and ways in which I think of you. It feels good to be reciprocal; eat this part of me while I drive reeds into the depth of you, spill out something sweet. I wish sometimes I could be less erce with you. No—I feel sometimes like I ought to want to be less erce with you. That this—whatever this is —would be better served by tenderness, by gentle kindness. Instead I write of spilling out your sap-guts with reeds. I hope you can forgive this. To be soft, for me, is so often pretense, and pretense does not come easily while writing to you. • You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbours do, and I could have swallowed this valley whole and still not have sated my hunger for the thought. Instead I wick the longing into thread, pass it through your needle eye, and sew it into hiding somewhere beneath my skin, embroider my next letter to you one stitch at a time. • When Garden embeds an agent—as I’m sure your Commandant has noticed—they are near impossible to approach, indistinguishable from their surroundings, so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of strands that to cut us out would tear unsightly holes through which Chaos pours, Chaos no one downthread wants, not even your Oracle, who lives and breathes the stu . Too unpredictable, too dicult to manage, the cost/benet all askew—so you catch us on the move, in between, while we’re dancing the braid as well, touching lives only lightly. Even Garden has diculty reaching us with the more nuanced branches of their consciousness; to be an agent out of time and approach someone embedded you’d need to practically wear their skin before the braid would allow you within fty years or a thousand miles of their position. • I make metaphors to approach the enormous fact of you on slant • I’ve never felt it before this —I’ve had joy in sex; I’ve had fast friendships. Neither feels right for this, and this feels bigger than both. So let me say what I mean, as well as I can. I sought loneliness when I was young. You’ve seen me there: on my promontory, patient and unaware. But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me. • You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you. • The twist of you in me. The writhe. You’re a whip uncoiling in my veins, and I write between the rearing and the snap. Of course I write to you. Of course I ate your words. • Suppose we reached across the burn of threads and tangles, cut through the braid’s knots—suppose that we defected, not to each other’s sides, but to each other? We’re the best there is at what we do. Shall we do something we’ve never done? Shall we prick and twist and play the braid until it yields us a place downthread, bend the fork of our Shifts into a double helix around our base pair? ...more |
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| Liu, Ken
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| 4.58
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| Mar 2011
| 2016
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really liked it
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★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • The high-school-me thought I knew so much about everything. Contempt felt good, like wi ★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • The high-school-me thought I knew so much about everything. Contempt felt good, like wine. • know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It’s for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone. ...more |
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ebook
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| 0804139024
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| 4.42
| 1,162,232
| Sep 27, 2011
| Feb 11, 2014
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really liked it
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★★★★☆ (4/5) Despite being unable to visualise the technical aspects of this story, this novel sure is pure thrill to read. The constant race against ★★★★☆ (4/5) Despite being unable to visualise the technical aspects of this story, this novel sure is pure thrill to read. The constant race against time and survival against brutal odds renders grittiness to the story. It is devoid of sentimental, nonsensical clichés that often downplay the crux of such books. Mark Watney, the protagonist, is lonely and helpless in every sense of the word. Mars is inhospitable, desolate and unwelcoming. Distances between Watney, Earth and the crew are ruthless and unsparing. Yet, each individual and collective choice lingers and pervades till the very end. Human existence and endurance become gateways to ultimate survival. Instinct and inherent goodness overpowers any threat of gross failure. Dark humor, sheer tenacity of will and interplanetary travel make this an excellent read. Highly recommended! (PS: The film version does not do justice to the novel at all. How it won so many awards is beyond me.) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • If the oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So yeah. I’m fucked. • Mars is a barren wasteland and I am completely alone here. I already knew that, of course. But there’s a difference between knowing it and really experiencing it. All around me there was nothing but dust, rocks, and endless empty desert in all directions. The planet’s famous red color is from iron oxide coating everything. So it’s not just a desert. It’s a desert so old it’s literally rusting. • My guess is pockets of ice formed around some of the bacteria, leaving a bubble of survivable pressure inside, and the cold wasn’t quite enough to kill them. With hundreds of millions of bacteria, it only takes one survivor to stave off extinction. Life is amazingly tenacious. They don’t want to die any more than I do. • There’s an international treaty saying no country can lay claim to anything that’s not on Earth. And by another treaty, if you’re not in any country’s territory, maritime law applies. So Mars is “international waters.” • “It’s amazing how much red tape gets cut when everyone’s