Bobby’s Comments (group member since Mar 15, 2013)

Bobby’s comments from the Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy group.

G33z3r wrote: "Bobby wrote: "It's always a danger and a seductive one, to criticize a book for not being the book that we would have written...."

No, I'm criticizing it as the book that I would've liked to read...."

"You say tomato..."

I mean, I agree with you on almost everything. Her focus was different. You picked up the wrong book. That's not a fault with the book.

Mandel is writing about what makes up a life and how fragile and precious all of that actually is...even the silly stuff. She chronicles a full life before the Georgian flu (Arthur's) and deliberately has him die of entirely different causes, just before the flu, to show us how the effects of his having lived are still rippling outwards even after a massive disaster has wiped out the world's population. He hasn't disappeared. She could have chosen any one of seven billion lives. She chose Arthur's.

And yeah, some people have the know-how, the resources, the luck to know how to turn the lights back on, but that's a bigger deal than we think. For the vast majority of people, not just in the US or Canada, but the world, we turn on the magic light switch and the magic light comes on. And for instance, I thought Mandel did an excellent job of detailing how the affect of not having that would initially affect a society and have a profoundly disorienting impact on individuals who that was all they'd known.

I don't even think your description of the "lumps" in the airport is inaccurate (though unfair). I think you're looking at it upside down. The infrastructure of their entire world has collapsed, no electricity, no running water, etc., friends, family gone. That they survived for twenty years starting out with the clothes on their back is amazing. I don't think you're appreciating just how hard it would be to re-build society once it had been wiped out. Most people in the United States and Canada go to the grocery store to buy their food and if it's not aligned in brightly colored rows, they flip out. When she writes about how (who was it? Clark or Austin...) a character had eaten their last orange and if only they'd known, I loved that. I'm typing on a computer to you who is I-have-no-idea-where, and I have just about zero idea how any of it works. Mandel is writing about a society that is so ego-oriented, so self-involved, we check our emails, our Facebook status literally, every few minutes.

(I remember the comedian Louis C.K. talking about his annoyance with teen-age girls who were complaining because their phones were taking too long to load. He's like, "Hey, you little punk, have some patience! The signal is being sent to an antenna in space and then has to come back down!" What he's saying is that the thing they're taking for granted is actually a miracle. But those teen-age girls are going to have a hell of a time holding on to anything if the entire infrastructure of their world falls apart. Hell, I'm going to have a hell of a time.)

First, I have to learn to live with not checking my email a hundred times a day. Then I have to learn to live without being able to automatically contact my parents in California, my sister in Mississippi, etc. Eventually, I'm going to realize that the food I can raid from a store or from a house is gone, so I have to hunt it, gather it or grow it. So there are layers and layers and layers, thirty thousand years of learning that have to be rebuilt. Some we'd have a head start on, but some we wouldn't. And everything is so interconnected that it might take a while to figure out which is which. You can bet a lot would be unexpected.

And brains aren't distributed evenly. I have a friend who is an artist. She dropped out of high school because she had a really hard time learning that way. Now, when it comes blowing glass or drawing, or growing plants in her garden, she's amazing. She's perfectly intelligent, a single mom, owns two homes. But she can't learn from books. If she were to make it past the initial holocaust, her focus might not be getting the electricity back on because she's not smart that way BUT... this over here, she can do. Because the people in the airport do stay alive and they do plant crops and grow food and they do build a little community out of nothing, and they do preserve something of the past and that actually is a lot in twenty years. And you know what? When they get in touch with those people who turned the lights on, I'll bet money those people will appreciate the museum of civilization a heck of a lot more than you do.

Janine wrote: "There's been a lot of discussion about the Arthur plot line and who likes it, who doesn't? Can I ask the people who like the Arthur plot: do you enjoy celebrity stories in real life? (Not necessari..."

I absolutely do not follow celebrity gossip in real life. Ever. What was interesting for me in regards to Arthur was the completeness and almost, sweetness with which he was conceived. Mandel writes about him without judgement and honestly, that's how I absorbed him. I didn't not like him or become disinterested in him simply because he was rich and famous. It's actually pretty interesting how that is the thing that seems to really have taken hold for people that didn't like the book.

