So What Are you Reading?: Generations

And now, I finished The Monster of Temple Peak and Other Stories, and I thought the whole thing was fantastic. The main title story was a lot of fun, the short stories that follow were too. Even though they were a fraction of the length of the Burden of Knowledge issues, the writers managed to pace them perfectly for their short length.
I'm going to be starting Star Trek TOS: Crisis of Consciousness by Dave Galanter late tonight. Are there any episodes I should watch to go along with it?

Finally down to the last chapter of Escape From Freedom, and Fromm has finally dropped the other shoe: how to turn negative freedom into positive freedom. And it's something I've known all along: love (not selfish, possessive love, nor excessively self-sacrificial love that erases the self, but the kind of love that acknowledges the self, and delights in the other-ness of the beloved), and creativity. Diane Duane nailed the latter in the last 10-20% The Wounded Sky: most of the great religions (and certainly the Abrahamic ones) assert that we are created in the image and likeness of a divine Creator, and if this is so, then the inescapable conclusion (albeit a conclusion that most of those religions don't choose to emphasize, and may even actively suppress) is that it is in our nature to delight in creating things.

Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along (and presumably also the original Kaufman & Hart play) is an object lesson in this: in the beginning of the show (which is of course the end of the story, in the show's reverse chronology), we find that Frank is wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, and yet profoundly unfulfilled and unhappy, and has lost his two closest friends, his trophy-bride second wife, and his young starlet lover, and is estranged from his first wife and his son, and it's all because he lost The Joy of Making Things, turning his life into an empty pursuit of material wealth and carnal lust.

I'm now less than 50 pages from the end of Escape From Freedom, and look forward to reading the rest of Fromm's conclusions.

Next up is Inspired Enterprise.

hbquikcomjamesl said:

Diane Duane nailed the latter in the last 10-20% The Wounded Sky: most of the great religions (and certainly the Abrahamic ones) assert that we are created in the image and likeness of a divine Creator, and if this is so, then the inescapable conclusion (albeit a conclusion that most of those religions don't choose to emphasize, and may even actively suppress) is that it is in our nature to delight in creating things.

Click to expand...

Yeah -- I've never understood stories that denounce "playing God" as something evil. Don't most kids play at doing their parents' jobs? And wouldn't most parents be happy to see their kids grow up and follow in their footsteps?

Well, yes, but "playing God" typically refers to something rather different from responsibly exercising what powers of creation we have. And those who use that phrase are often doing so hypocritically: for example, they might not raise any objection at all to using artificial means to increase fertility, and yet might denounce not only abortion, but contraception as "playing God."

I suddenly find myself thinking of the old Chiffon Margarine ads from the 1970s, with Dena Dietrich ("Competence," from the Roman Empire segment of History of the World, Part I) intoning the tagline, "It's not nice to fool MOTHER NATURE!!!"

hbquikcomjamesl said:

Well, yes, but "playing God" typically refers to something rather different from responsibly exercising what powers of creation we have.

Click to expand...

But that's just it -- it's used in ways that presumptively denounce any act of innovation as evil, and basically argue that humans should remain obedient children forever rather than taking responsibility for ourselves. Genetic engineering is "playing God" (never mind that nearly every plant and animal product we eat has been genetically altered through generations of selective breeding). Creating artificial intelligence (the real kind, like Data rather than ChatGPT) is "playing God." Altering our environment is "playing God" (never mind that we've been unintentionally modifying our environment since the invention of large-scale agriculture and pastoralism). The way the phrase tends to be used automatically rejects the possibility that altering nature or ourselves in any way can ever be responsible, because "only God has that right." And that's what I don't understand. If religious people think we're God's children, why do they assume God would be angry to see us following in our parent's footsteps, rather than happy? I mean, yes, there's the whole "You're too young" thing, but children do eventually have to grow up and take on adult responsibilities. I just find it strange that they use the parent-child metaphor yet see it as blasphemous to suggest that humans could ever mature to the same level as our "parent." It seems contradictory.

But then, I guess there have always been different interpretations of religion; some approach it as more of a personal, familial relationship with the divine, but others -- particularly institutions -- approach it from a more authoritarian angle, God as monarch rather than parent, an absolute authority that must never be questioned or challenged. Although, granted, for much of history, the assumption has been that the father's authority in the family is as absolute as a king's, so there's a lot of overlap there. But children are still expected to grow up and take their parents' place eventually, while the hierarchy between royalty and commoners is presumed to be eternal, so it's not quite the same.

