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Knocking on Heaven's Door
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Knocking on Heaven’s Door (August 2020)
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Yes but if we turn a deaf ear to environmentalists and keep pushing nature out of balance nature has to push back --you can call it a "price" but its just a re balancing If humans do not keep the balance nature will .Its either that or death of all life one earth --if humans are left unchecked so nature's checking of humans who wont check themselves (which we could have easily done) ( and still can do) not such a a big price
Not as big s it would have been if nature did not re balance sooner rather than let things go unchecked --just be sure to be one of those who survive the re balancing
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I'll try to join on this one. After the Sir Julius Vogel Award and the Hugo marathon, I need a break from reading (and gawd, I still have to read the entries for our own contest for positive speculative fiction) ... but by the end of August, I should've recovered. ;)
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“Maybe their lives weren’t as good as mine because they lived in a polluted world with constant wars and not enough food and water for everyone but they were still people and the fact is that my life is so good now because they died and made room for me and for all the other animals and plants.”
The lives they have now are based on a consensus of the three surviving groups. It’s fascinating
But I’m not buying the psychic animals.
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There's more psychic animals in the second chapter (or animal, really), but I'm not entirely sold on them yet either. I'm not sure we're getting more explanation then "we brought back Paleolithic creatures and it turns out they're psychic", but that might be better than science if it can't work.
I thought you were reading the Katy Butler book of the same name, but clearly not. That book is a very astute look at end of life issues in our country - I very much enjoyed it. I will look for this one.
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Yes! They intrigued me too. Especially that they don't usually gather in groups - it feels like a lot of this world's society is based around connection (to people and paleos). What drives someone away from that? Is a desire to be a bit hermity allowed or are the options full society or absolutely feral?
Finished chapter 3 - I'm hoping Brad is up for a great deal of personal development. At the very least he's starting well along the scale of unlikeable!
The animals seem pretty diverse, too, which is maybe the leftovers of zoos? But hyenas is a pretty tall order, I'd have thought, particularly with (at least) sabertooth cats, wolves, and lions in the same area. And presumably the species of predator that were originally native to America? They haven't come up much yet. Most of the fauna would be more usual in an african setting, at least so far.
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And think of time scale:
I’m surprised they have not mentioned tigers. There are enough of them in Texas to have given them an edge as top predator had they been released at the time of the plague.
This was gorgeous by the way:
“We live in abundance, the best of times, the best of worlds. Thousands of years and billions of deaths to reach this beauty, this wealth, this diversity—to hold it in our hands. All of history has brought us to this moment, and if the burden is great and the cost high, then the prize—this moment—is even greater.”
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That was a gorgeous passage! Also, I have to ask - there are tigers in Texas??
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That’s the major downside to all the freedom everyone gets up in arms (literally) about.
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Chapter 4 - we got a bit more of the scientific explanation behind the paleos, though it still seems pretty hand-wavy to me. But I'm fine with that, it's not the bit I'm here for!
Chapter 5 - More from Dog. The bits about the den made me think of Call of the Wild - haven't read that in years.
Chapter 6 - There had to be blood. It was the way to power.
Brad hated that story. Aww, maybe Brad is starting on his journey towards being a less annoying human!
Also, if he did nothing now, Clare would never fall in love with him....never mind, lol. But I did like the earlier passage about the same old story when it comes to humankind.
There's also more on this society and how it deals with the members less suited to a nomadic hunting life. Not sure I agree that that's how it would shake out, particularly when it seems there's still a decently high level of technology and acceptance of gender as a spectrum rather than a binary.
Chapter 7 - Loved the story of the first cloned teratorn!
Chapter 8 - Dog again! This time he's the peyote god.
Some good progress today! I'm not sure where this is going, but I'm actually enjoying just flowing along with the story. It's quirky.
