HRSFANS.org

Awesomely, one of the New Yorker weblogs published a post musing on another very new-to-me reason for reading, not reading, and/or finishing a book during the same week as the HRSFANS-discuss book recommendation thread I wrote about in July. (By the way, I have started—barely—to collate the recommendations list on the wiki. Please help! “‘Paperbacks-for-the-road’ Recommendations” is linked through from the “Index to the Awesome.”) I considered in parallel from the start Ms. Minkel’s apparent compulsion to show herself “an adult” in her reading life and Tony’s warning of potential future bad volumes in good-so-far series, so here come my musings specifically on the former.

An extract:

On one hand, we have big, painful books we feel compelled to see through to the end. On the other, the books we’ve sort of read and glibly lie about having finished. Both of these seem tied to some sort of reading scorecard, one in which the readers are measured and judged by—perhaps even more than—the books that they’ve read. …

But is the reading scorecard internal or external? Or are the two so entwined that it’s impossible to answer that question?

Ms. Minkel could mean the “we” impersonally: “On one hand, we have [here an example of] big, painful books we feel compelled to see through to the end,” but the rest of her post seems to indicate that she does speak as “we” for herself and her assuredly well-read readers (the comments posted seem to presume this, too).

Yet to me this entire concept of a compulsion to finish a book (painful or not) is foreign, bizarre, and surely detrimental to reading health. Does it ring a bell for anyone? Can you explain how this compulsion could make sense inside one’s own head (or how it can compel regardless of sense)?

People who’ve read my posts before may have noticed that I, if anything, tend to brag about my willingness to drop a book at any point, as if it’s macho, or stoic, to leave the story ever unfinished in my own mind. Come to think, in some cases it does feel internally macho, in that I’m deliberately holding myself back from the experience because I do care and yet don’t feel it would be advantageous to continue (Big Love after “Pilot”, new Battlestar Galactica after “Bastille Day”, A Reliable Wife more than 2/3 through, and to a lesser extent The Pillars of the Earth after 300p); in other cases it does feel internally stoic in that I’m accepting that I don’t care a whit about the next phase of the story and would rather turn to more enjoyable pursuits, without necessarily faulting the author(s) for being unable to keep my interest (Potter V 70p in without a single page free of people yelling at each other, Angel after “Reprise”, Farscape after “Season of Death”). When I discovered Ms. Minkel’s post, I immediately opened a chat to a friend whom I’ve mentioned earlier as a counterpoint to my reading style: he once devoured half of War and Peace in two days as escape reading. I opened the conversation (minor typos & grammatical quirks corrected):

me: you’ll have a COMPLETELY different reaction to this than I will …

you won’t think this whole concept of “we have big, painful books we feel compelled to see through to the end” is foreign, bizarre, counter-to-one’s-reading-health

he:i think that reading is just less painful for me

because i read so fast

… i mean, i am a bit compulsive about finishing books, but that’s more my obsessive nature than it is powering through

what would take willpower is putting them down

it’s not that i feel compelled to finish a book because i started it. it’s because i like reading and don’t like putting books down.

me: Usually a reading struggle for me just means my psyche isn’t keeping pace

I still don’t see how liking reading is a reason to keep reading a story you’re not liking—there’s hundreds of others available just as easily (in your case, without even putting down the device if you’re reading on the iPhone)

he: well, but you want to know how it ends

as i said, i don’t task switch well

if i’m in the middle of a video game

i find myself playing it for several more hours

me: no, I only want to know how it ends if I’m interested in the story

and even then, that’s not the important part

If I wanted to know how every story ends, I’d be even more of a basket case about keeping contact with everybody than I already am—and I never would have cancelled my FB account due to lack of interest

Read for your self, not for your private morals or for their public display. Reading is between you, the story, its characters and/or its world, and the author. Everything and everyone outside is just details—and if they aren’t, read something else.

The other month, a to-be-commended HRSFalum asked through HRSFANS-discuss for good books to bring on a long vacation, imposing only constraints that they be in-print (reasonably available) mass-market PBs. As one might expect, this generated an excellent recommendations list (which someone really ought to collate for the HRSFANS wiki—shoot, I volunteered again, didn’t I?), if rather heavy on SF/F and historical fiction with SF/F elements. But there’s nice range to the discussions, as well; and a bit of back-and-forth amongst the recommenders.

