Lot of stuff going on

Matthew E2 Comments

There’s a lot of stuff going on these days; probably some of it has caught your attention. War, climate change, economic disasters, natural disasters, political upheaval, political repression. And I sit around saying, well, what am I doing about it. Not enough, is what I’m doing about it. No good reason why not, either. I mean, sure, I have hostages to fortune, but I can do something, right?

So let’s start here: according to this website, today is American Censorship Day. Go read it, think about it, consider what to do next. Sure, my site here is in important respects a Canadian website… but the blogging service that runs it is American-based, so that’s one thing. Plus, I don’t know, one cannot do everything, but one has to start somewhere, and this is a good somewhere.

Reading: Angry Young Spaceman

Matthew ELeave a comment

The library interregnum period continues. I polished off The Marquis of Carabas last night. The title had led me to hope for something a little more, oh, fanciful, I guess, but it wasn’t. It was just a good Rafael Sabatini French Revolution adventure. (One thing Sabatini does that I kinda get sick of? He has the heroine distrust the hero for no good reason. Read enough of his books and you start to catch on that really she distrusts him because she’s a Sabatini heroine and that’s what they do.)

Now it’s on to Angry Young Spaceman by Jim Munroe. Haven’t read this since I first got it, back when it originally came out. I kinda liked it at the time and it’s even better now. Munroe is, of course, the author of Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask, maybe the best superhero novel ever written.

Angry Young Spaceman is about a young guy who goes off to teach English on another planet. It is clearly intended to parallel the experience many people in my generation had teaching English overseas. It’s a very GenX book, and coming from me that’s a compliment. But the thing I like about it is that Munroe puts so much other neat science fiction stuff in there that you can’t draw any parallels between the story and here-and-now (or, I suppose, here-and-2000) that don’t break down quickly.

I don’t know why it took me eleven years to crack this damn thing open again. Recommended.