Category Archives: Reviews

REVIEW – A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong

Posted on by
Reply

A few times in years past, I’ve participated in discussion panels at local conventions on the topic of God in science fiction.  More specifically “Is there room for god in Science Fiction?”  (I’m being deliberately inconsistent in my capitalization of that sentence, because it depends on who you are as to which of the two topics is more deserving of reverence.)  My answer?  Of course there’s room for God in science fiction! There’s room in science fiction for everything that can be speculated upon under the existing body of scientific law.  Certainly, the existence of a being of advanced intelligence and power, who to us would appear both omnipotent and omniscient, is an appropriate topic.

The point of the question, of course, is that God is often not treated as an item of speculation.  God is treated by many as a defined quantity, about whom everything is recorded in sacred literature.  If those sacred texts defy what we think we’ve learned about the universe, then we’re wrong and those texts are right, even if they were written a thousand years ago by people who thought a flat earth was the center of the universe.  Ironically, many atheists cling as stubbornly to this narrow definition of god as do fundamentalists.

I guess there’s no room for that god in science fiction.  If you’ve read my science fiction, however, you know that I don’t believe in that god, and that I certainly think there’s room to discuss multiple definitions of god.  My work is lousy with references to gods of all sorts.  I’m fascinated by religion and mythology, even though I’m a rationalist and believe in the scientific method.

Karen Armstrong is a rationalist, too.  A former Roman Catholic nun, she’s written quite a number of books on the histories of religions – Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism among them.  I’ve studied a couple of her works in my scandalously liberal Methodist Sunday School class.  I’m about convinced that Ms. Armstrong knows more about the human conception of God than I will ever know or God will ever tell me.  Her books are long, scholarly, and sometimes daunting; but they’re worth your time, if you want to understand the very complex history of human religion.

But you’re probably saying  “Hey, Steve, what’s all this got to do with your promise to point us at good SF?  We want to find the next Moon is a Harsh Mistress, not take a college course from a lapsed nun! She might come at us with a ruler, and then where would we be?  In a broken heap at the bottom of the stairs, like stunt doubles from The Blues Brothers!  If we’re going to read a long book, it better have robots, computers, spaceships, time machines or at least babes in chain mail bikinis!”

Hang tight.  First of all, Armstrong’s, A Short History of Myth is, as its name implies, not a long book.  At 149 pages, hardbound and only five inches by eight, it looks like it should be part of your Winnie the Pooh collection, except that it has no stuffed bear on the cover, tubby or otherwise.  It’s a brief outline of what Armstrong sees as the six ages of myth, beginning around 20,000 BCE and running up to the present day.

The bearing this has on speculative fiction was admirably summed up in the much-maligned film Star Trek the Motion Picture,* wherein the artificial intelligence called Vger seeks its creator, hoping to answer the question, “Is this all that I am?  Is there not more?”  That is the purpose of myth: to look beyond the everyday, the factual, the mundane and find out what there is that we cannot see.  This is transcendence.  This is ecstasy.  As Armstrong puts it:

“We seek out moments of ecstasy, when we feel deeply touched within and lifted momentarily beyond ourselves.  At such times, it seems that we are living more intensely than usual, firing on all cylinders, and inhabiting the whole of our humanity.”

As can be inferred, “myth” means something more than a misconception such as Penn and Teller might debunk for us, or an overblown story which we like to believe, but is, in fact, false, like George Washington and the cherry tree.  Myth, as related by Armstrong, is a story which informs us on how we are to behave, how to interact with others, how to make moral decisions.  Myth sets an example for us in story or parable, and myth has direct bearing on our lives.

And this is an important point: Myth is not mean to be believed as fact or history.  Pick up any volume of Greek myths, or a book of creation mythology, and the jacket will tell you that ancient peoples created myths in order to explain how the world came to be.  This suggests that myths served, for ancient civilizations, the same purpose as Kipling’s Just So Stories.  That is, they gave a whimsical explanation for how something that exists now developed in the way it did.  Armstrong disagrees with this definition.  Myth, she says, was not used by the ancients to entertain or to answer questions about history; it was meant to give people a moral framework and show them how the divine (a great world which exists beyond this one) was reflected in their everyday lives.