rooting for one man to survive.” • So I go out every night with a homemade sextant and sight Deneb. It’s kind of silly if you think about it. I’m in my space suit on Mars and I’m navigating with sixteenth-century tools. But hey, they work. • So far, I think it’s been working. But who knows? I can see it now: me holding a map, scratching my head, trying to figure out how I ended up on Venus. • And I have to hustle. Dust storms move. Sitting still means I’ll likely get overwhelmed. But which way do I go? It’s no longer an issue of trying to be efficient. If I go the wrong way this time, I’ll eat dust and die. • My terrifying struggle to stay alive became somehow routine. Get up in the morning, eat breakfast, tend my crops, fix broken stuff, eat lunch, answer e-mail, watch TV, eat dinner, go to bed. The life of a modern farmer. Then I was a trucker, doing a long haul across the world. And finally, a construction worker, rebuilding a ship in ways no one ever considered before this. I’ve done a little of everything here, because I’m the only one around to do it. • Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we’ve dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true. ...more |
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Hardcover
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| 0374104093
| 9780374104092
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| 3.77
| 246,680
| Feb 04, 2014
| Feb 04, 2014
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liked it
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★★★☆☆ (3/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation i ★★★☆☆ (3/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you • Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth. • As if somehow the blankness of the walls fed off of silence, and that something might appear in the spaces between our words if we were not careful. • It was entirely in keeping with his personality to become set on something and follow it, regardless of the consequences. To let an impulse become a compulsion, especially if he thought he was contributing to a cause greater than himself. • I didn’t cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband. • As I left the landing, I had the peculiar thought that I was not the first to pocket the photo, that someone would always come behind to replace it, to circle the lighthouse keeper again. • That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality. • Observation had always meant more to me than interaction. • Cheap motels for vacations by the beach where Mom would cry at the end because we had to go back to the normal strapped-for-cash life, even though we’d never really left it. That sense of impending doom occupying the car. • Death, as I was beginning to understand it, was not the same thing here as back across the border. • I felt as if I were stuck between two futures, even though I had already made the decision to live in one of them. Now it was just me. • All that time, I discovered later from thrash marks in the grass, I wasn’t frozen at all: I was spasming and twitching in the dirt like a worm, some distant part of me still experiencing the agony, trying to die because of it, even though the brightness wouldn’t let that happen. • The dirt and grit of a city, the unending wakefulness of it, the crowdedness, the constant light obscuring the stars, the omnipresent gasoline fumes, the thousand ways it presaged our destruction … none of these things appealed to me. • The individual details chronicled by the journals might tell stories of heroism or cowardice, of good decisions and bad decisions, but ultimately they spoke to a kind of inevitability. • the blue-green light was like nothing I had experienced before. It surged out, blinding and bleeding and thick and layered and absorbing. • A complex, unique, intricate, awe-inspiring, dangerous organism. It might be inexplicable. It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture—or my science or my intellect—but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me. • What do I believe manifested? Think of it as a thorn, perhaps, a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side of the world. Injecting itself into the world. Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation. Perhaps it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 28, 2018
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Apr 30, 2018
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Mar 17, 2018
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Paperback
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| 4.25
| 131,110
| 1974
| Oct 20, 1994
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it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) A monumental book! A selection of my favourite passages from the book • There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut ★★★★★ (5/5) A monumental book! A selection of my favourite passages from the book • There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. • If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them • To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest. • the water valve did not cut off when you released the faucet but kept pouring out until shut off—a sign, Shevek thought, either of great faith in human nature, or of great quantities of hot water • they often used the word “higher” as a synonym for “better” in their writings, where an Anarresti would use “more central.” But what did being higher have to do with being foreign? It was one puzzle among hundreds • Speech is sharing—a cooperative art. You’re not sharing, merely egoizing • If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together • Making the prison had been his idea, and it sufficed him; he never realized that imagination does not suffice some people, they must get into the cell, they must try to open the unopenable door • “But in a sick organism, even a healthy cell is doomed,” said Bedap • I agree that it’s probably wise to fear Urras. But why hate? Hate’s not functional; why are we