The Relentless Moon
The Relentless Moon is the third in a series of alternate
history books that basically look at what would happen if sometime in the 1950s
a giant asteroid hit the earth and wiped out most of the eastern seaboard of
America. What the combined governments
of the nation decide to do is create a space race to get to space and get on
the moon and get on Mars. They do this because they have a theory that the aftereffects
of the asteroid impact which first created essentially nuclear winter will turn
around and become a runaway greenhouse effect. I don't know if the science
behind this is true. But will take that precipitating event at face value.
For me of all the series it's those first 50 pages that are
most interesting. For some reason I still don't really buy the idea that they
would turn around a create a space race when there was no real existing
technology for it. Even now with the technology we have over half a century
later colonizing the moon or Mars seems like a huge effort. So, in the book
they're spending huge amounts of resources on an effort that sounds like a
really wouldn't save a lot of people. What's interesting is that there is
within the text of the book a group of people who are fighting against this project
because it is a waste of resources and they'd rather spent the effort of the
governments on earth. The other part that really doesn't seem to work is that
after the after impact everyone starts working together. On a country-to-country
basis for me it would seem to be agree catastrophe would be something that
pushes us towards conflict and not word unity, which she was especially
prevalent in the face of the pandemic. I think the author may have wanted to
use this as a metaphor for global warming writ large, but we've had a more
concentrated global emergency that kind of throws away the foundation of her
thought in the book.
The thing is this is the third book that I have read the
series. So, what I'm thinking about the book and the series itself I think “Hey
why am I attracted to this series?” because normally if I had these kinds of
qualms about the basis of a story I probably wouldn't keep reading. And the
more I think of it I think what really drives my interest is the characters. Kowal
creates characters very well and they're interesting they have flaws. It's a
very feminist book so there's still fighting against a lot of gender and racial
norms that existed. The other thing is that this book focuses on a different
character than the previous two books do so as a reader it took a minute to get
into it since you had to get the grounding with these main characters in her
life. Overall though she tells good stories and I keep reading the books so I
have to say there's something good going on there even if I can't fully
articulate it.
The Last Man Takes LSD
I went to Graduate School in English about 20 years ago. Somehow,
I didn't have to read much Foucault. I think I read Discipline and Punish but
only on my own time. We may have read
some sort of excerpts in a larger theory class. But that doesn't mean I'm not
kind of familiar with the concepts of the man because the postmodern, post-structuralist
thinking, that he helped engineer was everywhere at the Academy at that time. Even
if you were more structural, Marxist or something that wasn't as grounded in
French theory you still had to deal with that environment.
That basically means that I don't have the full context to
completely judge this book because it is somewhat of a biography and somewhat
of an intellectual biography but also a criticism of his work. So, reading this
I learned a lot about Foucault and his thought and the things he was involved
in. But I can't say where the authors got it right where they got it wrong how
much he was involved in the creation and strengthening and dissemination of
what we now call neoliberalism. What I can say is that the subtitle means more
to the structure of the book than the title. There is sadly very little about
LSD and it's more about the fizzling out of revolutionary potentials. I'm glad
I read this book and I think I learned a lot from it.
No comments:
Post a Comment