For the Greeks, greatest of the mythologists, there were two systems of thought, mythos and logos.  Logos was the “logical, pragmatic and scientific mode,” and mythos the moral, the spiritual.  Plato and Aristotle both disliked mythological thinking, because it made no sense in a rational context.  It was all about emotion.  In order to be understood, the listener or reader had to be caught up in the feelings produced by the story being told in, say, a tragedy by Sophocles.  Armstrong is quick to point out that we should not share Plato and Aristotle’s impatience with mythos.  We’re incomplete without it, she says, and not just because we lack religion.  Indeed, she sees that religion doesn’t work for many people today:

“Religion has been one of the most traditional ways of attaining ecstasy, but if people no longer find it in temples, synagogues, churches or mosques, they look for it elsewhere: in art, music, poetry, rock, dancing, drugs, sex or sport.  Like poetry and music, mythology should awaken us to rapture, even in the face of death and the despair we may feel at the prospect of annihilation.  If a myth ceases to do that, it has died and outlived its usefulness.”

It’s almost as if she’s saying, countering the fundamentalists, that it’s not our fault as humans that we’ve moved away from God.  It’s the fact that God has become irrelevant to us that has caused us to move away.  If myths are to inform our moral choices, then myths need to hit us where we live.  And we don’t live in the age when a micro-managing god summoned his prophet to the mount to tell him that the people shouldn’t eat seafood.  Fundamentalists miss the point.  The stories they claim are history and science were never intended to be either.  They were intended to make us feel, to set us an example, and they were intended to change as our needs changed.  Zeus evolved in Greece from being a distant sky god to being a randy traveler among us, searching out our prettiest girls, and occasionally boys.  This happened because a distant sky god wasn’t much use to anyone.  Indeed, Uranus, Zeus’s grandfather, was castrated and thrown out of power because he was a distant sky god, and couldn’t be interacted with, even in parable.  Uranus was a first draft of the sky god, and it took a few tries to get him right.  For the ancients, gods, like people, evolved.

But, Armstrong notes, mythology essentially stopped evolving in the Axial Age, around 200 BCE.  Today our spiritual lives are still informed by the Hebrew Prophets, by Plato and Aristotle, by Confucius, Buddha and Laozi.  All progress has been on the rational side.  “Western modernity,” she says, “was the child of logos.”  Fundamentalism grew from the frustration felt by some of those who still wanted spiritualism, who found the purely rational here and now too limiting, who asked, “Is this all that I am?  Is there not more?” and came up with an answer that was, in itself, limiting; because they tried to force the spiritual into the framework of the rational.  They tried to insist that myth was fact.

Others, as Armstrong relates, found other ways to fill the spiritual vacuum.

“We still long to ‘get beyond’ our immediate circumstances, and to enter a ‘full time,’ a more intense, fulfilling existence.  We try to enter this dimension by means of art, rock music, drugs or by entering the larger-than-life perspective of film.  We still seek heroes.  Elvis Presley and Princess Diana were both made into mythical beings, even objects of religious cult.  But there is something unbalanced about this adulation.  The myth of the hero was not intended to provide us with icons to admire, but was designed to tap into the vein of heroism within ourselves.  Myths must lead us to imitation or participation, not passive contemplation.  We no longer know how to manage our mythical lives in a way that is spiritually challenging and transformative.”  

Indeed, I’d have to agree with Armstrong that a lot of our secular answers to these needs ring hollow.  For years, I’ve been dissatisfied with the modern definitions of heroism, such as this one from Arthur Ashe: “True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.”  I’ve always known I disliked the definition, all due respect to Mr. Ashe and his accomplishments.  I knew that the heroes of my mythology didn’t do anything as pedestrian as sublimating their identities and just serving others.  James T. Kirk would have (and did, if you believe his lesser mythologists) died saving the universe.  George Bailey would have died to save his brother Harry or any of his family.  Lazarus Long did die (kind of) to win the approval of his beloved Mama Maureen.  But none of these heroes ever, for a minute abandoned their identities or forgot their own needs, even if they did sometimes give priority to some goal other than their immediate safety or personal ambition.

What troubled me was that I couldn’t write a personal definition of heroism which emotionally satisfied me.  I came up with this:

A hero is someone who puts his principles ahead of all else, including personal convenience, comfort and safety.  