taught it? • I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don’t have to learn • You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been • He would always be one for whom the return was as important as the voyage out. To go was not enough for him, only half enough; he must come back • But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality • I’m trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins—it begins in shared pain • It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on. • The wall. Shevek knew the wall, by now, when he came up against it. The wall was this young man’s charm, courtesy, indifference • He had assumed that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker • To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return. • Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along • The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile. • They brought fossil oils and petroleum products, certain delicate machine parts and electronic components that Anarresti manufacturing was not geared to supply, and often a new strain of fruit tree or grain for testing. They took back to Urras a full load of mercury, copper, aluminum, uranium, tin, and gold. It was, for them, a very good bargain • In fact, the Free World of Anarres was a mining colony of Urras. • Seven generations of peace had not brought trust • However pragmatic the morality a young Anarresti absorbed, yet life overflowed in him, demanding altruism, self-sacrifice, scope for the absolute gesture • Though she suggested that the natural limit to the size of a community lay in its dependence on its own immediate region for essential food and power, she intended that all communities be connected by communication and transportation networks, so that goods and ideas would get where they were wanted, and the administration of things might work with speed and ease, and no community should be cut off from change and interchange • from the start the Settlers were aware that that unavoidable centralization was a lasting threat, to be countered by lasting vigilance. • Gvarab saw a much larger universe than most people were capable of seeing, and it made them blink • But for those who accepted the privilege and obligation of human solidarity, privacy was a value only where it served a function • Shevek’s career, like the existence of his society, depended on the continuance of a fundamental, unadmitted profit contract. Not a relationship of mutual aid and solidarity, but an exploitative relationship; not organic, but mechanical. Can true function arise from basic dysfunction? • “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up!” • He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand • “You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.” • In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him • No matter how intelligent a man is, he can’t see what he doesn’t know how to see • To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws. The Social Organism • As for violence, well, I don’t know, Oiie; would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order • art was not considered as having a place in life, but as being a basic technique of life, like speech • We have no government, no laws, all right. But as far as I can see, ideas never were controlled by laws and governments, even on Urras • You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing! • But we’ve betrayed that hope. We’ve let cooperation become obedience • If your ideas won’t stand public examination, I don’t want them as midnight whispers • There was no strong sexual desire on either side to make the connection last. They had simply reasserted trust • But the fact was that he liked Bedap more as a man than he ever had as a boy. Inept, insistent, dogmatic, destructive: Bedap could be all that; but he had attained a freedom of mind that Shevek craved, though he hated its expression • That the walls of his hard puritanical conscience were widening out immensely was anything but a comfort. He felt cold and lost. But he had nowhere to retreat to, no shelter, so he kept coming farther out into the cold, getting farther lost. • They preserved autonomy of conscience even at the cost of becoming eccentric • And by its nature, by the nature of any art, it’s a sharing. The artist shares, it’s the essence of his act • The air above the mountains was like amethyst, hard, clear, profound. • She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to. • Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called “love of nature,” seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love • It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her • Man fitted himself with care and risk into this narrow ecology. If he fished, but not too greedily, and if he cultivated, using mainly organic wastes for fertilizer, he could fit in. But he could not fit anybody else in. There was no grass for herbivores. There were no herbivores for carnivores. There were no insects to fecundate flowering plants; the imported fruit trees were all hand-fertilized. No animals were introduced from Urras to imperil the delicate balance of life • Although her existence was necessary to Shevek her actual presence could be a distraction • The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model • The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death • “That is where she belongs,” he said, smiling. “Inside my head.” “No. Better to have her in a palace. Then you could rebel against her • The extravagance, the sheer quantity, of the storm exhilarated him. He reveled in its excess. It was too white, too cold, silent, and indifferent to be called excremental by the sincerest Odonian; to see it as other than an innocent magnificence would be pettiness of soul • She rattled on. He took pleasure in her inconsequential talk just as he did in the sunshine and the snow • Spelling and grammar fell by the wayside; it read like Efor talking: “By last night rebels hold all west of Meskti and pushing army hard. . . .” It was the verbal