05/17/23 – Stopping The Anti-Reconnecting

Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, May 17, 2023.

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Sorry I gave you all such a rough week last night with Aitana’s parents rejecting her, it seems it really struck a chord, I meant it simply as all part of the journey.

17 Comments

  1. Jude

    I had faith in you, Christopher that you weren’t planning on leaving their (future/possible) relationship like it seemed in the last episode. To have adopted Aitana in the first place and raised her to be the person she is, they must’ve been good people and good parents.

  2. As always, I appreciate darker notes in my comedies. It makes sense the Stribs would want to strip humans of any earthly connections to better exploit them. Showing how family relations can be disturbed and distorted by the demands of imperialists is good science fiction. Philip K Dick would approve.

  3. notStanley

    A one shot erasure of old connections is bad enough. But leaving an active process to prevent specific new connections? Is that contagious? If it mutates and spreads, people could start forgetting important things. Like Mom’s phone number, or how to breathe :{

  4. Pete Rogan

    If Spacetrawler has a unique characteristic in its stories, it’s to show that human desire of any kind — greed, hate, self-improvement, bodily transformation, even benevolence and the desire for peace — can, with the right technology, become a fearsome engine of unimaginable destruction and desolation. Freed from the constraints of insufficient tools, humans equip themselves with merciless weapons, trash entire societies, plunder any marginally-useful resource, and leave dead and crippled sentients in their wake. The Galaxy’s other races may be caught in their own quest for power, prestige, or (in the case of the Stribs) complete release from any sort of responsibility, but humans stand alone in their inability to keep themselves from taking any want of theirs and turning it into a Galactic problem.

    That includes Ruddock, who has created a sentient race of robot mice whose destiny, aside from being eaten, he hasn’t given one smidgen of thought. How THAT story proceeds, let alone how it ends — if it ends at all — is left an unexamined mystery. For now.

    We can be wry in the face of Keith Laumer’s politically decadent galactic diplomatic corps, or stunned by Frank Herbert’s vision of how religions equip themselves with divinity, or just smirk at Robert Heinlein’s pat endings to amazingly complex situations (i.e., “Friday”). But Christopher in three tales has posited a deep and intransigent part of human nature we cannot help but contemplate with slow horror. We want to make things better, but invariably the expression of our personal desires means wrecking worlds, and populations. However humorously done.

    The one emotion Christopher has shown NOT devastating planets and races is the one scarcely touched upon till now: Love. Humans would like to define love as the giving of oneself, even at great personal cost. Marina had it. Mauricio would have liked to have had it, and paid a great price for what he got. But the Galaxy is full of viewpoints, objectives, and of course technologies, and it’s been easy to get lost on the way to a nobler goal. Amid all these tales of desires subverted (or, worse, fulfilled, pace Yuri), this one human emotion has yet to be shown reaching fruition. I don’t know that it will come here — I don’t know if it will be through Aitana, or Chiphu, or even Mr. Zorilla — but I am aware that this vast delta of stories is flowing to the sea, and if I can’t see what final ocean it reaches, I can still envision the one I’d like to end up on the shores of.

    Heavy thoughts for a Wednesday. I think I’ll stop here, and resume my search for Scotch. I had a bottle of it here somewhere. I think.

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