That seemed to be a definition of heroism that was less prone to manipulation by draft boards or charities that sink so low as to employ telemarketers.  (For the fate of both of these entities, see Shepherd Book’s sermons on “the special hell.”)

Ms. Armstrong’s book has allowed me to come up with this definition, which I like a lot better:

A hero is someone who acts when others are unwilling to do so, and whose actions inspire us also to act in ways that change our surroundings for the better.  

And here, I think, is the place where science fiction and fantasy intersects mythology, as mythology has always been intended to serve.  Fantastic literature is particularly suited to describing the extraordinary.  There is everyday heroism, of course; but most of us are a bit thick, and it’s easier to get the point across to us if you’re not subtle.  Everyday heroism is subtle.  The heroism of our science fiction stories, our television shows, our movies and our comic books is not.  And so it reaches more easily into our lives and makes itself relevant to us.

Armstrong summarizes, near the end, the downside of centuries of devotion to pure reason:  “…during the twentieth century, we saw some very destructive modern myths, which have ended in massacre and genocide… We cannot counter these bad myths with reason alone, because undiluted logos cannot deal with such deep-rooted, unexorcised fears, desires and neuroses.”

I would qualify this statement.  As demonstrated by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, rational analysis certainly can help us navigate the morass of emotions which sometimes cause us anxiety and pain.  A lot of the problems that overwhelm us day in and day out can be solved if we take a breath and think our way through them, instead of oozing emotion all over everyone.  I think Armstrong’s point, though, is that cold, rational truth is not enough.  We need an emotional framework in which to function.  We need inspiration.  We need to occasionally ask, as cliched as it sounds, what our heroes would do in a given situation, whether our hero is Jesus, the Dalai Llama or John Galt.  (And yes, I believe there is the power of myth even in works of fiction created to appeal to the rational mind, as is Atlas Shrugged.  Ayn Rand made it clear that her heroes were not men as they are everyday, but men as they should be.  That is a valid definition for a myth, and I believe she created one that has power for a lot of people.)

And with that last I pointed at the conclusion which I drew while reading Armstrong’s book, and which I was happy to see she drew as well: Our new mythology is not the province of traditional religion any longer.  It is the province of our novelists, our storytellers, our movie makers and our playwrights.  Robert Heinlein saw this thirty years ago when he explored the concept of the World as Myth.  His characters, beginning in The Number of the Beast, learned that there were a nigh-infinite number of universes in which the fictional realities postulated by the most powerful storytellers were brought into being by sheer creative energy.  Andrew M. Greeley also played with this in God Game.  I recommend both works.

But it’s important that our new mythologists remember that their job is not only to entertain or to explain.  It’s to motivate, to inspire, to take us beyond the everyday and the pedestrian.  To show us how our lives are a reflection of the world beyond, whatever that is.  This is not all that you are.  There is more.

It’s not a purely rational idea, no.  And don’t think I’m advocating that we abandon reason and surrender to unbridled passion (though we should probably all do that sometimes.)  Like Karen Armstrong, I’m saying that we need to spend at least part of our time thinking and talking about how things should be, in addition to how they are.  That way, when it’s time to go out and do something, we have a road map.

* A story coincidentally developed by Alan Dean Foster, who I featured last week.  In a reversal of his usual practice, Foster developed the plot for the film, and series creator Gene Roddenberry wrote the novelization.

REVIEW – Reflections on Orphan Star by Alan Dean Foster

Posted on by
Reply

In discussing some of the authors who influenced me early on, I missed a big name: Alan Dean Foster.  If you’re a fan of any sort of SF media and you’ve ever picked up a book based on a movie, you’ve probably read him.  You couldn’t miss.  Foster’s earliest high-profile project was the Star Trek Logs, a series of books which were based on the Star Trek animated series of 1974 – 1975.  He adapted the 22-minute scripts into novellas of about 70 pages each, fleshing them out and producing very entertaining reading.  The novels outlasted the Saturday morning series by quite a measure of years, and are, I believe, still in print.  I’m pretty sure this was the first and certainly one of the only times that an American children’s cartoon was novelized.  Of course, a lot of the reason it was possible was that the scripts were not typical “children’s” fare.  They were just half-length Star Trek episodes, overseen by many of the same creative lights responsible for the original TV series.And note that I put “children’s” in quotes in that last passage.  I think the idea that children’s entertainment should be less sophisticated and of lower quality than its adult counterpart is dead.  You can’t be sure, though.  So I’ll make it clear that good childrens’ literature is much harder to create than adult lit that will pass as good.  To make it as an adult writer, you only have to impress that segment of the population whose imaginations have already withered and died.  Not as neat a trick as impressing a mind that’s wide-open and firing on all cylinders.Foster went on to ghost-write the novelization of Star Wars and to author its original sequel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye.  This was a book conceived at the time when Star Wars was just the title of one movie, an entry in a much bigger project called The Adventures of Luke Skywalker.  To this day, I wish someone had made that series instead of the one we got.  And then Foster became king of the novelization.  You name it, he probably wrote it: the Alien novels, Carpenter’s The Thing, Dark Star and even the most recentStar Trek novelization.  (A joy to listen to, by the way, if you want to pick up the audio book.  It’s read by Zachary Quinto.)