I felt that Arthur's celebrity status was representative of all the paper thin trivialities that seem solid, that seem important, in our world today. Arthur's celebrity actually means nothing in the great scheme of things. We agree, all of us, even you, to give it some kind of emotional weight in order to give us some sense of control over the world we live in. We make these simple agreements a thousand times every day just to get along in the world. Mandel chooses to have sympathy and understanding for these. She even manages to find some beauty in them. A running back running for more yards in a game than anybody before him is only important because a group of people decide it's important. That decision then, becomes an affirmation of our basic humanity and therefore, worth honoring.

G33z3r wrote: "Part 1: it's the end of the world as we don't know it.

We're off to the theater! Shakespeare, no less. No wonder the Literati like this book. (I'd rather go see Wicked!)

Jeevan & Laura are attend..."


Wait a second, Geez.

First of all, this should have been your review. Hilarious.

But is she pretentious just because she chose her characters to go to a play? The book would have been better, i.e. "less pretentious" had Jeevan and Laura gone to a hockey game? Really? Why?

It's always a danger and a seductive one, to criticize a book for not being the book that we would have written...if we had written that book. But we didn't. And for Emily Mandel, her characters went to the theatre. People do, you know, even down-to-earth, unpretentious people. You'll even see some at Shakespeare, I swear.

G33z3r wrote: "Bobby wrote: ".... I am now reading Station Eleven written almost twenty years after Parable of the Sower and it is yet another dark take on the not-so-distant future of humanity...."

When you ta..."

Well, I feel the need to remind us to take into account that there are more than the two poles, optimism and pessimism. Presumably, most art is written with neither one in mind and a lot of stories have much of both and more besides. The story is what the story is. Having said that...

In almost all of the cases you named, G33z3r, I think they would qualify as optimistic. Human beings getting wiped out isn't, in my opinion, inherently pessimistic. Human beings being the cause of their own destruction, is. In Parable of the Sower, Roadside Picnic, Station Eleven or even say, The Stand what is ultimately wrong with people is people. We're destroyed by our ambition, greed, carelessness, hatred, etc. 1984 hates what we are becoming. Human beings coming together to fight a common cause, or helping each other to overcome an obstacle, I think that's gotta be optiimistic.

I think science fiction has always had a healthy dose of pessimism somewhere. I mean, you could argue that Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text is a relatively bleak outlook on the ramifications of science pursued at the cost of all other concerns. On the other hand, it's hard to get much more optimistic than The Martian. And sometimes, there are simply matters of degree. Say, Asimov's The Foundation Trilogy is inherently optimistic despite the constant conflict therein just because it envisions a future of humanity among the stars across thousands of planets. With the trouble we're having with this one, that now seems almost childishly optimistic. Compare that to this summer I've read Roadside Picnic and Parable of the Sower, both of which have pretty grim viewpoints, Sower even in spite of the thread of hope that the "Earthseed" religion provides. Those books were written twenty years apart.

Funnily enough, I am now reading Station Eleven written almost twenty years after Parable of the Sower and it is yet another dark take on the not-so-distant future of humanity. And I just saw a movie Z for Zachariah that also has the human race getting pretty much wiped out. I will say this, the possibility that the coming millennium is going to be royally FUBAR is definitely on our collective minds.

But that makes me curious to read some of these guys V. W. is talking about. Sometimes it seems like we decide optimism or a utopia for that matter, is a childish idea or concept because we don't see it in our every day life. I think there's more to it. We give too much weight to our failings and not enough to our profound victories -- which we also have. When you read (or see) a story like 2001: A Space Odyssey, surely the most optimistic science fiction book ever, how can you help but be open to humankind's possibilities?

AuldWolf wrote: "Utopias are boring? What a peculiar and patently ridiculous thing to say. It's not that different to saying something like 'humanity is boring and that's the reason why science-fiction has to be pe..."

I am editing my overly emotional response here because it occurred to me that AuldWolf is probably a teen-ager or a very young adult. So, I apologize.

Jim wrote: "I don't know if any of you is a Neil Gaiman fan, but here's an interesting interview with him mostly about age appropriate reading, so it sort of fits the topic. I never restricte..."

I can remember my philosophy as a kid was if I could read it, I read it!