mode of the Nioti, past and future rammed into one highly charged, unstable present tense. • Oiie was an ethical man, but his private insecurities, his anxieties as a property owner, made him cling to rigid notions of law and order. He could cope with his personal liking for Shevek only by refusing to admit that Shevek was an anarchist • The Odonian society called itself anarchistic, he said, but they were in fact mere primitive populists whose social order functioned without apparent government because there were so few of them and because they had no neighbor states. When their property was threatened by an aggressive rival, they would either wake up to reality or be wiped out • But Chifoilisk’s warnings, which he had tried to dismiss, kept returning to him. His own perceptions and instincts reinforced them. Like it or not, he must learn distrust. He must be silent; he must keep his property to himself; he must keep his bargaining power. • He was perfectly aware that he had had the same low moods and intimations of failure in the periods just before his monuments of highest creativity. He found himself trying to encourage himself with that fact, and was furious at his own naïveté • They all looked, to him, anxious. He had often seen that anxiety before in the faces of Urrasti, and wondered about it. Was it because, no matter how much money they had, they always had to worry about making more, lest they die poor? Was it guilt, because no matter how little money they had, there was always somebody who had less? Whatever • Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility • chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end • If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly • He had let her alone because he wanted to be let alone, and so she had gone on, gone far, too far, would go on alone, forever • Letters went unsealed, not by law, of course, but by convention • On Anarres he had chosen, in defiance of the expectations of his society, to do the work he was individually called to do. To do it was to rebel: to risk the self for the sake of society. Here on Urras, that act of rebellion was a luxury, a self-indulgence. To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve not society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State. • Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind; it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument. Yet its potentiality had been real, and though deformed had not been lost • Justice is not achieved by force!” • “And power isn’t achieved by passivity.” • You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give. • You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution • I don’t know if it’s right to count people like you count numbers • the third time they were both half asleep, and circled about the center of infinite pleasure, about each other’s being, like planets circling blindly, quietly, in the flood of sunlight, about the common center of gravity, swinging, circling endlessly. • That we’re ashamed to say we’ve refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate—we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice • Those who build walls are their own prisoners • That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; just the contrary • With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life • If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy • There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them • Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. ‘The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.’ ...more |
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1
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Feb 2018
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Feb 28, 2018
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Feb 01, 2018
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| Liu, Ken
*
| B00TBKYK60
| 4.36
| 33,723
| Mar 08, 2016
| Mar 08, 2016
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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Jan 26, 2022
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Feb 23, 2022
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Apr 04, 2017
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Kindle Edition
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| 1944700951
| 9781944700959
| 1944700951
| 3.94
| 622
| Apr 26, 2016
| Oct 02, 2019
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really liked it
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★★★★☆ (4/5) This is my first time with Paolo Bacigalupi and I’m intrigued. Complimenting Ted Chiang’s “Lifecycle of Software Objects”, Paolo’s short st ★★★★☆ (4/5) This is my first time with Paolo Bacigalupi and I’m intrigued. Complimenting Ted Chiang’s “Lifecycle of Software Objects”, Paolo’s short story deals with existence of robots in either the realm of products or humans. A legal question no doubt but it is rooted within the ethics of human society. Synopsis This was what the world was coming to. A robot woman who got you so tangled up you could barely remember your job. In the universe of this story, a Mika model approaches our narrator, Detective Rivera in hopes of getting a lawyer for a murder she has committed. Mika models, built by Executive Pleasures company, are highly sexualised robots who respond to clients’ behaviours (noting their pulse rates, tones and inflections, movement of eyes and so on) and act accordingly. Our Detective is constantly seduced by Mika model’s advances despite being cognizant of her heinous crime. He is perplexed by her “humanness”, her constant assertions of being real and not just an assembly of software and computer chips. Rivera needs to remind himself time and time again that she is not human. The girl clouded my judgment, for sure. No. Not the girl. The bot. Despite this realisation, our Detective is completely enamoured by her. His inadvertent actions in regards to the robot reflect the goodness of his treatment in spite of her guilt. Had a real human