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Oh no, sounds like you're not having the best time either - the fingerpads! That's got to hurt, I hope you're feeling better soon to; let's hope the universe gets on that evening out soon ^^
Finally joining you. :)As usual, I won't be reading anyone's comments before finishing the book so that I can be as unbiased as possible.
~ I'm impressed by the number of voices Russell manages to reproduce. Dog and the student essays are particularly authentic.
~ Here's the main premise in a nutshell:Brad opened to his favorite screen image, Albert Einstein, his childhood hero. His mother had set him the problem of Einstein’s equation when he was twelve and asking too many questions about his father. Energy and mass were different forms of the same thing. Pure energy was electromagnetic radiation—waves of light, radio waves, X-rays—traveling at a constant speed of roughly 1,078,260,480 kilometers per hour. Energy at rest equals mass times the speed of light squared. But why square the speed of light? And what about energy in motion? Figure it out, his mother had said, and when Brad did—what about antimatter? she asked.
In those years, his early teens, his favorite book had been the twenty-first-century biography of Albert Einstein, which put the scientist at a turning point in history. Because of Einstein, people in the mid-twentieth century knew that matter and energy were the same thing. Everything was the same thing. Science as mysticism. Scientist as saint. Einstein represented a new way of seeing the world until finally in 2059 came the realization that thought could also travel in waves. The living proof was a hungry bird, a teratorn weighing 15 kilograms and standing 3.3 meters tall. Now the existence of a third property “apart” from matter and energy—unconscious consciousness immanent in the electromagnetic waves of the universe—threw the old string theories out the metaphoric window. New ideas and new equations started to make sense. That iconoclast Bohm, and others, started to make sense. Experiments with DNA and the holographic principle revealed some of the secrets of organized life and became the basis for a panpsychism, a TOE that went beyond anything Einstein had imagined.
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I enjoy the breaks for student papers that give insight and backstory.
I do not enjoy dogs confusing rambles of his memories and his trans owner’s memories, and I think Brad’s memories. It’s a bad writing idea.
~ The description of Dog's consciousness (view spoiler) in Chapter 11 was fascinating. Reminded me of David Zindell's holistic attitude to the bodymind in A Requiem for Homo Sapiens.
~ However, I had difficulty relating to any character except for Elise and Dog. There's something clinical and aloof in the grown-ups' presentation.And once the novelty of the story's ideas wears out, I caught myself wondering, So what? Where does this change(view spoiler) take us? Why should I care?
Perhaps the ending needed quite a bit more space for a proper exploration of implications and consequences; and the whole book definitely needs more heart--more spirituality to go with the smart thinking and the scientific breakthroughs.
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And here's my full review:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Now I can finally read what everybody else thought--or will think. :)
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"Dislikable characters" seems to be a leitmotif here. :(Sorry to hear about your troubles, Fiona!
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Sorry to hear about your troubles, Fiona!"
Thanks Kalin! I'm counting myself lucky it's temporary and that I still have a job at all - not a great time to be out of work, but a lot of people are.
Re: the dislikable characters - yes! It's bearable when there's just one, maybe two, but when they start to dominate the page time it gets very tedious, very fast.
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World Building ★★★★★
Characters ★★☆☆☆
General Story ★★☆☆☆
Microwave Ghost Science ★☆☆☆☆
Yup, that’s all I owe this.
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I wish it had been explored in far more detail--its implications (and complications), what it meant for humanity as a whole. It's a novel idea (at least to me), but it just scratched the surface. My main question was: If consciousness does persist beyond the physical world, doesn't it have a purpose there? How would it respond to someone dragging it back?
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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ksat...
If you see a Tiger wandering around your neighborhood you probably live in Texas.
Madness! From the article Lena cites: "Texas State Director for the Humane Society of the United States Lauren Loney called the problem [privately owned tigers] an 'epidemic in Texas.'" Are you sure you might not want to start you own hard-boiled TX crime/mystery/weretiger series? Will gladly beta-read.
It’s too bad that utopia had to come at such a cost...