Entries Tagged 'books' ↓

Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.

“All ready.” She grinned. “You got the tickets?”

I waved them. She turned to the nearest ninja, dipped her chin a bit, and turned big green eyes up at him. “Could we get a cab?”

Four ninjas howled and leapt into Lexington Avenue, waving their swords about. A yellow cab swerved left and clipped one ninja, sending him flying ten feet back to splatter on the rear of a limo. Another ninja stood and watched in shock, which meant he wasn’t going to ninja his way away from the cab, which took him like a mad bull’s horns and flipped him over the roof. The cab mounted sidewalk and jammed on the brakes just as the fender bodyslammed ninja three. The cabbie leaned over and flung open the door, which opened hard on ninja four, batting him down. Scrawled in the dirt on the door were the letters WMD. Inside was an immense black man with an X carved into his forehead. Trix and I were the last ones standing. He grinned like a kid at Christmas and yelled, “Where we going, tiny white people?”

What? The person behind all this might be a copy of me? So she was just put to sleep, that’s all… Gosh, this is just like something the Puppeteer‘d do…Wha? No brain damage? She even has frontal lobes? Wow, am I ever lucky!

Knowledge was power. And in seizing knowledge, humanity had gripped a power as bright and angry as a live wire. At stake were issues vaster than any before: the prospects were more dazzling, the potentials sharper, and the implications more staggering than anything ever faced by humanity or its successors.
Yet the human mind still had its own resources. The gifts for survival were not found only in the sharp perceptions of the Shapers, with their arsenals of brain-stretching biochemicals, or the cybernetic advances of the Mechanists and the relentless logic of their artificial intelligences. The world was kept intact by the fantastic predilection of the human mind for boredom.
Mankind had always been surrounded by the miraculous. Nothing much had ever come of it. Under the shadow of cosmic revelations, life still swathed itself in comforting routine.

Catching up with long-overdue feed items I come across a reference to Clive Thompson’s musings on sci-fi as the last last bastion of philosophical writing. Thompson writes:

If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.

[...]

Its authors rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how humanity responds — so we can learn more about ourselves. How would love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?

Serendipitously, a later post on the same blog points to an amusing visualization of books preferred at certain US colleges, correlated with the average SAT scores from those universities. Booksthatmakeyoudumb offers a conveniently genre-sorted chart which shows Philosophy as the genre correlated with the highest SATs; following as a close second is, yes, you guessed right, science fiction.

Ender’s game beats Anna Karenina. Tolstoy is surely the better writer, but Scott Card gave us the most food for thought.