One day into the discussion, Tony cautioned:

His Majesty’s Dragon, like Name of the Wind, Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and Vlad Taltos are all unfinished series, and I’d really recommend reading the GREAT books on this list that are DONE before reading ones we don’t know how they turn out.

This seems to involve a bit of legerdemain in categorization, comparing “unfinished series” to “books … that are DONE.” A series pretty much by definition comprises several books completed in their own right (or at least to the extent that individual publishing is deemed warranted). His Majesty’s Dragon is done, as are five successor novels: the author is not yet done with all stories she intends to set in the Temeraire universe, but why should her artistic and/or business decision in our reality handicap the readability of books already available?

Even if the intent is to recommend complete series (such as The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) over ongoing ones (from the barely-begun City of a Hundred Rows through the apparently-still-kicking Song of Ice and Fire all the way to, I suppose, Wheel of Time?), why should the expected number of additional related books be a more compelling reason against or for reading volume 1 (or 5) than the qualities of the specific volume in question?

And how does this square with Tony’s own list of recommendations, emailed to the thread the previous day, including “Hyperion by Dan Simmons (only read the first book!)”? Once a reader knows how a set of related books “turns out,” s/he can choose only the “GREAT” one, but that same reader should hold off reading a GREAT book that might yet have good, bad and/or indifferent successors?

Please allow me only barely to mention the undead series, completed by their creators for good or bad and re-animated in subsequent decades (Dune being probably the most extreme example—in this aspect as in others—but with the Foundation books an arguably even weirder case, since they were re-animated first by Asimov himself and then again by his estate!).

I say, read any given book on its own terms. As I’ve written before, if it is a GREAT book there will obviously be further stories to tell, but that does not mean you need feel any duty to seek out any more of those stories, or to believe any related stories just because the same person (or an anointed successor) wrote them.

In the past few months I have been hoping to cultivate a personal-intellectual project regarding the many ways readers think about the stories, characters and authors they encounter. This is proceeding more slowly than I might have liked, but mostly for good reasons—there are so many other wonderfully interesting things to explore in parallel! (Two weeks into my freshman year at Harvard, a young man from my entryway declared forcefully at dinner, “It has always been too long since one has read The Little Prince. One should be reading it constantly, non-stop, day in, day out. Unfortunately, there are other books that require one’s attention.” Two days later I fell deeply in unrequited love with him.)

But at the very least I can return periodically to the questions raised for me so fortuitously by a good visit, so, here, allow me to follow up on a question I mentioned my post “Who’s the Medium now?.”

When a friend stated she cannot enjoy art from creators with whose views she disagrees, I asked first, “Does this also apply to non-fiction?” She said, “I don’t read non-fiction.” As she is in a graduate program in a humanities discipline, my response was a look of some bafflement.

She clarified that she essentially does not read any books in a ‘non-academic non-fiction’ type genre, and that there are some books “I have to read to do my work.” Although she has since clarified that these academic books are enjoyable, her initial phrasing gave me the impression that she read them only because she has to.

I do not know, though I would welcome more insight from her, what formed her preference (aversion? categoric disinterest?), or whether she considers it something good, bad, or indifferent about herself. Perhaps she merely has so much good fiction to read she has decided not to distract herself with some of the enticing offerings of “actual” present and past. (I occasionally wonder how I will ever get to any new books, since there are so many wonderful books to re-read: not just The Little Prince, of course, but also How to Eat Fried Worms, Watership Down, and the Fionavar Tapestry—although I more recently realized I can’t handle that world again.) Or perhaps her identification of an author’s ground axe(s) with the art makes her especially suspicious of authors working in actual facts. Or perhaps it simply hasn’t interested her so far.

But I doubt that good non-fiction cannot interest her. This world is, after all, a wondrous place, full of far more variety and subtlety than we can grasp. Good fictional worlds share the same qualities, to my interpretation: but it takes less skill in an author to go beyond the reader’s imagination when facts are involved.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. (NOT SO in the case of Macbeth: the historical Lady Macbeth’s given name was Gruoch, but I understand there is no documentation beyond that of her being particularly intimidating or formidable.) But it is very often more interesting. The much-married Henry VIII of England and his extensive, fractured family provide a favorite example of mine. (My main source is Alison Weir’s joint biography The Six Wives of Henry VIII; among the prosaic fictional treatments I have briefly encountered are The Tudors, The Other Boleyn Girl, and The Autobiography of Henry VIII.)

