I just had the opportunity to read Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein all in fairly quick succession. I’d recommend the same to any aspiring SF writer, and not just because they’re all good books in their own right. The three books are a triptych that illustrates how broadly a single subject can be approached, and shows how an author’s politics (or more broadly, an author’s beliefs about how the universe works) inform a narrative.This trio, when viewed from a distance, show a very similar story. A future cadet from planet earth joins a unified human military force as an infantryman. The military is embroiled in an interstellar war against alien forces and uses its starship-based high-tech infantry in a role roughly equivalent to armored cavalry units. The cadet starts in basic training/boot camp and sees fellow cadets screw up (sometimes fatally) but manages to squeak by training, entering the infantry as a private. The new private sees action, more people die in action, and he sees at least one major battle screwed up royally. He rises into the officer ranks and sees his last action (in the book at least) in a battle that ends as a qualified success (at least the important characters survived.)Of course, at ground level where the narrative meets the road, you’d be hard pressed to find three more divergent treatments of the same subject. Some examples that more than likely grow out of each author’s point of view:
According to Gallycat, the students riled up by the threat of Random House's publication of the Jewel of Medina were planning little more than a publicity campaign to e-mail the publisher and news outlets and so on. Perfectly innocuous stuff in a pluralistic society. Which makes Random House look like a bunch of wusses, and makes Professor Denise Spellberg's frantic warnings about threats to Random House's staff and property look even more like disingenuous bigotry, to put it kindly.
From the “this surprises you why?” department:Random House was going to publish a book titled The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones, a historical novel that features one of Mohammad’s wives, and has decided “oops, bad idea.” Quoth Random House in the Washington Post Op-Ed, “after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received "from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.” Apparently one of those credible sources was an American academic named Denise Spellberg (sage advice from the Smart Bitches, do not let this woman blurb your book) who got an advance copy and apparently got her knickers in a prudish little twist (you see Muhammad had wives, and gasp, may have had sex with them) and made a “frantic” call to the editor of a popular Muslim website (this book made her frantic) and asked him to warn Muslims about this nasty, evil, book that “made fun of Muslims and their history.” And apparently, armed only with Spellberg’s description of this “very ugly, stupid piece of work,” not having read it himself, he did exactly what she asked, warning people of the coming literary apocalypse. And, of course, offense spreads like wildfire.But what seems to be the trigger that caused the book to be pulled was Spellberg’s own warning to her own editor at another imprint at Random House. According to Spellberg, if the book was released there was “a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence.” Apparently she babbled on like an islamaphobic neocon frightened by Obama’s middle name. The Terrorists would kill them all if the book saw the light of day. Her warning was bounced around the email servers at Random House until the book was pulled less than a month later.Spellberg might count Random House’s withdrawl of the book as some sort of victory, but I wonder if she realizes that encouraging them to stomp this book by using threats of violence is casting Islam in a much more vile light before a much broader audience than the book’s publication ever would have.
No strange videos recently, so here's one from the Weird Universe Weblog. (The URL onscreen is NSFW)
His rant is here, and somewhat predictably there are responses in the blogosphere ranging from laconic bemusement by Scalzi to rhetorical dismemberment on the Feminist SF Blog. I would like to add my own little can of lighter fluid to this raging bonfire by offering everyone who’s jumping on this OMGWTFTEHGAYS panicmobile a nice little clue:Marriage defined by the state <> marriage as defined by the church (any church.)Repeat this a few times every time you’re frightened by images of George Takai on his honeymoon.Shall I defend my thesis with facts? (Oh please, not those.)I’m married in the Catholic Church. They don’t believe in divorce, you know. If I got a divorce, all nice and legal, the Pope starts going “lalalalala I can’t hear you lalalala” and says I’m still married. Of course, if divorced me tried to continue filing my taxes jointly or keep my ex-wife on my health insurance, I’d have some legal issues. If I died without a will, she wouldn’t inherit. But in the church, I’m still married. I get another wife, the US Government says it’s just fine while the Church says I’m still married to the first one. Another situation, a Muslim man can divorce his wife just by telling her he divorces her. Fine, his church says they’re divorced. But if he’s a US citizen and hasn’t filed the right paperwork, he’s going to be facing bigamy charges if he marries again— even if his wife says, “but he really did divorce me.”There are common law marriages that aren’t properly recognized by any particular church, and pagan marriages that aren’t recognized by the state. There are sects of particular religions that explicitly allow polygamy that the US has never legally recognized. (That’s a particularly thunderous silence in Mr. Card’s article.)Card’s thesis seems to be that if the State’s view of marriage in legal terms does not conform to a person’s view of marriage in religious/spiritual terms, it is a proper basis for succession and/or actual revolt. This might have been a cogent argument in the time of Henry V, nowadays it doesn’t particularly wash.
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