Salon Des Geeks

LawGoddess and I have been exchanging a few ideas as she dibbles her toes in the pool of science fiction. I’ve been a lifelong SF fan, but as someone that reads primarily for amusement, I found it a bit tricky to recommend quality SF. After some thought, I’ve come up with the list below. What SF do you recommend, and why? What is “quality SF” to you?

(My recommendations in no particular order)
(more…)

I read an article in the New York Times today talking about the precautions the WHO would proscribe in the case of a human outbreak of H5N1.

One of the things meanitoned was that in Japan it is considered poilte when sick to wear a mask to work. (If people who are sick wear masks, it significantly reduces the transmission of disease. Even better is if the sick person does not shake hands with others. )

I wondered: How would you react if a coworker came to work wearing a mask?

Would you consider it polite?
Would you think ill of the individual?
Would you wear a mask yourself when sick, knowing it would prevent others from catching the disease?
How would you feel if someone refused a handshake, not wearing a mask, because ‘I am sick’?

For my part, I thought I would react negatively. I know I did when a woman showed up to my bridge club wearing a surgical mask. I presumed she was either taking immuno-suppressant drugs, or was paranoid. I think this reaction was unjust. Especially considering the close quarters, and aged opponents, preventing the spread of infection seems very decent. I thought I should experiment, and the next time I am sick, wear a mask to work. Thoughts?

“I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one. “

So opens Ender’s Game, a novel that I strongly suspect everyone else in the Salon read long ago but that I only just got around to this snowy, housebound weekend. There’s no excuse for my neglect of it up to this point — plenty of readers whose tastes I respect have recommended it to me over the years — but I procrastinated all this time because I don’t normally care for Sci Fi. Now, dear salonnier(e)s, I need your help. Dust off your copy and refresh your memory, because I want to discuss this book with you! Here are a few thoughts to get started.

* The character of Ender felt very familiar to me — I think he would have been part of our crowd in high school, and certainly would have made a great addition to the Salon des Grands Geeks. Highly intelligent but small for his age and far from being in with the In Crowd, sometimes ruthlessly bullied by other kids, Ender struck me as being…well…a geek. Although Ender is undeniably not a “normal” kid by our standards, I thought Orson Scott Card did an excellent job of conveying the very normal geeky-kid emotions that Ender struggles with: Helplessness, rage, isolation, superiority, boredom, curiosity, etc. It occurred to me that for a geeky kid reading this book, Ender would be a tremendously sympathetic character. Who among us, when bored into numbness in class or bullied by jocks in the gym, didn’t secretly fantasize that we had been preselected heroes of some better world? Did you feel this way when reading this novel for the first time? What characteristics of Ender did you sympathize with the most?

* Ender’s life, like the lives of almost all the characters in the novel, is manipulated from the moment of his conception by forces beyond his control. Is it possible to truly be a hero inside this framework?

* Ender tells his sister Valentine: “And it came down to this: In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.” Later, we see this exchange between Graff and Ender:

“We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling. And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.”
“So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.”
“If the other fellow can’t tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you.”

What do you think of this idea of violence as a failure of empathy?

* What else made this book compelling for you?

Thanks, all!