been in the model’s place, he would not have extended such warmth to him or her. Having approached the crime scene, the model takes him to the basement where her now former owner used to torture her. The Mika model confirms that her actions were mere revenge. By this time, the company has dispatched their own legal counsel, Holly Simms to disable Mika model. In a gruesome act before the Detective, Holly drives a screwdriver into Mika’s eyes thus shutting down her processing unit. Detective Rivera cries murder but Holly calls it a mere “hardware deactivation”. Thoughts What inherent human need is fulfilled by robots which strikingly resemble humans? Mere companionship and fulfilment of sexual desires does not satisfy as an answer. Automation at workplace is a different case where robots are set to do specific tasks. Robots bearing remarkable similarities with humans are intended to be viewed as close imitation of humans if not real humans themselves. Then why does the question arise about anthropomorphizing them? So it was all fake. Mika didn’t actually care about me, or want me. She was just running through her designated behavior algorithms, doing whatever it took to make me blush, and then doing it more, because I had. In the story’s context, Mika model acts like human. She has blood rushing through her, motor and sensory neurons under her skin, her eyes are vibrant and suggestive, her physical actions are fluid and not the least bit mechanical or choppy, and she has the ability to feel and converse like real humans. Add to that her ability of deductive reasoning and decision-making and she is but a split image of a human being. Instead of all this being embedded in a soul, all the processes are carried out through coding in the background. “There. You see? Now I’ve learned something new. Does my learning make me less real? Does yours?” “It’s completely different. You had a personality implanted in you, for Christ’s sake!” Now to what degree are Mika model’s intentions her own or ingrained in her software is a question which requires a thorough understanding of robotics. Her ability to feel guilt for a wrong-doing, her assertions of being as real as humans deserve to be recognised. Here comes the pertinent question of the notion of responsibility. Rights and duties are symbiotic in nature and responsibilities are rooted in these two ideas. In this fictional world, are robots given rights? Or as put by a lawyer in reply to this story, “when a robot kills, is it murder or product liability?” Throughout the drive to the crime scene, Detective Rivera’s thought process is directed at somehow acquitting Mika model. Even after seeing the dead body, the implications of the word “murder”, legal and ethical, somehow don’t apply to the bot. But as soon as Holly disables Mika model in a grisly way by plunging the screwdriver into her eye sockets, the Detective cries “You can’t murder someone in front of me!” Why is it that killing of a human by a robot did not exactly fit the definition of murder for Detective Rivera but incapacitating the model did? Does the death penalty even matter to something that’s loaded with networked intelligence? Concluding Thoughts This is a very well-written short story which leaves the reader with many unanswered questions. The portrayal of Mika model as a seductress and culprit is both intriguing and jarring. The pace of the story advances the plot and action and nowhere does the reader need to take a pause to comprehend the finer intricacies of this complicated situation – until the very end that is. The world building in this story is concrete and tangible. A futuristic tale, “Mika Model” puts forth uncomfortable questions, answers to which must be found in our rapidly advancing world. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 2017
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Apr 2017
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Mar 21, 2017
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Paperback
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| B0048EKOP0
| 4.26
| 110,257
| Jul 05, 2002
| Oct 26, 2010
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it was amazing
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You can read my detailed reviews for all 12 stories of the anthology here: 1. Tower of Babylon ★★★★★ (5/5) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 2. Un You can read my detailed reviews for all 12 stories of the anthology here: 1. Tower of Babylon ★★★★★ (5/5) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 2. Understand ★★★★☆ (4/5) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 3. Division by Zero ★★★☆☆ (3/5) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 4. Story of Your Life ★★★★☆ (4/5) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 5. Seventy-Two Letters ★★★☆☆ (3/5) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 6. The Evolution of Human Science ★★★☆☆ (3/5) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 7. Hell is the Absence of God ★★★★☆ (4/5) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 8. Liking What You See: A Documentary ★★★★★ (5/5) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 9. What's Expected of Us ★★★★☆ (4/5) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 10. The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate ★★★★☆ (4/5) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 11. Exhalation ★★★★★ (5/5) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... 12. The Lifecycle of Software Objects ★★★☆☆ (3/5) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 11, 2017
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Mar 30, 2017
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Feb 11, 2017
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Kindle Edition
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| 0452281253
| 9780452281257
| 0452281253
| 3.61
| 158,765
| May 1938
| Dec 01, 1999
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did not like it