When King Henry married Anne Boleyn, she was very likely in her early-mid thirties, pushing the safe limits for childbearing years in her time (and even in our time, pushing the easy limits for conception). So although Henry was fixated on securing his succession with a legitimate male heir, that was not a strong argument for marrying this woman.

Furthermore, the extrication process from his marriage to his first wife (his brother‘s widow), Katherine of Aragon, had dragged on for seven years, due in no small part to Queen Katherine’s own exemplary political and personal connections and her popularity with the British people. Henry could not expect to gain in domestic or foreign clout by repudiating the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella.

Finally, during all but the last few months of the political and religious wrangling leading up to Henry’s “divorce,” he and Anne most likely were not sleeping together.

Which pretty much leaves Anne Boleyn’s own personal magnetism as the one most likely proximate cause for Henry’s insistence on marrying her. And I have to say I have a heck of a lot of respect for a woman who had an intensity of magnetism that maintained such a hold for so long over the imagination of a man who had very little rational expectation that she could bring to his complex life any relief (beyond, presumably, in bed), and every reason to wish he might be able to forget her.

Nancy Kress’s short story “And Wild for to Hold” is the only fiction I’ve seen on Anne that can so much as hold a candle to the compellingness of her history. (If only Siân Phillips had ever had a chance to play her!) Unfortunately, Kress’s treatment does not depict Henry or any of the other wives, each of whose own stories was fascinating and tragic in a uniquely real-life way.

I told my friend about Henry-and-wives the day she said she doesn’t read non-fiction. She was fascinated.

Nur - Enemy of darkness and illuminator of consciousness

Xyn - Bringer of sleep, keeper of secrets and guardian of Mysteries

Earlier this fall I encountered an pair of goddesses to enthrall me, part of a larger pantheon on display in a coffee shop. More recently I found contact information for the artist, Jonah Kamphorst, and asked for their stories; he has been kind enough to send some preliminary pointers prepared for an earlier show.

I had earlier on the evening I wrote to Jonah re-read my other recent post on fiction, reality, and communication by/through artists. This pretty clearly influenced the particular questions I posed of this artist:

Are they from a world of yours? If so, to what degree are they yet fleshed out in your consciousness?  If not, where else can I look for more?

Jonah’s response is that he created the goddesses (note the direction of the agency) for himself, but has hoped others might find them illustrative or more. Also that he has an “extensive narrative … which is nowhere near complete” regarding them.

I haven’t checked yet, but my first guess is that Jonah has less than extensive experience writing narrative fiction so far. Again, as I noted last month, many writers seem to find themselves less than entirely in control of their narrative worlds. Also, I would describe none of my favorite fictional worlds as “complete”—or at least not as “completely described.” Wholeness in a world, whether this in which we live or those into which we follow storytellers’ great tales, is to my senses crucially dependent on there being always more to discover. One should always sense that one does not yet know everything that’s going on. Even, I expect, as a world’s creator.

Certainly that’s how I maintain my self-respect as a proper Dune fanatic: by insisting that it is not a universe belonging to and best understood by Frank Herbert. Herbert was merely the first to show it to us.

Likewise, I quite without remorse discarded Farscape barely into Season 3 and Six Feet Under part-way through Season 2, feeling the writers had lost track of their characters. And, despite my continued absorption in and deep respect for the character creation from Martha Cooley in The Archivist, I feel she mistakes her plot at the end.

Nur and Xyn here, from Jonah Kamphorst’s pantheon, remind me visually somewhat of “The two sisters,” from Margaret Mahy‘s The Door in the Air, and Other Stories, although these two are not actually complements as Jennifer and Jessica are. The obvious visual influences of Indian, Celtic, and cyberpunk cultures are quite striking and super-fun in combination. The image of Xyn linked here, though, does not quite feel the same as when I first saw it; it may be a different image, or possibly I feel different enough looking at it through the computer screen. In either case, I don’t have quite as forceful a feeling today as I did earlier this fall that there is more to discover—but it’s forceful enough.