Aleah wrote: "Never mind, I just Googled it. I still don't have enough facts to form a proper opinion, but my knee-jerk reaction is to be very annoyed."

You and me both, sister. It's taking everything I've got to stay as much out of the conversation as possible.

http://www.ericflint.net/index.php/20...

I bought all my bookshelves at garage sales. I'm feeling a little unmanly in your wake, Spooky.

Jim wrote: "Harry Harrison writes a lot of witty, fun characters. Slippery Jim DiGriz of the Stainless Steel Rat series, Jason Dinault of the Deathworld trilogy, & Bill the Galactic Hero.

On a..."


Jim, the Stainless Steel Rat was the first guy I thought of too, Jim.

Also, Kartik, you should read The Martian. All the kids are doing it. The protagonist there is very "witty". Almost too much so.

Jim wrote: "Bobby, check out this Wikipedia entry on LOTR radio drama.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lor..."

Jim, I certainly will. Thanks!

Holly wrote: "Hi all, for me it has to be The Lord of The Rings. I heard a radio recording first...and that led me to the book. Listening to it on the radio fired my imagination and I created all those images in..."

I'm totally curious. It must have been a radio dramatization, yeah? As opposed to say, reading the whole book. Where did you hear that? Who produced it? I'd be interested to hear something like that. I love radio theatre.

Clare wrote: "We all want to come and help you next time that you sort them out... provided we get to sort the SF shelves particularly."

It's funny, I first started putting my spec fic with the rest of my books out of like, defensiveness for the genre(s) or something.

That's seven different bookshelves. Yikes.

Yeah, I could use a dewey decimal system, I have enough (as in, way too many) books but basically, I just have mine blocked off in type. Fiction which includes my science fiction, plays, books about theatre, poetry, books about poetry, film, history, autobiography, black history, pocket paperbacks, comics and graphic novels, research materials and then, on a separate shelf for like, favorite speculative fiction, where I keep my King and Bradbury and Ellison and anthologies. Finally, I have another shelf that is my spec fic pocket paperbacks.

It's pretty unwieldy, but the upside is that one of my favorite "jobs" that I do at least once a year is reorganizing my books while listening to a book! Ahhh...

Sad Puppies? Rabid Puppies? I guess I'm not hip...

Spooky1947 wrote: "Bobby, my new best friend

:D

I've heard of Powell's...isn't it the largest used bookstore in the nation?

I'll talk to about this by PM...

And thanks for the offer :D"

I actually don't know if Powell's is the biggest book store in the nation. It is, however, BIG. New and used stuff, HUGE spec fic section, really dangerous to go there unless you have money to burn. For some people Powell's is almost too big, in which case they have a smaller store up on Hawthorne. But I think for what you want, like I said, there's Wallace Books down the street, that's like the bookstores my parents used to drop me off in and come back four hours later. Or Cameron Books downtown, dusty, stacked with old editions from bygone decades. It's really fun to hit these up on a rainy day when you have nothing else to do.

Like that, for instance. Urban fantasy as a genre was absolutely necessary. Fantasy couldn't stay in the Middle Earth knock-offs forever.

Spooky1947 wrote: "Bobby, Bobby, Bobby....true part of it IS me....I just like That Old-Time Science Fiction, and it's darn hard to find unless you steal it off the internet (I'd rather buy than steal, but if I can't..."

You know what I recommend, Spooky? You should plan a visit out to Portland, Oregon. I'm serious. Between my lady and I we have two two bedroom apartments. Come out here for like a week and I'll take you to a handful of the best bookstores you'll ever go to. I've even got one, right down the street, that is just a house and is neck deep, sometimes literally, in books. The science fiction section has crates full of books overflowing and shelves buried three rows deep of paperbacks. There's also Powell's: City of Books. One book store that takes up an entire city block and is four stories high or something. All books, bro, new and used. I'm not kidding. PLENTY of the Old Masters. And if you did that and found some loot that made you happy, we could head down to the Sylvia Beach Hotel, overlooking the ocean, and read up in the attic/library. This hotel, no cell phones, no wi-fi, no TV and all the rooms are themed after authors. Think about it.

And you're absolutely right, dog and I didn't mean to say that. I love Heinlein, Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov the whole shebang.

That's a real offer, bro. Let me know.