Salt

by Adam Roberts

And here are we, you and me, poised between Heaven and Hell. We are salty.

Rylee would like this discussion of salt

But this thing about the children, this was a seed planted.

Ha

You are nowhere, you are nothing. Nirvana.

tabernacle

The chamber in the astroid in the book rivergods was called the tabernacle

who take such perverted delight in bending language,

Music is the soul of mathematics,

There is no shame in a man admitting the handsomeness of a man,

This reminds me of spinrad's Iron Dreams

With us, we work a quarter-day, and the rest of the time is ours.

Sounds good to me

And after a few years we discover we can bring skills from all our areas of expertise to bear on any problem that confronts us.

This reminds me of my thoughts in Rivergods with the standup commedian character finding his skills working well in business

‘The hierarchy is internalised.’

‘The Bible is a book, somebody else’s book. If we fit ourselves wholly into that book as you say, then we become slaves to it. The only freedom is to shape one’s own relationship with the Divine. To write one’s own Bible.’

I could see no other way to success, but I could see that; it was present in my head, complete, like a finished piece of music.

The music anaolgy by both antagonists

that hauled the snake-charmer’s animal from its box.

Ha

War is a terrible thing though glorious,

Lol

The Senaarian army was almost two thousand strong;

How does the character know this fact??

was to heat-shield them to dampen their infra-red, then half-bury them in the salt.

Will he do what they did in kim stanley robinsons mars series?

We made war. But little is made in war, and much unmade. It is a stupid phrase; it has no correlation with the real world.

Als was never a nation at war, but a rabble of bloodthirsty terrorists.

Bushism

Of course, an individual cannot declare war; only a government can. It is of the greatest importance to law, to order, that we distinguish these two things.

with Convento, and the occupation of the ruins of Als, the war was effectively over. It was a matter of great frustration that there were so many Alsists who refused to digest that fact.

‘We have won the war; it is merely that the enemy have refused to accept the fact. We must make them accept it.’

The comparison with another holy relationship between Father and Son is surely not blasphemous.

Jesus Christ!!!! Wow, this is so Iron Dreams

We were like animals, natives of the planet.

I thought of the Mars trilogy with the disguisedd vehicles, now with this native statement and dunes I'm thinking of Dune.

perhaps. The vision (I can shut my eyes and the image will come to me as if newly fished from bright water)

Like this prose

that the pain had contracted about me like shrink-wrap.

thinking. It was because the occasion hurried me out of thought,

the product being purchased was liberty.

I think of the opening sequence of Bobby Conn's Disposable Future

when I reveal that for a whole month we spent more public money on Als than we did on Senaar itself, even though (and my enemies have made enough capital with this) some people were hungry in the streets of our great city.

U S A USA

Inside the camps were built parodies of towns:

I love the back and forth of the perspectives of the two antagonists

That Senaar would do so much, in order to achieve so little

they were ‘buying’ the right to talk to me, but I was so hungry I did not even recoil at this perversity).

hand. I might almost say I am glad to be dying before the war comes to the end, for what would I do afterwards?

You see lots of writting like this, how vets can't go back to their old life the same, and people after being in prison can't deal with regular life after.

food began to go up in price to an astonishing degree.

Is this fiction?

it is I who do the drowning, stuffing a shirt into his mouth

Is this the ripped shirt put on the table during her debriefing?