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★☆☆☆☆ (1/5) The laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great transgression and the root of all evil. This is m ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5) The laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great transgression and the root of all evil. This is my first time with Ayn Rand. I’m aware of the general sentiments regarding her philosophies but am unfamiliar with the finer intricacies of her arguments. This review is solely based upon my personal reading of “Anthem” . Giving this book a definitive rating is also rather difficult. I found the first half of the book quite fascinating in terms of world-building and prose style. The second half of the book ran contrary to all notions I had formed of the dystopian world portrayed in the first part. Towards the end, the story became “pure evil” , leaving us with a forceful and outrageous message. It is undoubtedly an incredibly written book which makes the moralistic contradictions even more shocking! Synopsis We were guilty and we confess it here: we were guilty of the great Transgression of Preference. We preferred some work and some lessons to the others. Our narrator, Equality 7-2521 recounts the story of the life he has lived in a world where all notions of individuality have ceased to exist. Absolute collectivism is the norm of society which is heavily integrated. Use of pronouns such as I, me or you have been replaced by “we” and “them”. Men toil for the sake of fellow brothers and sisters, and they accept that which is already planned for them. There is no concept of individual thought or creativity which are considered to be highest form of transgressions a man can commit. It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. The protagonist begins his account by admitting to the sins he has indulged in – sins of inquiry, curiosity and desire. He has acquired the ability to write that which he cannot share with others, and has also stumbled upon an underground tunnel, a discovery he cannot disclose to anyone. He had desired to join the Home of Scholars owing to his tendencies towards learning but was condemned to a life as a mere sweeper of the city. The tunnel provides him with respite where he can indulge in free thought and writing enables him to give definitive form to internal doubts and inquiries which remain hidden within him. We think that there are mysteries in the sky and under the water and in the plants which grow. But the Council of Scholars has said that there are no mysteries, and the Council of Scholars knows all things. He also encounters The Golden One, Liberty 5-3000 who is a seventeen year old peasant girl working in the fields. They develop a silent understanding of each other which eventually moulds into love. Since it is forbidden to form alliances with other human beings (unless directed to), they keep their attachments discreet. In the tunnel the protagonist also discovers a piece of wire which emits light upon heating. His inquisitive nature and happiness overpowers his will for secrecy and he aims to share his findings with members of Home of Scholars. The elder members take deep offense at his actions since he was consigned to be only a sweeper. He then flees into Uncharted Forest which borders the city. Our protagonist realises that he is indeed damned since he has forsaken his brothers, yet he enjoys the freedom of the wilderness around him. He is joined by his beloved, The Golden One who had followed him into the forest after his escape. After days of exploration they find a house from the Unmentionable Times where they decide to settle in. Equality comes across manuscripts written ages ago, finds out about the “I” and rediscovers individuality which was lost upon them. World Building and Prose Style We went on, cutting through the branches, and it was as if we were swimming through a sea of leaves, with the bushes as waves rising and falling and rising around us, and flinging their green sprays high to the treetops. The trees parted before us, calling us forward. The forest seemed to welcome us. We went on, without thought, without care, with nothing to feel save the song of our body. Probably the only aspect of this book which have stayed with me is the epistolary style which documents workings of a well-crafted dystopian world. We see the world through Equality’s eyes which lends it greater credibility and concreteness. Simple prose style makes the world-building even more haunting. His journal entries feel real and plausible, his inquisitive nature is apparent through persistent admission of guilt of having committed sins. All the great modern inventions come from the Home of the Scholars, such as the newest one, which was found only a hundred years ago, of how to make candles from wax and string; also, how to make glass, which is put in our windows to protect us from the rain Thinking is confined to certain houses such as Council of Vocations and Home of Scholars. Each phase of life scribes to a specific house such as Home of Infants where children are raised, Home of Useless where they elderly are sequestered, and each vocation has a separate house such as House of Leaders out of which emerge political leaders, Home of Scholars where members deliberate upon various tangible and intangible notions. Then there are various councils which regulate and authorise thought and exploration, assign specific tasks and designate mating partners. They called the Students' names, and when the Students stepped before them, one after another, the Council said: "Carpenter" or "Doctor" or "Cook" or "Leader." Then each Student raised their right arm and said: "The will of our brothers be done." Life in this world is austere and scheduled, controlled by a systematic approach to eating, entertainment, sleeping and working. Savage punishments are accorded for the most minor of offences. Singling out one human over entire brotherhood to receive one’s affections, preferring specific jobs, exploring the city one is not authorised to, or doing anything for oneself are all considered