Geoff's Miscellany

We read this book in class when I was in high school and I vaguely remembered finishing it. But we didn’t. We only actually read the first three stories.

Anyway, I had wanted to revisit it because in high school I was distracted by everything and because I thought I recalled the book having some fun logic exercises.

The logic exercises were fun. But they weren’t as good as I’d remembered. Anyway, the stories I hadn’t gotten to were all very good. My favorites are Evidence and Liar. Liar, about a robot whose positronic brain has spontaneously gained the ability to interpret human thought, is a page turner.

Robert Heinlein. Starship Troopers 1959.

The Good:

Heinlein wrote a very solid sci-fi novel. It contains my favorite science fiction elements:

1. Speculative World Building: The imaginative nature of the battle armor and the change of civilization at the advent of interstellar travel are both very exciting.
2. Speculative Philosophy: The author has his characters philosophize about the nature of war between humans and other species as well as about human nature in a fashion that is made compelling because of the stakes in the story. I think that the philosophy leaves much to be desired, but it very nearly is the most compelling modernist expression of ethics I've read and I've read a lot.
3. Quotable moments:
   1. "There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men. We're trying to teach you to be dangerous - to the enemy." (77)
   2. "That old saw about 'To understand is to forgive all' is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them." (141)
   3. "On the bounce." (various)
   4. "Now continued success is never a matter of chance." (233)
   5. "If I ever find a suit that will let me scratch between my shoulder blades, I'll marry it." (131)
   6. About what was learned in officer candidate school: "Most especially how to be a one-man catastrophe yourself while keeping track of fifty other men, nursing them, loving them, leading them, saving them-but never babying them." (221)

The world was very compelling, the characters were interesting, but the story itself didn’t seem to go very far.

Till We Have Faces

A Review

C.S. Lewis' novel Till We Have Faces (TWHF) is retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. The original myth is of a woman whose beauty is so renown that Aphrodite grants her to marry her son Cupid or forces her to marry her son, Cupid. Psyche's sisters are so jealous of her husband that they plot to ruin the marriage (as Cupid is either so beautiful or hideous that he hides himself). The sisters tempt Psyche to use a lantern to catch a glimpse of Cupid, everything goes wrong from there. Lewis' version utterly inverts this. I cannot say too much without revealing key plot points, but in the original tale the gods are petty and in the wrong. In this tale, the main character sees her own face as she tries to reveal what the gods' faces are truly like.