A speculative mind

  As with all Philip K. Dick books, this is a little different. The title is not the weirdest thing about it. I think the first half and second half of the book are different animals. We begin the book with the Earth unbearably hot. He never uses the words global warming or the greenhouse effect, which were things that had been talked about in the scientific community before this book came out, but were not widely accepted yet (in 1964). Whatever the cause, the earth is hot. The UN, a much more powerful organization than it is in our world, is trying to populate other bodies in our solar system: the Moon, Mars, Ganymede, etc. There are too many people on Earth for the limited resources. The problem is, no one wants to live in a colony on another planet, where conditions are miserable. So, the UN must draft people. Our protagonist, Barney Mayerson, has received his draft notice and is trying to game the system so he doesn’t have to go. Barney is a precog and a high-ranking executi...

  I recently went for a vacation at Oregon’s Silver Falls State Park. We walked the trails and took in the splendor of a number of falls and the steep heavily forested canyons that they dropped into. While wandering one of the upper trails, we came upon a stone structure. It was something that had been built in the 1930’s as a kitchen for the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camp. It had later been restored to its more-or-less original condition. It put me in mind of when I had worked a couple of summers for the US Forest Service at the Cape Perpetua Visitor’s Center. On top of Cape Perpetua is a stone shelter and down nearer the base of the Cape are the remnants of a cookhouse. Both were built for and used by the CCC boys.   The Civilian Conservation Corps along with its brother organization, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), were part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies to fight back against the great Depression. These two organizations employed millions of m...

  As a kid, I didn’t understand the complexities of the Viet Nam War. I don’t remember when it started. I just remember that at some point we were just sort of in it. President Johnson talked about it. Nixon talked about it. Lots of people talked about it. Lots of people were against it. I had no doubt we would win it, because America always won its wars. As a kid, you don’t have much of a concept of war. There were war movies and television shows like Twelve O’Clock High and the Rat Patrol . There were even comedies like Hogan’s Heroes , or McHale’s Navy . These were not the sort of things to give a kid a realistic view of warfare. No maiming, no PTSD, no dead babies.   So I was more interested in the things that kids like me were interested in: toys, astronauts, games with friends. One of those games was “war” where we would run around the neighborhood pretending to shoot each other. When my oldest brother got to draft age, he enlisted in the Coast Guard. Our communicatio...

  Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse is the second book in her Between Earth and Sky trilogy . The cultures depicted in the series are inspired by Pre-Columbian Native American cultures from throughout the Americas, with perhaps even some Polynesian influences.   (There are spoilers ahead if you haven’t read the first book) I confess I had a bit of trouble at first remembering who was who from the first novel. There are a lot of characters and it is a complex tapestry. A polyhedron of politics is played out among the various clans. In the first book there had been a conspiracy to kill the Sun Priest Naranpa. But somehow, she survived and now must crawl (literally) her way back to some kind of life. The countries in this world are kept at peace by treaty, but that treaty is fraying. War seems likely in the future. Magic is supposed to be illegal, but that doesn’t stop people from trying to figure out how to use it. It is the use of magic that is one of the main contributors...