Foster does well with other people’s stories because he’s got a gift of narrative.  He knows how to tell a story in such a way as to pull you into it and make you feel you’re experiencing it.  He throws in a lot of detail to give it depth – sounds, smells, textures – really creating a world in which his story, or anyone’s, can unfold.  He’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny, and I rarely catch a political bent in his writing.  Perhaps that’s part of the reason he excels at telling so many different kinds of stories.  In fact, I managed to enjoy his novelization of Alien 3, despite the fact that I hated the story, and later learned Foster did too!

But Foster has a whole career beyond novelizations.  Good thing too, as, in the days of Blu-Ray, I doubt there’s much market for them.  He’s authored dozens of novels set in the World of the Commonwealth, a civilization built on the successful partnering of humans and the insectoid Thranx.  He’s also written quite a number of fantasy novels, but, well, I don’t do fantasy.  In fact, it was Foster who made me realize that.  When his novel Spellsinger came out while I was in high school, I ran and bought it immediately.  This was one of my favorite authors, after all.  Never finished it.  Don’t even think I made my usual trial run of 100 pages.  It was then that I realized that even authors I like have a hard time making fantasy palatable to me.  So I gave up.  I’d already tried and failed at Tolkein, and later tried and failed with Piers Anthony and Ann McAffrey.  It just ain’t happenin’.

But the Commonwealth, and particularly its most-chronicled residents, Flinx and Pip, are longtime favorites of mine.  Foster created Flinx and his universe in his first published novel, The Tar Aiym Krang, in 1972.  Flinx’s adventures aren’t groundbreaking.  In fact, Flinx is very much the spiritual descendant of Heinlein’s Thorby in Citizen of the Galaxy. He’s a slave boy, bought by an elderly trader on a primitive world, who happens to have a pretty important past, and spends most of his adventures trying to figure out just who the hell he is and why he was made this way.  And if Flinx owes a lot to Thorby, his Commonwealth, found by two races shortly after they discovered each other, owes a lot toStar Trek.  The humans and the Thranx interact a lot like the humans and the Vulcans of Trek do, and the grasshopper-like Thranx all have the same scholarly dignity that Spock, Sarek and Surak carried around in their robes like chewing gum.

But the derivative aspect of these works is not a bad thing.  If you’re going to build a reliable car, you look at how others have built their cars.  If you want to make comfortable furniture, you use time-honored traditions.  If you’re going to write entertaining space opera, you could try to do something totally new, but you’re probably better off relying on some proven staples of the genre so that your readers feel like they’re on familiar ground and can enjoy the ride.  So you use the United Planets, or the Federation or the Commonwealth; you use Starfleet or the Lensmen or the Legion of Space; you introduce character archetypes like the lost prince or princess, the wise old alien scholar, or the old thief with the heart of gold.  Readers shouldn’t get snitty about it, either.  It’s how the process works.  And odds are, if someone accuses you of stealing from a source, they’ll be surprised to learn that that source stole from somewhere else.  (If there’s an original idea in Star Trek, it’s pretty well-hidden!  But that doesn’t mean the show wasn’t a great piece of television or an entertaining piece of SF.)

And Flinx does have his unique aspects.  We meet him when he’s seventeen, a red-headed boy of Indian descent who has psychic gifts (he used them to fleece tourists) and a very, very deadly flying snake, Pip, as a pet.  As he comes of age, he learns that he’s pretty special.  He’s the only one who can communicate with the Krang, a relic of an ancient civilization called the Tar Aiym.  It’s also a very powerful weapon.  The kid is comfortable with dangerous things.

