Opus 2024-183: Book Review: One Shoe Writing

I don’t spend as much time reading fiction as I used to.  One reason is there is a shrinking pool of fiction that is worth reading, at least to me.  One of the first things I look for is a good action story.  I like action, not description.  Give me Louis L’Amour, you can have Zane Grey.  I’m not into emotional introspection.  I tend to skip over a lot of stuff like that.

That being said, it has to have good characters that I can identify with and care about.  The story needs to hold together and needs to be well written.  What makes it hard for stories like this is the wole formula all authors are forced to use nowadays.  Some are able to meet the minimum‘s of the politically correct progressives, and still write a good story, but most are not up to it.  I am currently exploring a new author who has promise.  I am assuming the author is a woman because she has one of those names that could be taken either way, and the main characters in the story tend to be evenly divided between men and women.

All the same, it is a woke story, but the wokeness is kept in the background, so far.  I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I see a few cases where pronouns come up.  There is a doctor who is continually referred to as “they”, but it is done in such a way that it is not clearly referring to one person.

Homosexuality is introduced in a passing way by a brief reference to the main character, who is a man, having his father tell him when he was 15 that it was not appropriate for him to approach this boy that he liked.  The reason he wasn’t to approach him was because the character is the son of an absolute monarch, and is not allowed to abuse his underlings by forcing them into relationships.  It had nothing to do with sexual impropriety or morals.

Then you run into the problem of women being written with the characters of men.  The female lead in the story is a Wonder Soldier.  She is a super fighter and is the bodyguard of the male lead in the story.  There is a romantic interest developing, which is forbidden by their social mores but I expect it to develop.  He is the son of one of the oligarches, she is a servant.  Their future happiness is not bright.

You also have the missing spiritual awareness.  In this culture people are “printed” and stored in a computer of some kind.  When they die, the old print is resurrected, a body is cloned, and the old person is inserted.  Somehow they have managed to transfer the memories of the person who dies violently or out on the trip back into the print out, and life starts over again.  Star Trek explored this idea.  One of the problems you have and this is the idea of making duplicate copies of the person.  Do you remember Captain Kirk coming back with a double?

There are two questions here.  The first is metaphysical, I guess, “Is it really the same person?”  Does it just think it’s the same person because memories have been copied into its brain?  Or is it just an artificial recreation?  The question is never even looked into, at least in this first book.

The second question would be the place of a machine as a storage for a human being.  If a machine can store a human being and a machine can re-create that human being, then it just follows that machines could make up a human being on its own, and then the question becomes, “Is it a human being?”

Another issue is where the main character gets his Christian cultural values in a society which seems to have rejected all forms of religion.  He is concerned that his father, who he knew was strong and had to do terrible things, might not be a decent person after all.  If not, he might not be doing things because they were necessary, but be committing atrocities because he enjoyed it.  Where would you come up with those kind of values in the world devoid of Christianity.

At this point, I can read the next book with anticipation.  I also will read it with a bit of dread, often these authors suck you in with a good story, keeping the dissonance in the background, and then, as they establish a relationship with you they start pushing their agenda.  There have been series of books, where I would follow to the third or fourth volume, and suddenly all kinds of weird and strange things become the norm.  I remember one where the admiral of a massive space fleet, who was totally the manly man, suddenly started talking about his husband at home.  I don’t know if I got much further than a few paragraphs after that.

I don’t know which way this author will go.  I know there’s a lot of pressure to follow the plan to fall into line, and to conform.  With modern progresses it really doesn’t matter.  If you are a great author tell me a good story.  The real concern for the publisher is, are you following the playbook?  Are you working to tear down the standard values of society?  Are you jumping through the woke hoops?

I will enjoy while I can and then move on.

O’Keefe, Megan E.  The Blighted Stars.  New York:  Orbit, 1923.

homo unius libri