“‘I have watched people die in exhaustive and penetrative detail,’ the avatar continued. ‘I have felt for them. Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts? Per second, a human––or a Chelgrian––might have twenty or thirty, even in the heightened state of extreme distress associated with […]
“‘Some people take days, sweat buckets, endure pain and cold and risk injury and––in some cases––permanent death to achieve the summit of a mountain only to discover there a party of their peers freshly arrived by aircraft and joying a light picnic.’ ‘If I was one of those climbers I’d be pretty damned annoyed.’ ‘Well, […]
“‘Look into that bastard’s mind.’ ‘I can’t do that, Ziller.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘It is one of the very few more-or-less unbreakable rules of the Culture. Nearly a law. If we had laws, it would be one of the first on the statute book.’ ‘Only more-or-less unbreakable?’ ‘It is done very, very rarely, and the result […]
John Dewey is my intellectual hero, so taking up one of his works is always a distinct pleasure for me. There is no other thinker at this point in my life who can challenge and delight me the way Dewey does; his philosophy is deeply contemplative but also distinctly practical, and his insights reflect the […]
“Conceptions of possibility, progress, free movement and infinitely diversified opportunity have been suggest by modern science. But until they have displaced from imagination the heritage of the immutable and the once-for-all ordered and systematized, the ideas of mechanism and matter will lie like a dead weight upon the emotions, paralyzing religion and distorting art. When […]
“It would be too much to ask, he thought to himself. The chances are too remote. It was a small miracle we discovered anything at all in here, that we are able to rescue those souls from such destruction a second time. To ask for more…was probably pointless, but no more than natural. What intelligent […]
Given the recent popularity of post-apocalyptic narratives, it seems a good time to pick up Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon. Frank’s portrait of a small Florida community coping with nuclear fallout is an early contribution to the genre, one that demonstrates considerable cleverness and technical merit. Sadly, this story of Cold War-era anxiety and ingenuity has […]
“‘Once, holidays meant the time when you went away.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, I remember hearing that. Primitive stuff. Age of Scarcity.’ ‘People had to do all the work and create wealth for themselves and society and so they couldn’t afford to take very much time off. So they worked for, say, half the day, most days […]
“A society that chiefly esteems order, that finds growth painful and change disturbing, inevitably seeks for a fixed body of superior truths upon which it may depend. It looks backward, to something already in existence, for the source and sanction of truth. It falls back upon what is antecedent, prior, original, a priori, for assurance. […]
“‘To understand the present you must know the past, yet it is only part of the answer and I will never discover it all. I have not the years.’” ––Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, pg. 236 “Knowing, for the experimental sciences, means a certain kind of intelligently conducted doing; it ceases to be contemplative […]