“Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of detectable stars. Lots and lots of them. Those civilizations make up the body of a cosmic society. Cosmic sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society” (p 12).
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Three–Body Problem (2006) by Cixin Liu—the most popular contemporary Chinese science-fiction writer—is often proclaimed as the most […]
“‘Well, to me, that’s what love is. Not that anyone can understand me, though.’ Midori gave her head a little shake against my shoulder. ‘For a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly. From something like that or it doesn’t begin at all.’
~ Inspired by True Events in Guilin, China ~ The twelve-year-old girl woke eager for the new day. In bed she sat straight and stretched her arms wide over […]
“I write to create. I like to build things…birdhouses, Adirondack chairs, good meals. I write for the same reasons. I want to put something out into the world that people will enjoy or find provocative. The conveyance part is the tougher question. There are common themes that run throughout my writing, even when I don’t want them to. I write about struggles and pain and grief. Even my theoretically happy stories have these themes. I like a good “hero wins the day and gets the girl” story, but there are lots of those. I write stories for those who struggle. We’re not alone in our challenges even if our social narrative suggests otherwise.”
Pratima: “When I first started writing the novel, like twenty years ago, Laura had thrown caution to the winds and accepted a part in a local production of A Midsummer Nights Dream. The play has this crazy effect on her, and she begins exploring aspects of herself that she had never considered before because of the limitations that her strict church puts on her and on women in general. It was a cool storyline, but it just didn’t quite work. Also, the novel used to have multiple narrators: Andrew, Marcia, and Sara. Ultimately, the novel was Andrews. It’s his story. I just had to commit to him and go for it.”
“He seemed as he stood there to see all his age, its tumultuous life, its iron certainties and rigid conventions, its repressed emotion and facetious humor, its cautious science and incautious religion, its corrupt politics and immutable castes, as the great hidden enemy of all his deepest yearnings. That was what had deceived him: and it was totally without love or freedom…but also without thought, without intention, without malice, because the deception was in its very nature; and it was not human, but a machine. That was the vicious circle that haunted him; that was the failure, the weakness, the cancer, the vital flaw that had brought him to what he was: more an indecision than a reality, more a dream than a man, more a silence than a word, a bone than an action. And fossils!
“He had become, while still alive, as if dead.
“It was like coming to a bottomless brink” (p 363).
“I create, I am: all the rest is dream, though concrete and executed. Perhaps what Dan always wanted of his looking-glasses was not his own face, but the way through them. This kind of mind is self-satisfied only in the sense that one must suppose God is self-satisfied—in an eternity of presents; in his potentiality, not his fulfillment” (p 208).
The twelve-year-old girl woke eager for the new day. In bed she sat straight and stretched her arms wide over her head while through the windows she saw the hills of Guilin tower over the city as though they were giant elephants marching the girl to a land far, far away.
“To love abundantly is to live abundantly.
“To love forever is to live forever. Eternal life coupled with Love” (p 254).