Probably dozens of you noticed Charles Murray‘s recent Washington Post essay days before I did. I came across it yesterday, looking over my husband’s shoulder as he chuckled at one of the (no doubt legion) bemused/snarky response weblog posts, one that block-quotes the several paragraphs listing examples of cultural touchstones that “members of the New Elite” are not familiar with (starting 3/4 of the way through Murray’s essay) and turns them into a “quiz” that readers can use to “rate” their own eliteness. So far, I have only read that response and Murray’s own essay; I will probably try to read up a bit on other responses once I have my own thoughts in a bit of order.

If I were Murray, I would be seriously upset—livid, to be specific—with myself and my editor for dropping those paragraphs into the essay, where they all but beg to be seized upon by hundreds of clever Netizen writers, dressed up (and talked up) as if they were the whole point, and swiftly shredded, item by item.

Because, you see (or, at least, as I see it), the examples paraded rather colorfully about are quite tangential to the fairly subtle, multi-faceted, and very much discussion-worthy issue Murray states: How does/can/should a governmental system strive for balanced representation, given that achieving balance along any one continuum means foregoing all consideration of one or more other salient measures?

Americans generally have liked to think of our culture as individualistic, and of our individuals as less bound by their personal, family, and local history than in earlier Western cultures (let alone non-Western). Nonetheless, for centuries the American elite was, as in Britain, France, Germany &c., by and large defined by blood and money, and the powerful were drawn almost entirely from the elite, although with ambition and ability one could push impressively far. Some of that has changed. But is an elite defined primarily by ambition and ability more diverse than its predecessors? In terms of the modes of thinking it naturally employs, the constituencies it can identify (with) and represent, and its abilities for intellectual cross-fertilization, perhaps not.

What type of segregation is imposed rather than alleviated by meritocracy? If admission to Harvard were merely a matter one’s parents’ connections, with one’s own accomplishments, hopes and plans incidental, one might very well encounter among one’s classmates more diversity of hopes and plans. (Of course, it does not follow from this that one necessarily would appreciate or even notice that available diversity.)

But to break the hold of a meritocratic elite, what could a culture or government do? Lottery admission to top schools, on the primary, secondary, or post-secondary level, wouldn’t do it, because even once in, a young person would have to succeed on his or her own merits. One neat idea got some new publicity in a Time opinion piece from Joe Klein earlier this fall: choose representatives quasi-randomly, but push them to inform themselves on the issues before them by reading and interacting with expert opinions. Turns out that, given power, the “average” person often will embrace responsibility.

Last weekend a long-standing friend and I re-wove a fascinating set of threads from a once shimmering and strong connection that had been somewhat out of repair. Also that weekend, over brunch, she told my husband and me that she cannot enjoy art from creators she knows to be jerks.

I got a bit wistful pondering the vast expanse of good, important stories from which she cuts herself off by this judgment. I have all sorts of follow-up questions I have not yet put to her:

• When you are intrigued by a book, must you check the author’s credentials first?
• How do mythological frameworks play into this? (e.g. If there is no single obvious source for Orpheus‘s story, but you happen to believe classical Greek culture was depraved, is that entire archetype invalidated? Furthermore, would Greek culture invalidate Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending, or is that enough a new work of art that its validity depends only on Williams‘s predelictions?)

I did ask one follow-up question first: “Does this also apply to non-fiction?” I’ll get back to the part of the conversation that flowed from that bit in future posts.

It took only one nap before I realized that my friend’s x-ray vision through a work of art into its creator (and all the various axes s/he grinds) can only be the product of a personal paradigm of art, stories and reality differing significantly from mine. To make a long story short (too late), I imagine she must see a story (in particular, but also other artistic expressions) as a medium through which an author communicates with the audience(s). Yet it’s very common particularly for authors of fiction to describe stories and/or individual characters as compelling the author to express them one way instead of another. I believe them. In my paradigm, generally, the author is the medium through which the story communicates with the audience(s).

Of course, in actuality it’s almost always a big knotty combination of author and story using each other. But in my experience, a good story feels inevitable, whether or not it happened (or could happen, or could have happened) in this physical universe in which I live.

And for you?

The world of Algebraic Geometry (to which I have personal but absolutely no professional ties) is kind of tempest-tossed at the moment. I wouldn’t be suprised but what a number of you would enjoy thinking about and commenting on what’s going on.

In brief, lay terms, as I have heard it, there was this brilliant young French mathematician in the 1950s by the name of Alexandre Grothendieck who all but single-handedly revolutionized/created certain fields of Algebraic Geometry. Some 10-15 years later, he gave up academic life, moved to the Pyrrenées, and became a sheep farmer.

