What I'm Re-Reading Now

Mostly I have been re-reading Kage Baker's Company series, which if you like science fiction and revolutions, you should give it a go. It's about people chosen as tiny children by a corporation in the 24th century to be rebuilt into immortal cyborgs. The immortality process only works on children younger than five or six, but then those children grow up to work for the Company. An immortal workforce that you don't need to pay! Who never get sick and who will never be old!

The Company has them collecting works of art, rare or extinct species of plants and animals, even various humans whose culture or genetic material will vanish through time. It's all in the service of making the Company and its stockholders even richer than they are, though it's sold to the little cyborg children as preserving things that would otherwise be lost: one of our main characters, for example, the botanist Mendoza, hunts for plants that would otherwise go extinct, while meanwhile attempting to breed a type of maize that will be nutritionally complete, using the maize plants that get lost as climate and farming practices change. 

The Company looks like the good guys at first -- the children who become cyborgs are rescued from terrible situations (wars, earthquakes, the dungeons of the Inquisition), and the work they grow up to do does seem important. As the series progresses, though, we come to see the Company's true motives; and how they handle cyborgs who rebel; and what life is like for someone who is hundreds of thousands of years old. There is also a romance between Mendoza and a different sort of cyborg, one who is not immortal.

These are really good books, and Kage Baker, having finished the Company novels, was starting two new series, one set in a fantasy world and the other set on Mars. Sadly, she died of cancer in 2010, while in her early 50s, leaving those series only barely begun. Still, very much worth reading. Start with Garden of Iden, or else The Bird of the River.  

So Where Have I Been

Laid low, y'all.  Laid low.

I got some sort of evil virus, or flu, or demonic infestation, which made me sicker than I have been in year. For a few days there I did almost nothing but sleep. Seriously, at once point, clawing my way to consciousness, I googled sleeping sickness to see if, you know, maybe....

It's not endemic in Arkansas, though.

I went back to school on Monday, which was probably a mistake, even though all I had to do was meet students for conferences over their papers; and on Tuesday, which was definitely a mistake. I taught for about forty minutes (I do not remember most of what I said -- I vaguely remember going off on a rant about Plato), realized I was very close to passing out, and sent them home.

Today, like a miracle, I am all but well.

Lying there on the sofa at my sickest, though, racked with misery, fever, and pain, I thought about Elizabeth Barrett Browning -- who lived for years like that, in pain like that, unable to move from a sofa, and all the while managed to write poetry*.

A better man than I am.




*I couldn't write. I read, during the hours I managed to stay away, straight through Kage Baker's Company series. The entire thing.