Unfortunately, with far too many religious denominations, it's really about power. And sometimes, even when it's not about power across the entire denomination, it still is in some individual parishes. Being pan-denominational, I tend to avoid those denominations and parishes, myself.

A lot of the problem is that for the overwhelming majority of Human history, nobody ever realized that creating a mindlessly obedient mechanical servitor is many orders of magnitude easier than creating a sentient being. And so far too many have assumed that God wanted the former, but got the latter.

Then, there's something one starts to notice, when reading the Bible in its entirety, at the pace needed to do so as a Lenten discipline: the Torah contains a prohibition on miscegenation. If I remember right, it's mentioned more than once. And yet Moses married Zipporah, a Midianite (and therefore, a shikseh). And Ruth, one of only two women to have canonical Bible books named after them (the other being Esther, and if you look at the Apocryphal books, you also find the Book of Judith, and an apocryphal part of Daniel called The Story of Susanna), but more importantly, Ruth, a Moabitess (and therefore another shikseh), was an ancestor of David, and of Solomon, and of Jesus.

And @Christopher, you're starting to get into the essential conflict that George Lakoff identified in Whose Freedom, the first book to make the Far Right and Far Left points of view comprehensible without demonizing anybody: the confict between Strict Father and Nurturant Parent models of the family. Lakoff is far from perfect, and far from unbiased, and had to have one of his own students explain to him some of the implications of his own theory, but he does make a lot of sense.

And speaking of Strict Father and Nurturant Parent family models, and the mindsets and worldviews that grow from them, it occurred to me many years ago, that "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" and "Here Comes Santa Claus" provide diametrically opposite notions of Santa (and by extension, of God), with the former a Strict Fatherist Santa ("You better watch out"? crying and pouting are punishable? And why "bad or good," which implies that "bad" is the default?), while the latter is a Nurturant Santa ("He doesn't care if you're rich or poor; he loves you just the same," and the closest thing that song has to a threatening line is "say your prayers," which is hardly used in a threatening context).

Almost finished with Dickens' The Haunted Man. Read most of it over lunch. Think of it as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind with a supernatural twist.

bdub76 said:

Almost finished with Dickens' The Haunted Man. Read most of it over lunch. Think of it as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind with a supernatural twist.

Click to expand...

I saw an off-off-Broadway stage version of that decades ago, although my memory is fuzzy at this late date.

In the meantime, I'm slowly working my way through The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a few chapters every night before bedtime, and enjoying it thoroughly.

It's not a quick read, being very dense and intricate, but fascinating.

hbquikcomjamesl said:

Unfortunately, with far too many religious denominations, it's really about power. And sometimes, even when it's not about power across the entire denomination, it still is in some individual parishes.

Click to expand...

Or individual people in the same parish. I saw Wake Up Dead Man last night, and I was struck by how much it illustrated how the positive or negative effect of religion comes down to the character of the people practicing it.

hbquikcomjamesl said:

A lot of the problem is that for the overwhelming majority of Human history, nobody ever realized that creating a mindlessly obedient mechanical servitor is many orders of magnitude easier than creating a sentient being. And so far too many have assumed that God wanted the former, but got the latter.

Click to expand...

I get the impression that the Genesis myth is more along the lines of God seeing humans as children and trying to protect us from "adult" knowledge and the pain and burdens that come with it -- so that the very act of choosing to eat the fruit of knowledge was an act of taking responsibility for ourselves and moving out of the cradle. Although that's a more humanist reading than it's usually given.

hbquikcomjamesl said:

And why "bad or good," which implies that "bad" is the default?

Click to expand...

I don't think it implies that. I think it's just that "He knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake" works better as a lyric than "He knows if you've been good or bad, so be good for goodness sake." Not only does "been bad or good" flow better in and of itself, but juxtaposing the three "good"s in quick succession works better than putting a "bad" between two of them.

Greg Cox said:

I saw an off-off-Broadway stage version of that decades ago, although my memory is fuzzy at this late date.

In the meantime, I'm slowly working my way through The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a few chapters every night before bedtime, and enjoying it thoroughly.

It's not a quick read, being very dense and intricate, but fascinating.

Click to expand...

I'm doing the same with Secret History, but the chapters are much longer, so I'm not knocking out one or more a night.

Finally finished the appendix of Escape From Freedom. In much of the last chapter and the appendix, Fromm's biases show up (he appears to have been a devout atheist, and he was certainly a socialist), and in the appendix, he repeatedly skewers Freud (whom he'd been citing throughout the entire opus).

Next up is Inspired Enterprise.