In Orphan Star, the second entry in the series*, which I just read, Flinx has actively begun the search for his past.  Picked up by an interplanetary organized crime boss who wants to use Flinx’s abilities to activate a hallucinogenic gem, Flinx is taunted by the man – seems Challis, the crime boss, knows something about Flinx’s mother.  And so Flinx embarks on an adventure which puts him in the company of dangerous criminals, and carries him to the home of the insect-like Thranx, as well as to old home Terra and to the mysterious world of Ulru-Ujurr.  Here he finds both a member of his family and a race of powerful beings who equip him with a spaceship of his own and the freedom to continue his quest.

Orphan Star is something of a coming-of-age story, but then the whole first trilogy of Flinx’s adventure is.  He’s learning that the universe is a lot bigger than he conceived, that he has a very special place in it, and that his past is both mysterious and dangerous to pursue.  More than a story of a boy becoming a man, though, it’s an absorbing adventure, full of well-drawn characters who often aren’t honest or moral, but are always interesting.  Flinx emerges as a confident and competent hero, but never so super-human that a reader can’t empathize with him.

Again, I focus on Orphan Star as it’s the one I just read – or listened to, rather.  It’s available in a very good reading from Brilliance Audio.  I recommend the entire series, however.

* Every source published throughout the seventies and eighties insisted that Bloodhype was the second Flinx adventure.  ‘Taint so.  Flinx appears in it, yes; but not as a central character.  The story is also set after he’s become an adult.  Chronologically, it falls somewhere in the later series of Flinx books that  Foster released after 2000.  Tar Aiym Krang, Orphan Star and The End of the Matter form a pretty distinct trilogy.  A later novel, For Love of Mother-Not, is the first chronological adventure, feature Flinx at age 14. But I’m a purist, and I’d recommend starting with the first-written novel.  

My Golden Age of Science Fiction

Posted on by
1

“The Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve.”

Not a clue who said it first.  I thought it was Sprague DeCamp.  It’s been attributed by Thomas Disch to Terry Carr, who apparently denies saying it.  Carr attributes it to Peter Scott Graham, only Carr says Graham set the number at thirteen.  David G. Hartwell wrote a piece for Futures Past entitled “The Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve,” and gives attribution to Graham.  There’s a good summary here.

At any rate, it’s a good observation.  What time period constitutes the high point or classic era of a genre or art form is a highly personal call, and any opinion we offer has a lot more to do with our personal history than we’re probably willing to admit.  I’ll say this: whenever the Golden Age of Science Fiction was, it sure as hell isn’t now!  There are still good SF authors living and working, but they’re being obscured by the plethora of licensed novels and the desire of publishers and retailers to only handle books which will sell in the millions of copies.  Friends often point out to me that Asimov’s and Analog are still publishing good SF, but I don’t care for short stories much, and I think the pulse of the genre is best taken on the retail book shelf, not at the newsstand.

For my money, if you want to shop for Science Fiction, your best bet is to find a good used book store.  When compiling a list of books worth reading, one should not start with only the set of books published in the last two years.  The thoughts of authors who wrote twenty, fifty or a hundred years ago are often equally as worthy of our attention as those of authors writing now.  They may be moreso, for an author writing at least twenty years ago never heard of the Kardashians, Octo-Mom, or Kanye West, and thus must have possessed a kind of intellectual purity to which we poor denizens of 2011 can’t even aspire.

And sure, science has grown and evolved.  An SF book from 1930 is going to contain incorrect assumptions and outright errors; but then I’ve read fiction from the past two years which suggest that Earth’s sun could turn red within centuries, and earth would survive (!) or that aliens from non-Earthlike planets could have DNA.  I therefore don’t think a decades-old work should be forgotten simply because it may contain the odd scientific error.  We can learn a lot, after all, by looking at mistakes, other peoples’ as well as our own.

