Accomodation and paying the rent

So I have finished my re-reading jag and received 3 new books in the mail.  Next up will be Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker.  But since I have only read the first 5 pages this post is about The Children of God and the Octavia Butler short story "Bloodchild" and my emerging interest in how we (can? do? should?) expand our understanding of what it means to live together fruitfully: how do we sustain real community?  What I liked about this reread of CoG was the in your face recognition of how difficult community can be and the myriad ways in which we divide from one another -- over misunderstandings and legitimate concerns (as, for example, when one member of the community subists by eating the other).  And we divide over how we can live with one another -- what will be the conditions of that living together?  How shall we distribute what might be scarce and share what we might rather foist on someone else?  And what if those basic conditions simply suck?  Can we still think about justice under circumstances where mere survival (or even revenge) seem ever present? 

So in Butler's story, humans have arrived on a distant planet right about the same time the dominant inhabitants of that planet have realized that their gestational practice of using the bodies of a local gazelle like creature were not working.  And so the humans arrive and their appropriateness as possible host bodies for alien worm/slug babies (who can be removed before any 'eat your way out of the womb' moment -- can be, but timing matters).  The story concerns a second generation human who has been raised with the knowledge of what he will do, but no real experience of what this means.  After he witnesses a less than ideal birth situation he demands of his alien impregnator that the aliens really explain the birthing system and give the humans a chance to really choose the life to which they are now bound.  The story is not particularly hopeful; Butler notes in a commentary that she meant the story both to counter the usual colonizing voctories of science fiction tales (as does CoG) but also that the story is about "paying the rent." (As is CoG.)

Now this is one of my moments of being a someone obtuse political science professor.  I teach the "Bloodchild" story every semester and every semester we talk about paying the rent and in the back of my head is this little voice saying:  to whom is the rent being paid?  Who set the price?  What is being rented?  And my literal fixation on the metaphorical ties me up in knots.  But I try and work through these moments, relying on my students who are often far more innovative readers than I.  But last night while finishing CoG I thought that in fact that book is about paying the rent: the obligations we owe to those whose space we inhabit.  And what science fiction can do is expand our mind to think about how we accomodate ourselves to the lives and living spaces of those with whom we are thrown together -- by will or force or chance. 

More Mary Doria Russell

Ok, so I have not finished my re-reading of Children of God and I think I should save most of my comments for both together, but I will make a few observations here.  First off what I have always really liked about these books is that first: it thinks through exploration in this very particular way.  My children have been studying explorers for the last few months and the attitude of seeing something for the first time is tied right up with the presumption that wreaking havoc on the people you encounter along the way is just the price you pay.  So these novels take up that price setting issue from a group of people that are trying really hard not to pay the kind of price colonizers and explorers have paid in the past.  Secondly I also think that the novels get something about friendship and conversation right -- not that we are all so very clever -- but that conversation is the foundation of human interaction in important weays and the characters here have great, ordinary conversations.  (Then there is a whole god, spirituality theme that I find much less interesting.)  So next week -- a more focused analysis, paying particular attention to the depiction of vulnerability -- my newest interest.

I will not share (yet again) my thoughts on either Thomas More's Utopia or Edward Bellamy;s Looking Backward as school reading is not the focus of this blog...

A slow week.

Ok, really, once a week

So I said once a week and then I lost my blog.  But Alison told me how to find it again and here I am.

This week:
Jonathan Franzen -- Freedom
 I read this on an endless flight to and from San Francisco.  Everyone who says it is readability is right -- while the characters are depressed/depressing and capable of making some of the world's worst (yet completely ordinary) life choices, the book has a nice flow.  I started out truly disliking Patty -- but the book does a good job of telling her story from enough standpoints that you can see not only why but how she ended up where she does.  Her son is about as unlikeable a human being as I have read about, and does little to challenge my dislike of a certain privileged shit of a white boy, and little is endearing in Patty's refusal to see her son for the shot that he is (and his supposed redepmption is unbeleivable as is his continued marriage to the blank slate girl next door. 

Michael Grant --Gone
Totally misleading and fairly stupid.  All the adults disappear -- kids left alone, what will they do??  I hate fantasy that pretends to be science fiction.  What seemed as if it should be a good young adult postapocalyptic account is instead some sort of supernatural nonsense with  a little Hobbes and a lot of Lord of the Flies.

Currently re-reading
Mary-Doria Russell -- The Sparrow
so every few years or so I change the book that I reread most often.  When I was in college it was John Irving's World according to Garp, then there was a grad school gap when I stopped reading ....I was going to say for pleasure, but that is not quite right...I guess I just stopped reading fiction.  Then when I started reading novels again it was almost anything by David Lodge.  And then A.S Byatt's Babel Tower.  So Now I am in a Sparrow, Children of God repeat.  But I'll have to blog about that when I finish this re-read.