Bonnie > Recent Status Updates

Sounds like society in After Atlas

"Where to go now? The answer seems to be ‘nowhere that we can realistically hope for’.

The assault that has been gaining momentum, of ecopolitical protest groups, implies a profoundly damaging psychological withdrawal from delimited boundaries. It would terminate Stage One w/o ushering in Stage Two. The result could only be apathy and decay on a planet-wide scale"

"A memory nagged at him—something he’d read years ago, that the initiate to the Orphic Rites in ancient Greece had to learn by heart for recitation after death. ‘I am a child of Earth and Starry Heaven. Give me to drink of…’
Of what? The waters of forgetfulness—or the waters of memory? One of the two; but he couldn’t remember which it had been. Yet the distinction was critical."

Dotheboy's Hall, from Nicholas Nickelby. Now I get the reference. Makes me happy when things connect.

"What sort of grim Dotheboys Hall would Dorothy’s logic world have turned into, but for the warmth and kindliness of Lionel Rosson?"

a conversation about speech processing, information in the brain>>

“...a permanent form isn’t practical for every single word—we only need remember the basic meaning. So you’ve got one level of information—that’s the actual words we use, on the surface of the mind. The other permanent level, deep down, contains highly abstract concepts—idea associations linked together network-style..."

Very descriptive, can see this

"Africa. Those hot still evenings when the open louvres brought no air into their flat and the beer came warm from the overloaded icebox. The brightly-lit university buildings there on the hill, and the yellow glow of the city a dozen miles away by the sea, with the sticky darkness in between syncopated by the mutter of drums."

"What damage have I done you? What have I said?
I don’t grudge you anything,
not if the next man up and gives you plenty.
This doorsill is big enough for the both of us —
you’ve got no call to grudge me what’s not yours.
You’re another vagrant, just like me, I’d say,
and it lies with the gods to make us rich or poor."

"Stupid because this duty was yet another crime. Stupid because white can’t also be black, duty and crime cannot be one and the same. Otherwise there is no black or white at all, and color is wholly dependent on the foundational logical premise."

Handheld calculator in the 1920s, nice

In front of me, on the half-breadth plan, in the sketch, I saw my hand holding the calculator, the logarithmic dial pointing to 15.

"Fifteen tons [of rocket fuel]. But it’d be better to take... yes: let’s do 100..." I said that because I knew that tomorrow...

Watching this scene from outside of myself, I noticed the hand holding the calculator had started to tremble

"He could see us. I pictured what He saw: the concentric circles of the tribunes dappled in little blue dots, like the rings of a spiderweb speckled in microscopic suns (our gleaming badges). The wise, white Spider would now alight in the center, clad in the white robes of the Benefactor, having wisely bound us all hand and foot in His beneficent snares of happiness."

Besides, how could the state have been logical while people still lived in a state of freedom, i.e., wild animals, monkeys, and herds? What can you expect from people back then when even today, in our era, somewhere deep inside, in the furry depths, you can still hear the wild echo of apes?

Where are the rest of the Library siblings right now? Elsewhere in the Pyramid, outside, hidden in their own magical Libraries?
THERE'S NO MAGIC, STEVE.

Heh

'The skinny girl doled out Kleenex. Every so often she’d say something like “I just don’t know what he was thinking,” and pat her belly protectively. Erwin guessed that there would be another doomed idiot to take Billy’s place in the trailer park in six months or so.'

Past time to share the fricking "catalogs"

“Yeah. I wasn’t going to say anything. It’s part of my catalog.” Alicia’s catalog was the far future.
“Well, then don’t—” Peter began.

1. Back with Calypso again, after all that!
2. No. It was told out of order - those big adventures took place earlier; that was how he ended up on Calypso's island.


I drifted along nine days. On the tenth, at night,
the gods cast me up on Ogygia, Calypso’s island,
home of the dangerous nymph with glossy braids
who speaks with human voice, and she took me in,
she loved me . . . Why cover the same ground again?

Why though

"You must travel down
to the House of Death and the awesome one, Persephone,
there to consult the ghost of Tiresias, seer of Thebes,
the great blind prophet whose mind remains unshaken."

"Human speech was difficult for him now, even painful—especially when he was fresh out of the woods. Worse, he lacked guile."

Sigh. Didn't care for this book when I read it, so why read it again?

The usual reasons. Give it another chance. Defend my two stars, or else mine the depths and charm I missed the first time. Refresh my memory for book club discussion.

Find out why two GR friends compared it to the Umbrella Academy, one negatively as in "It's a grimdark ripoff of The Umbrella Academy, Vol. 1: Apocalypse Suite..."

--Here There Be Tygers - a spaceship lands on a beautiful Earth-like planet, but the planet may be a living intelligence. Would it want people there, or not want people?
--The Strawberry Window - a family on Mars. The wife is homesick so the husband pays to have pieces of their old house shipped to Mars. Memory /modernization?
--The Dragon - a dragon, or a train?

Where or what is "Dededeon"
It is not on the map!

“If you have gods,” Nola said, “I’d suggest prayer.”
“I wouldn’t take you for a woman who believes in the power of prayer,” I said.
“I believe in the power of prayer to keep panic at bay in those who believe in the gods”

...But it wasn’t Wilder’s bayonet that cut into the woman’s flesh. It was not by his hands that she was salted. It is in this way that the Imperial Army—indeed, any authoritarian military force—eschews individual responsibility. If there is a devil in this world, it does its work through hierarchy.

Dimos' observation has plenty of relevance to situations of our time. Yesterday, Secretary of State Rubio questioned by Senate committee re "targeting rules" for the numerous seafaring boats being blown up by the U.S. military.

“Wasn’t me, not really,” he told me. “It was an order. Wilder’s the one who gave it.” ...

A Sound of Thunder (had read this before: butterfly effect via time travel)
The Long Rain (weather on Venus: constant rain, or a Sun Dome?)
The Exiles (if this isn't in The Martian Chronicles, it certainly could be)

Will it be made clear to me by the end what is happening? Because right now I am still confused. Like a PKD novel.

Like GRRMs 'game of thrones' theme

“They say you grow up in war, but only parts of you do. Other parts get suppressed, eroded.”

“How old are you?”

“Who can say? I've been fighting this war a long time. Once you begin to drop, time becomes a luxury, an outdated thing, like the idea of voting or equality or freedom that meant anything but freedom for the rich from the burdens they force the poor to carry for them.”

Plenty of anti-war in this operation

"The rest of our squad struggled up the rise. Omalas and Sandoval, Tanaka, Landon, and Deathless. Behind us . . . nothing. After that bombing . . . there was no moaning or sobbing on the field. There were no whole people, no one capable of sound.
Everything smelled of blood and smoke."

The Golden Apples of the Sun
R Is for Rocket
The End of the Beginning
The Rocket
The Rocket Man

^these stories fantastic, best so far^

"Meat was easy to bamboozle. It had to expend so much energy and attention just dragging itself around that it tended to miss a lot."

"...fifteen years later they were still squeezing videos out of [John Lennon], like they forgot somebody wiped him out, and it had gone from, like, because they loved him to it not mattering what had happened because they could still get the fucking videos. They cooked up a simulation.. of the man and got it to do interviews and give simulated answers to simulated questions before the estate pulled the plug on that."

' “Truth is cheap, but information costs.” I can’t remember who said that.’

‘Vince What’s-His-Name,’ said Sam. ‘Died in a terrorist raid or something. I thought you said all information should be free.’

‘It should. It isn’t. Knowledge is power. But power corrupts. Which means the Age of Fast Information is an extremely corrupt age in which to live.’