Platypus of Truth

Shaddam IV and Princess Irulan.  

We're already past July 4th, and I haven't addressed the critical issue of Summer Reading. In part, that's because I'm applying to grad schools and six to eight hours of each week day is devoted to language study and catch-up reading. So, right now, most of my Summer Reading is Wheelock's and Hanson and Quinn. Other things have managed to slip in, however. If you've been following this blog, you may have noticed the Neil Gaiman binge. It started with Troll Bridge , moved on to The Neverwhere , gained steam with The Sandman  vols 1-6, The Dream Hunters  and Overture , and finished up with Fragile Things  and The Ocean at the End of the Lane . That's a lot of Gaiman! To break up the flow of goth drama and tragic sexuality, we've also been listening to Stephen Fry read the Sherlock Holmes novels and doing our own read-through of Frank Herbert's Dune . We're looking forward to watching the Sci-Fi channels mini-series after we're done with tha...

Following from what I have stated in the last post about my read of "Dune," I want to address what I think is a sub-theme that flows out of it. Since the focal character of the drama is the planet Arrakis, the humans in the book are there as fauna and loci of planetary change. Thus one of the primary lenses through which Herbert views them is in how they adapt to life on Arrakis. In light of this, it is no surprise that the entire first book of the novel "Dune" deals with the attempts of the Atreides family to adapt to life on Arrakis. Because of the predators on Arrakis, the Harkonnens (indeed, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is fond of referring to himself as a predator), most of them are wiped out. This is to be expected when a new species is introduced to an area; it will either flourish and displace indigenous life forms (ie. the rabbit or the cat when introduced to Australia), or rapidly decline unless some sort of adaptation occurs (ie. colonial European...

This post comes at the urging of a friend and a stroke of inspiration prompted by a web comic last weekend. I wanted to write a series of meditations on Frank Herbert's "Dune" earlier this year, but was prevented by illness from following through. As a further bit of background, my wife and I were reading the book together out-loud at the time. It was my third time through the novel and her first. Since its appearance, "Dune" has been the poster-book for proponents of transhumanism ; the belief that science should be employed to help humanity "transcend" unwanted features of current human existence such as sickness and death. In the sixties, this interpretation was linked with the drug culture so that "Dune" became "all about the spice." The drug angle seems to be losing steam the further we get from the sixties, however, and the new take on the book is heavily influenced by environmentalism, cloning and genetics, the oil ...

Well, events of the last month have derailed much of my proposed blogging. Thoughts on Dune have gotten overwhelmed by my current reading of The Half-Blood Prince (A day late and a dollar short, but I'm almost done with the series). Still, I may attempt to restart that thread at a latter date. With N.T. Wright in the bag, the new theological work is Bishop Ryle's book on holiness. We're reading through it for faculty devotions. I've wanted to dig into Ryle for a while, so now I get my chance. I've also finished the first edition printing of The Book of Lost Tales I that my in-laws were nice enough to get me for Christmas (The picture above is J.R.R. Tolkien's painting of Taniquetil). I recommend it for lovers of The Silmarillion and those who have a keen interest in artistic composition. If you're in the mood for more of The Lord of the Rings it comes off as fragmented and frusterating (That was my impression when I first picked it up many ...

The recent flap over "The Golden Compass" has set me to thinking: what makes for an excellent piece of Science Fiction/Fantasy. In the case of "His Dark Materials" and "The Chronicles of Narnia," both series have been criticized as propaganda pieces for the author's respective world-views; Atheism and Christianity. Some opponents of the works, if I understand them correctly, claim that the artistry of these books is diminished or the enjoyment of them poisoned by the authors' attempts to use them as platforms for communicating their ideas/beliefs. This seems puzzling to me. After all, each book that comes out of an author's head carries in it the image of the author that produced it. The author may ignore them, or try deliberately to hide them, but his/her core beliefs and ideas are going to come through in some form. Beyond that, many authors intend for their ideas to come through in their work as a way of dialogging with their audie...