The Sound of One Crow Laughing

So. In the interest of saving my household a few bucks a month, I got a library card a few days ago and then spent an hour or so casing the local branch.

The Science Fiction shelf? One side of one shelf of about six feet by ten. Damn it. Sporadic Heinlein, a nigh complete Anne McCaffrey, and two Charles deLint. A bit of a let-down, this being the town that calls itself Rocket City and is proud as punch of its NASA presence.

But that got me thinking--in a city where engineers and geeks are thick on the ground, could it be that some of the SF has wandered into common fiction?

And lo and behold.



I despair of ever grokking these cats' organisation; it bears no resemblance to anything I've seen elsewhere. All fiction, alpha by author, and then by either pub date (I wish) or alpha by title (and to hell with genre!) would make more sense than this fragmented monster and expose a person wandering the aisles between Brust and Zelazney to a greater number of possible reads. But hey. Once again, I'm without the necessary documentation to comment, so I'll just learn the ropes and swing on 'em.

A query for those more intimately acquainted with the Dewey Decimal System than I, though--was comparative religion always kept so close to political science and so far from history, or is this another local vagary?


Anyhow.

All of that to say that I've managed to stumble across the original occurrence of the phrase "an armed society is a polite society". Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon. And you know, for all of my original complaint that the man lectured rather than telling a story? That's one aspect of his vision of utopia in this book that he never touches. It's fairly important landscape, the responsibility of the armed to the unarmed (and the assumed privilege that accompanies that responsibility). I want to know more about what qualifies a person to go armed and what's assumed about a person who doesn't and all kinds of other things, but he never chases that rabbit far from the story he's telling. I get the feeling it's because the concept was a thought experiment for him, and he wasn't wholly convinced. I don't know, though, and it makes me curious.

The one time I'm in it for a lecture. ~snaps fingers~


Other complaints from Stranger in a Strange Land re: depiction of women and general patter-y-ness don't strike me in this one, either. Only once or twice have I winced for either of those reasons, and then things were eased by, "But it's consistent for this character, not consistent across all characters".

As for the story itself... meh. I appreciate the ideas he proposes and love the language he uses. The paradise he's made is one I wouldn't mind touring, if I thought for a second I could survive it. The characters all have their own voices. But I spent the whole book wanting to peek around the edges of the story he was telling, because the thought that he seemed intent on conveying was...background?...to the one I was interested in. If it were McCaffrey, I'd rest easy--this one's To Ride Pegasus; in time, I'll get no fewer than seven books to explore the possibilities tossed up here. But it's not. It's Heinlein. And I have no idea whether he was much given to long continuities.

Again, the one time I came for a lecture.

Although looking at it, maybe that's why he's inspired so many different people--the things he left unsaid took root in their minds and bloomed. In which case, bless you, Sir. But damn, all the same.


And now it's 01:30 and I've been staring at the screen for five minutes.
Mark is snoring; methinks he has the right idea.
G'night, all.