Pretty fucking weird, which is good. 21 million years into the future, Earth is a hellish landscape transformed by the doomed remnants of humanity, ungodly beasts, and technology nearly indistinguishable from magic. Four novellas, three in the Night Lands where the date of humanity’s impending end is known yet humanity flourishes in a sense. The last novella has an ending which is damn near one of the best I’ve ever read, describing the end of the Universe from a simultaneously scientific and human point of view. Awake in Night Land, like every Wright novel, never fails to capture my imagination.

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The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion … and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself – ultimate cost for perfect value.

It is too tempting to dismiss Starship Troopers as libertarian screed but doing so robs us of a chance to actually understand what Heinlein is trying to do. His stories repeat a theme of self vs the cosmic order (often the legitimacy of other perspectives is questioned). Encased in Mobile Infantry Suits, soldiers are as sure of themselves as they are cut off from reality. The long lectures extolling the virtue of service and the legitimacy it lends a citizen politically are more bait than loud affirmations. Ask yourself, why are humans deemed most worthy for politics using superhuman suits?

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No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.

Just as humanity moves to take its fate into its own hands, those hands are swatted aside by the Overlords–a race of advanced aliens that hover above every major city. Through them, we lose the stars and seem to find ourselves; within fifty years, they usher in a utopia, but why? It’s sobering to watch humanity ascend to new heights, only to decay as the Overlords reveal their goal is not to let Man flourish but force him out of childhood via his children. Man evolves and joins a greater whole, but what is left behind is just as important.

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A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.

Early on, Genly Ai notices on his diplomatic mission to Gethen is that everyone is androgynous. Gender is chosen during new phases of the moon. This creates a world utterly alien to Ai; he’s lost in a society that ignores divisions which tell him how to act as a man, not a human. The emissary of an enlightened intergalactic union is lost in a society that values humanity! A larger theme, however, comes from the amazing cast of characters whom illuminate our predilection for divisions that also inform a misguided attachment to labels and identities, separating ourselves from our humanness.

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Smith is not a man. He is an intelligent creature with the genes and ancestry of a man, but he is not a man. He’s more a Martian than a man. Until we came along he had never laid eyes on a human being. He thinks like a Martian, he feels like a Martian. He’s been brought up by a race which has nothing in common with us. Why, they don’t even have sex. Smith has never laid eyes on a woman — still hasn’t if my orders have been carried out. He’s a man by ancestry, a Martian by environment.

A human born on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith’s voyage to Earth is Stranger in a Strange Land’s window to examine how humans act in vast social realities (like religion and economics) or intimate personal connections (like sexuality and friendship). Jubal Harshaw, his mentor, serves as a sort of moral grounding (seemingly Heinlein’s own). He’s a counterweight to Valentine; polemics lamenting the abandonment of tradition and decency serve to illustrate his disaffection. Harshaw serves as a literal embodiment of the past, rampant sexism included, but his values are realigned by Valentine’s own appropriation of structures like religion for something even stranger.

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“The 1143-year-long war hand begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate.

Once they could talk, the first question was ‘Why did you start this thing?’ and the answer was ‘Me?”

Much more than a science fiction adaptation of the Vietnam War, it allows a glimpse into the disorientation that follows war by magnifying its effects across space and time. Wilson Mandella is shipped light-years away to fight against creatures he’ll never understand for an Earth that grows increasingly alien. For Mandella, war is purgatory. The conclusion leaves you wondering, even amidst the glimmer of hope, about the value of the entire conflict and all the lives that were wiped out or perpetually frozen over its pointlessness. A gripping story that is all too relevant in our age of perpetual war.

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Your life belongs to you. You owe no debt to the being that roused you to this second life. Neither must you expect this being to guide you or benefit you in any way. It will not. You must find your own way.

Roger Zelanzy said “Last Legends of Earth…reads like Olaf Stapledon with a plot!” I can think of no higher praise for this awesome epic. Attanasio has created a universe run through by divisions, where the alien is human and human alien, where time and space are fickle forces transcending our mortal coil, and where the face of God itself is glimpsed through the creation and destruction soon to follow. Humanity has been dead for billions of years when it is revived, left to reconcile its role as bait for the zōtl, aliens that feed on sentient suffering. What happens next?

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But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could.

Zelanzy is a master of the craft, using science fiction for what it was initially created: create another world to better understand this one. We pick up centuries after Earth’s demise and follow Sam, a post-human fighting other post-humans masquerading as Hindu gods on a colony planet. The book is as much a mythological text as it is a comment on that tradition; flowery poetry punctuated by godawful jokes, “deities” depraved beyond measure, and the cyclical nature of Sam’s cosmic struggle. Its ambiguity clouds everything, including Sam’s motivations, but lets the story laugh at religion while admiring it.

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Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

An ambitious epic, crossing genres, dialects, and eons to explore what it means to have human experiences. Patrick Ewing’s journal, Robert Frobisher’s letters, Luisa Rey’s investigation turned story, Timothy Cavendish’s misadventure, Somni-451’s interrogation, and Zachry’s oration are all demonstrably dated modes of communication, the idea being humans are stilted by history’s march. Here, history is a nightmare to escape. The human spirit slumbers for ages before stirring, stunned but unmindful of the chaos around it. Cloud Atlas follows those few precious moments where the violence and despair are drowned out by something clearly there, yet frustratingly intangible.

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Whatever their proposed solutions, they cannot be a continuation of current policies. Despite the unprecedented expansion of surveillance programs, the NSA has “had no discernible impact” on thwarting terrorism.

Almost every major terrorist attack on Western soil in the past fifteen years has been committed by people who were already known to law enforcement..

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