a thoughtful passage that I liked.

[katster]

"I have seen the ebb and tide of human sexual morality over the eons, Keith. I have seen sex given as freely as a smile, and I've seen it guarded as if it were more precious than peace. I've known people who have been celibate for a billion years, and I've know others have had more than a million partners. I've seen sex between members of different species from the same world, and between those who evolved on different worlds. Some people I know have removed their genitals altogether to avoid the issue of sex. Others have become true hermaphrodites, capable of procreative sex with themselves. Others have switched genders -- I have a friend who changes from male to female every thousand years, like clockwork. There have been times when humans have embraced homosexuality, and heterosexuality, and incest, and multiple concurrent spouses, and prostitution, and bestiality, and sadomasochism, and there have been times when all of these have been abjured. I have seen marraige contracts with expiration dates, and I have seen marriages that last five billion years. And you, my friend, will live long enough to see all these things too. But through all of it, there is one constant for people of conscience, for people like you and me: if you hurt someone you care about, there is guilt."
--Glass, in Starplex, by Robert J. Sawyer.

(To know who Glass is, and who Keith is, and why Glass is talking about eons, well, you'll just have to read the book.)

And to that, I have to say amen.

Love is. :)

Comments

[lizardling.livejournal.com]

*adds that to her reading list*

[katster.livejournal.com]

You read any Sawyer at all?

If you haven't, you're in for a treat. :)

-kat

[lizardling.livejournal.com]

Ooh. No, I haven't.

[katster.livejournal.com]

*grin*

Well, it's zibblsnrt's fault I got hooked on him in the first place. And now that I think about it, him loaning me Calculating God predates our relationship, and him loaning me that book may have helped cement the relationship. But I digress.

Sawyer tends to take an issue and work around it, and manages to bring up good philosophical issues while playing with the ideas. I don't think I've found a Sawyer book yet that I was disappointed with, and I've read through a lot.

Calculating God -- well, I'm a Unitarian, so I'm a bit of a heretic -- holds a place in my pantheon of...well, not holy books, but books that illuminate what I believe in, and Sawyer, as well as anybody, put together a book on how science and believing in a Supreme Being can be combined.

And that's just the beginning.

Sawyer calls himself "Canada's only native born science fiction writer," so a lot of his characters are Canadian, and a bunch of his books are set in and around Canada. It's great.

Although weirdly enough, his second favourite setting is California, having one book set in the Los Angeles area, and one book that's set in Berkeley. (That one was odd, opening the book and discovering the first two words were "The Campanile...". I don't have the book handy or I'd give you the first sentence.)

Yeah. Highly recommended. :)

-kat, whom is, I guess, a Bob Sawyer fangirl too. %)

Well a contrary opinion

[shmuelisms.livejournal.com]

A friend once lent me Sawyer's "Starplex" and "Frameshift" (about the human Genome project), and after reading them both won't touch anything else of his with a ten foot pole.

He writes popular science fiction - in that it would appear he goes down to the public library, reads some abstracts from Scientific American, and picks up the latest hot buzz-words, and weaves them into a story (of sorts). Boring as hell, not very plausible, and not very convincing.