mighty sins and are heavily penalised. Complete submission of mind and body for collective benefit for all humankind is the highest and only attainable goal, worthy of toiling and sacrificing entire lives for. Criticism Upon reading first half of the book, my conception of Anthem’s world where control is relegated to fixed strata of society was reflective of our capitalist society where corporations have absolute influence on all workings of the world. Much like the Homes and Councils of the story, corporations have confined human thinking and creativity to a great extent. We are no different from the nameless men and women inhabiting Rand’s world, surrounded by material fatigues which are showered upon us every day. From the isolation of social media to being imprisoned by advertisements, we are confined to lives driven by corporate agenda. Wilful ignorance is spread by deceitful media practices, quality of education and its accessibility are limited to uppermost echelons of society. Individual ambition based upon mercenary attitudes garners more integration in society than ambition based on true forms of creativity and goodness. Liberal thinking is misused to justify oppression, collective goodness is squandered on protecting the most powerful amongst us. And yet there is no shame in us and no regret. We say to ourselves that we are a wretch and a traitor. But we feel no burden upon our spirit and no fear in our heart. And it seems to us that our spirit is clear as a lake troubled by no eyes save those of the sun. And in our heart—strange are the ways of evil!—in our heart there is the first peace we have known in twenty years. With this backdrop in mind, Equality’s choices seem profoundly courageous. He intends to question in spite of the repercussions. He lets his mind wander in order to find true freedom and liberty. For him, settling into a dictated life does not work. He is aware of his potential and does not shrink from searching the true meaning of life. He puts to use his faculty of reasoning which has been grounded into obedience through societal norms. He revolts through an outpouring of creativity and curiosity since he is not entirely satiated with his life. Only the glass box in our arms is like a living heart that gives us strength. We have lied to ourselves. We have not built this box for the good of our brothers. We built it for its own sake. It is above all our brothers to us, and its truth above their truth. This is where the story takes a shocking turn. Having once tasted true liberty, being cognizant of the “I”, having given names to himself and his beloved (Prometheus and Gaea), our narrator becomes intensely rigid about his individuality. He exclaims the power of the self and ego and vows to live only for himself. He claims to be the most supreme of being since he alone has discovered the true meaning of life and has experienced emancipation of thought and action. He makes conceited statements about futility of “we” and that his will alone shall be his sole guide. The story leaves a sour taste. Given the mass oppression faced by inhabitants of Rand’s world, the final message on notions of liberty and free-will are tragically appalling. She seems to rationalise egoism and greed – two ideas which have frequently ravaged our world. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. The problem, as I see it, lies in Rand’s depiction of extreme ends of spectrum of collectivism and individualism. Anthem’s world is a highly integrated society where individual rights are forfeited for the sake of collective good. This tapers off creativity and resourcefulness, two hallmarks of human distinctness through which men progress. Hence ideas such as altruism and sacrifice are cast in a negative light. I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him. Towards the end of the novel, Rand propagates the idea of individualism which is extremely harsh. She endorses a life lived for none other than oneself where the self is given absolute power and control over one’s own life. No regard for others are to be taken into consideration. One’s “ego” is the only thing one must yield to in all matters. Nothing is more significant than one’s own will. Through this one can formulate own judgements and decisions. This effectively renders the fine line between good and evil as unnecessary. In Equality’s opinion, nothing else matters but him. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgement of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect. Rand’s theory is inherently fallacious. Equality is keen to bring up his children with notions of individualism. He intends to go back to the city and bring back some fellow citizens to his new home. He wants to share his experience with others. He expresses interest in imparting others with the wisdom he has acquired so that they too can live a boundless life, free from shackles of authority. Does this not confirm man’s innate need of companionship, of leaving a legacy behind? Admittedly, the morals he wants to impress upon others are not exactly ethical, yet the fact is that he relies on others to share with him his newfound life. Any group, no matter how small, only flourishes through dissemination of ideas and cooperation. Cooperation requires accommodation which is only possible through some degree of selflessness and kindness. Communal living, to which Equality aspires can only be attained through a correct balance of altruistic goals and collective goodness. But this utopian dream is already fated for destruction owing to Equality’s supreme egoism. He relies on himself for ultimate gratification. Final Thoughts Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: "I will it!" Ayn Rand aims to portray the protagonist as a saviour but to me Equality becomes ruthless and vile. I detest his self-proclaimed greatness, his deliberate villainy, his absolute pride in himself. I loathe The Golden One for her subservience to Equality, “Rather shall we be evil with you than good with all our brothers,” she says, exonerating herself from difference between goodness and evil. I feel absolute contempt for the implications of this story, its blatant propagation of selfishness and materialism, its brazen disregard for goodness, nobility and selflessness. Ayn Rand’s final message is as much appalling as it is a cautionary tale for those who can see through the evil. I would never recommend this book to anyone owing to the maliciousness it advocates towards the end. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 27, 2017