*******

Last night, I read the Foreword. While I was nodding off from the aftereffects of spending the entire afternoon wandering the halls of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History (they're currently running an extra-cost special exhibition on cats, and two free special exhibitions, one on mineral specimens never before publicly exhibited, and one on the history and techniques of museum dioramas).

This morning, I read the Introduction, Acknowledgments (the author elected to put them up front, rather than at the end), and the first chapter.

The Acknowledgments read like a who's who of Star Trek, but also had a couple of personal connections: one of the Kickstarter funders may have been a fellow I knew in high school: I can't imagine that there could be very many guys named Javier Bonafont, who would be interested in a history book about how Star Trek came to be. And there was also a reference to early-1970s events at Golden West College; while I wasn't aware that GWC even existed that far back, my mother took a number of classes there, and I took one there myself, a summer music appreciation class, while I was a student at CSU Long Beach.

*******

The book is introducing me to people who, up until now, had just been names to me. For example, anybody who's read anything on ST production history (going all the way back to TMOST and TWOST) has probably heard of Kellam de Forest, a "professional nitpicker" who did clearance and research work for TOS, but up until now, I wasn't aware that the name was attached to a person, rather than a corporation.

And it turns out that I must have been at one of the exhibitions at Golden West College, probably the second, where the eleven-foot filming miniature was exhibited, even though I could have sworn that it had been some sort of open house at either the Tustin or El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

Star trek Tos No Time like the past

Book club read: Shadow Life by Lin Christie

New-to-me read: Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang

Fun rereads:

Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

I just finished a reread of Greg Bear's Dinosaur Summer, which is a loose sequel to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World involving a return expedition to the plateau of dinosaurs decades later, with fictionalized versions of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen as members of the expedition. I remember finding it a fun conceit and enjoying it when I first read it, but this time, re-reading it after having read the original Challenger novels, I found it a slog to get through. For one thing, it turns out not to be a direct sequel to The Lost World after all, since it changes many of the particulars. The original Doyle novel was written in the form of a series of newspaper articles written by Edward Malone as a member of Professor Challenger's expedition, but Bear calls it an account related by Challenger to Arthur Conan Doyle. He also changes the geography of the plateau and the small mountain next to it (making its summit much larger so it can accommodate multiple trucks and a roadway), and depicts the life forms on the plateau very differently, with none of the hominids featured in the original novel. Maybe my disappointment at it not being a genuine sequel colored my opinion, but I struggled to stay interested and it took me weeks to finish. I've decided to donate it to the Little Free Library box in my neighborhood. Maybe someone else will find it more entertaining.

Almost done with Hound of Baskerville and Secret History.

Hound of Baskerville is coming along pretty good. I'm enjoying the tale.I have a couple more chapters to go. Not sure yet if I like it more than Sign of Four. It's definitely better so far than a A Study in Scarlet.

Secret History comes across more as Less Than Zero than Dead Poets Society or The Skulls. I got Skulls vibes early on, but it quickly descended into Less Than Zero. I have to remember that this came out in the 90s when Grunge was a thing and a lot of TV was dark both with lighting and content. It's definitely well written. I'm curious how it ends. I'll most likely finish it this weekend. It does make me want to read Less Than Zero. It's been a while.

I'll return to Nightmare Alley after the new year. So far I'm liking the latest adaptation more than the novel.

Before I finished DS9: Unity, I started Voyages of Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion, and I've also read the first comic in the 2023 Lower Decks miniseries/omnibus, "All in a Sea of Wonders" - Eeeek! Count Dracula!!

Down to the last chapter (and the afterword) of Inspired Enterprise. I've learned about how FJS became involved (and it ties in closely with the filming miniature getting donated to the Smithsonian). Before the Great Bird started formally deprecating everything FJS ever did, the two were on very friendly terms. Goes to show you what being obsessed with ownership of intellectual property can do.

Just about a third of the page count is endnotes.

Overall, the only thing it seems to lack is the services of a good copy editor.

I finished up Crisis of Consciousness this afternoon and I thought it was fantastic. Dave Galanter had a great handle on the characters, and I thought the new alien race that were the focus of the conflict, were really interesting. I thought the whole multividual idea was really interesting, and it's always cool to get bits of new Vulcan and Romulan history.
After I finished that, I started the digital collection of Wonder Woman Rebirth Vol. 1: The Lies written by Greg Rucka with art by Liam Sharp.

I gave up Banquet of the Damned by Adam Nevill after 168 pages. Characters are to boring and the book isn't scary. Next book will be Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton