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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I finally finished Al-Ghazali's The Book of Knowledge. I thought it would be a quasi-religious manual about logic and argument, but it turns out to be a remarkably interesting attempt to consolidate and support the basic opinions of Islam's Prophet and the Companions on the topic of knowledge in comparison to what was deemed knowledge in his time.
Otherwise I'm attempting Said's The Question of Palestine, for reasons unrelated to my reading on Islam or contemporary events, being more interested in the idea of Othering. I'm still on Bly's Iron John, and some day soon, I hope, I will make progress in The Dawn of Everything.
Just started The Vorkosigan Saga and I'm loving it so far. Been on my list for a long time and I'm glad I'm finally checking it out. Old sci-fi at its best.
I have fond memories going through the saga, it's certainly doing something pretty unique. Just introducing standard sci-fi tech gimmicks, and then really deep explorations of what having technology like that means for society. I also like how it mostly doesn't take easy outs, plenty of hard consequences for the characters to live with. It's pretty well done, even if it's much more classic space opera than modern hard sci-fi.
It's also an interesting time capsule, for me it's the absolute essence of proto-woke. The breath and depth of the progressive thought surprised me several times considering the release dates of the books. She hits most modern culture war foci decades before they became mainstream.
True! So far there's a lot of feminism for sure. But at least it's early stage feminism where she accepts inequality of outcome, and that women shouldn't try to pretend to be men. Not the insanity we have today.
I find this particularly funny because I remember reading Barrayar and feeling that it was... er, basically a pro-life tract? As a book? This greatly offended the liberal-left friends who had recommended it to me, but I think I stand by that judgement.
Barrayar is a book in which the protagonist is a pregnant woman, Cordelia, who chooses not to use an artificial womb because she feels that the biological, bodily experience of pregnancy is of some sort of inherent value, whose child is identified early on as having significant disabilities, and who faces tremendous social pressure to abort the child, or even to give him up for infanticide after birth. She takes great personal risks to keep this child and give birth anyway, because all life is sacred, and ultimately the character most determined to abort the inferior child, count Piotr, is charmed by the child's simple goodness despite his disability.
If I were planning a book from the ground up to make the case for pro-life ethics, I could hardly do much better.
The book is, of course, critical of patriarchal and feudal Barrayar, but its depiction of Beta Colony, the enlightened liberal state, is also harshly critical! I came away from the book feeling that Beta was, if anything, more dystopian than Barrayar. At least Barrayar doesn't issue breeding licenses. I felt that Barrayar came off as something like a defense of natural, traditional parenthood. Barrayar's aristocracy are so concerned with face and honour that they will abort and murder children; Beta is so disconnected from biological life that they sever birth from the mother's body entirely, and they put mandatory state-controlled contraceptive implants in everyone. These are both deeply wrong.
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