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Apr 04, 2017
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Nov 28, 2016
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Paperback
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my rating |
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| 4.30
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not set
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Sep 18, 2024
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| 3.71
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really liked it
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Aug 11, 2024
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Jun 19, 2024
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| 4.12
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it was amazing
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Jun 21, 2024
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Jun 11, 2024
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| 3.72
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really liked it
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Jun 10, 2024
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Jun 05, 2024
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| 3.82
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it was ok
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Apr 25, 2024
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Apr 24, 2024
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| 4.32
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really liked it
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Apr 23, 2024
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Mar 31, 2024
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| Liu, Ken
*
| 3.93
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it was amazing
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Dec 07, 2023
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Oct 04, 2023
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| 4.15
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it was amazing
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Jul 17, 2023
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Jun 08, 2023
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| 4.10
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it was amazing
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May 22, 2023
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Apr 24, 2023
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| Liu, Ken
*
| 4.36
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it was amazing
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Feb 21, 2022
Feb 21, 2022
Feb 18, 2022
Feb 11, 2022
Feb 03, 2022
Feb 02, 2022
Feb 2022
Feb 2022
Jan 31, 2022
Jan 30, 2022
Jan 27, 2022
not set
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Mar 17, 2023
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| 4.12
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it was amazing
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Oct 2022
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Sep 18, 2022
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| 3.88
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really liked it
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Aug 10, 2022
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Aug 01, 2022
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| Liu, Ken
*
| 4.58
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really liked it
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Jan 26, 2022
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Jan 26, 2022
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| 4.42
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really liked it
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Apr 04, 2019
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Mar 27, 2019
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| 3.77
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liked it
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Apr 30, 2018
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Mar 17, 2018
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| 4.25
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it was amazing
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Feb 28, 2018
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Feb 01, 2018
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| Liu, Ken
*
| 4.36
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it was amazing
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Feb 23, 2022
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Apr 04, 2017
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| 3.94
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really liked it
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Apr 2017
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Mar 21, 2017
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| 4.26
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it was amazing
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Mar 30, 2017
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Feb 11, 2017
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| 3.61
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did not like it
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Apr 04, 2017
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Nov 28, 2016
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