I am therefore embarking on a new project: I want to highlight on something of a regular basis works which I think should be of interest to fans of Science Fiction.  I’ll pull heavily from what I’m reading right now, and you’ll find that that list includes a lot of books from long ago which I’ve stumbled across in my journey as a used book addict.  (And some of them will have been sitting on my shelf for decades before I’ve read them! I own as many as a thousand books I’ve not read.)  I’ll probably also touch on comics, TV shows, movies… you name it.  What I pick will be, by my definition, what should interest a fan of Science Fiction.  In other words, selfish S.O.B. that I am, I’m going to talk about what interests me.  That means you may find a few non-SF creatures like vampires, a few werewolves, and a few costumed heroes, but you’re very unlikely to read about orcs, hobbits or (Hugo help me!) Dragons.

Which leads back to what exactly was my golden age of Science Fiction?  It lasted a while, as I recall.  It probably did begin at about age twelve, possibly even eleven.  It was not book-oriented, at first.  1976, when I turned eleven, offered a fair sampling of SF-themed pop culture.  We had the Six-Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman, plus Space:1999 on TV, Logan’s Run in the theaters, and The X-Men just rising to fame in comic books.  The next year would of course bring Star Wars.  All of these captured my imagination, and, of course, there were Star Trek re-runs twice a day.

Probably Star Trek stuck with me the best as I got a little older.  The first Trek film, arguably the last of the seventies SF-epics, came to theaters just as the Seventies closed.  I think that added some energy to my love of the show, but it was already strong.  I was already buying every book published by Bantam and Doubleday, and starting to dabble in the fanzines.  Here was my gateway to book reading.  I remember spending a Sunday during high school, laying in my bed with a copy of the Trek novel Devil World, by Gordon Eklund.  As the sun went down and concerned family members stuck their heads in to suggest I was damaging my eyes by reading in the dark, I did something I’d never done before: I read a novel in one sitting.  Talk about your golden age! I couldn’t sit still that long now if Bob Heinlein leapt from his grave, handed me an unpublished manuscript and stared at me while I read.

Previous Trek novels had seemed largely to be SF novels the authors couldn’t sell elsewhere, and they’d stuck the Enterprise crew into them and sold them to a publisher who wanted “names” on the books he was selling to rabid Trek fans clamoring for more.  This one, however, seemed to actually be a story planned with the characters in mind, and I was hooked.  I went out seeking more stories by this Eklund guy.  (And Gordon, if you happen across this blog, it’s been way too long since I’ve seen a new book with that guy’s name on it!)  Suddenly I was reading non-Trek, non-movie-inspired SF.

As high school progressed, comics began to frustrate me and SF on TV and in movies dwindled or became too concerned with cashing in on Star Wars’ success, I delved farther into books.  I tore into authors whose works I hadn’t read, and decided I should become more knowledgeable about the SF field.  It helped that I met a girl – an actual girl! – who also liked SF, and looked at me in disgust when she found out how little real SF I’d read.  She handed me books by Heinlein, and who was I to say no to a girl who liked SF?  RAH became my eternal favorite.

My time in high school – 1979 – 1983 – was a pretty exciting one, literary SF wise.  Many of the classics of the genre were already old, but their authors were still producing.  Heinlein wrote Friday, Clarke sequelized 2001, and Asimov wrote new robot novels.  (I was less excited about the Foundation sequels.  I recognize the trilogy’s importance, but my heart belongs to the robots, and has since I first saw Robby duke it out with his cousin from Lost in Space.)

Alas, as I got older, so did the genre.  Star Trek: The Next Generation bumbled its way into forever changing how we saw SF, and the greats of the field all slipped away from us.  (They’re not dead, you understand.  They were picked up by continua craft and whisked off to a convention in the far future.  But it’s better there than here, so they’re staying.)  While there’s still some cool stuff happening, the death throes of traditional publishing leave the future of the genre in doubt.  My personal golden age would seem to be long past.

Recently, though, even before I decided I needed to start blogging more actively, I’ve been revisiting some of the books from that personal golden age, and seeing how they hold up.  Many of them are still worth a reader’s time, yet they’re not on the shelves any more.  So I think I’ll put in some time in this space, in months to come, to let whoever-the-hell-is-reading know what I think may be worth their time and why.

So check this space.  I’m shooting for weekly.  We’ll see if I can get more ambitious.

One last thing: I think the last entry in this blog announced a similar intent to do a series of posts on a topic, specifically the need for government.  That got dropped fairly quickly for personal reasons.  I won’t go into it.  It’s in the past.  I do think that this project, being more personal, is something I can sustain.  Here’s hoping…