September 17, 2006
"A chance meeting, as we say in Middle Earth"
... When we talk of our development I fancy we mean little more than that we have changed with the changing world; and if we are writers or intellectuals, that our ideas have changed with the changing fashions of thought, and therefore not always for the better. I think that if any of us examines his life, he will find that most good has come to him from the few loyalties, and a few discoveries made many generations before he was born, which must always be made anew.Posted by John Weidner at September 17, 2006 07:10 AM
These too may sometimes appear to come by chance, but in the infinite web of things and events chance must be something different from what we think it to be. To comprehend that is not given to us, and to think of it is to recognize a mystery, and to acknowledge the necessity of faith. As I look back on the part of the mystery which is my own life, my own fable, what I am most aware of is that we receive more than we can ever give; we receive it from the past, on which we draw with every breath, but also—and this is a point of faith—from the Source of the mystery itself, by the means which religious people call Grace.
-- Edwin Muir
And what is especially annoying is how the pointy-heads don't understand that they stand on the shoulders of giants.
Muir's point about an "infinite web of things and events" is well-taken. My favorite sub-genre within science-fiction is time-travel, and books like "Time and Again" by Jack Finney (not science-fiction, strictly speaking) make you think about how events impinge on one another and how contingent things are.
Posted by: Hale Adams at September 17, 2006 08:18 AMMy favorite time-travel story is John Crowley's Great Work of Time, a novella which is, alas, out-of-print.
It's abut a secret society that creates a more peaceful and benevolent world by preserving the British Empire....with, of course, the usual paradoxes and oddities and unexpected results.
Crowley is, in my opinion, one of the best writers alive. He also, to me, [I'm rambling far off topic here] embodies one of the most painful ironies of our age. He is unsurpassed in writing about things of subtle and mysterious beauty and profundity. (Little, Big or Aegypt) But, when it comes to such things, I happened to have joined the original firm. And so I know what it is that Crowley should be writing about! And he isn't
My question to him would be, "What the hell good does it do to be a genius writer if you don't have anything to say?"
Posted by: John Weidner at September 17, 2006 09:09 AMMaybe not out-of-print. It's in this collection, Novelty: Four Stories
Posted by: John Weidner at September 17, 2006 09:13 AMAnd this one, I think: Novelties & Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction
Posted by: John Weidner at September 17, 2006 09:15 AMThey sound like good stories, John. But I'm afraid that Finney's stories kinda spoiled me. Reading them puts me in a melancholic funk-- "I'm Scared" especially. I think that Finney's aim in writing them may have been to instill a disquiet in his readers, even a dim sense of.... well, horror isn't quite the right word, but he definitely (for me, anyway) drives home the point that as bad as things are today, you have absolutely no idea how bad things could have been.
Crowley's worlds sound like they'd be neat to visit, but I'm inclined to stay in this one, or reasonable extrapolations of it. (Though S.M. Stirling's works can be pretty scary, too....)
And then there's Keith Laumer and his "Imperium" stories. Wheeeee....
Posted by: Hale Adams at September 17, 2006 12:12 PM