Since Grothendieck’s disengagement, his body of work has remained wildly useful and has formed a bedrock for later mathematical generations. The respect accorded to his own writings has gone so far as to inspire its own personal Distributed Proofreaders analogue for creating a TeX version of a long systematic work, “Séminaire de Géométrie Algébrique” (or SGA). The free electronic SGA project has been ongoing for the better part of a decade or more; volumes SGA 1 and SGA 2 are up on the arXiv already.

It seems just possible that might not be true much longer.

Behold the text of the until-recently-current webpage for the SGA 4 project:

Alexandre Grothendieck a malheureusement souhaité que cessent les travaux de réédition de SGA. Les pages qui étaient consacrées sont donc closes.
Dernière actualisation : 2 février 2010.

There is slightly more information, and much discussion, at Scott Morrison’s post on the Secret Blogging Seminar, a group math weblog. Again in brief (and English), Grothendieck apparently resurfaced enough to put out a letter stating that he doesn’t want his work republished or translated.

And he wags his finger at anyone who has done so or wants to.

Which is the really weird part. Assuming the letter is genuine, what legal ramifications does it actually have? Why use a phrase like “unlawful in my eyes,” which sounds to me deliberately obfuscatory? (Legality is not a matter of an individual’s vision.) The comments on the SBSeminar post seem weighted towards arguments as to the moral dimensions of Grothendieck’s stated wishes and a given mathematician’s obligation to respect them (or not). To me, the legal questions are more pressing and pertinent. Whether one has a moral obligation to respect an author’s wishes is a decision one makes for oneself. Whether the mathematical community as a whole has a legal obligation to take Grothendieck at his word has greater ramifications–and probably a single, findable answer (unlike a question of personal morality).

Edixhoven, one of the prior leaders of the TeX SGA project, did research the distribution question through the publishers and was told copyright had in fact reverted to the original authors (as he states on the linked page). This seems to indicate Grothendieck is not out of line to say he withholds his permission. But the questions only start there. …

Some on the SBSeminar comment thread made the “glass half full” suggestion that maybe it’s time SGA got a revamp anyhow. Yet the original is still a precious resource. I’ll be interested to try to follow what decisions are made.

Casting my memory back lo these many years (those of you who know my actual age may snicker) I think I can trace my own fascination with alternate history to an epigraph for a chapter in an Arthur C. Clarke novel, The Fountains of Paradise.

Almost all the Alternative History computer simulations suggested that the Battle of Tours (A.D. 732) was one of the crucial disasters of mankind. Had Charles Martel been defeated, Islam might have resolved the internal differences that were tearing it apart and gone on to conquer Europe. Thus centuries of Christian barbarism might have been avoided, the Industrial Revolution would have started almost a thousand years earlier, and by now we would have reached the nearer stars instead of merely the farther planets….

I do not remember when I read the novel, but it must have been right around early high school. I remember little of it beyond the outline of the main plot, the monks and the butterflies, and that little paragraph about alternate history: what if, in effect, the Dark Ages had been averted?

Of course even phrasing the question that way is a vast oversimplification of the long course of a whole host of cultures—I now know somewhat more about those subtleties—but the question as such captivated me. We live in such accelerated times that the seeming changelessness of prior centuries boggles our minds (though, again, that apparent changelessness no doubt oversimplifies). What if Earth had had an 800-year head start on the Industrial Revolution?  Good heavens, where could we be now?  (I suppose that’s answering my own question….)

This past season I have been reading The Best Alternate History Stories of the Twentieth Century, edited by Harry Turtledove. But alternate history is fascinating in more than just fiction. A friend once told me that the “many-worlds” hypothesis comes to mind for him whenever he does something particularly stupid and escapes death, which happens occasionally (if not too alarmingly so) as a pedestrian in a city such as Boston. On such occasions he considers briefly and pities any number of now-dead “alternate selves.” I have always assumed that nearly all people rehash key conversations in their minds; though in my own case I try to focus on remembering the events as they happened, one also is tempted to consider how they might have gone better.

WARNING: Star Wars spoiler ahead.  Then again, I expect that many of us were spoiled for Star Wars before we were born.

And then … my own personal alternate Star Wars history (and I am not going to look up any sources for this, deliberately!): I have heard that Darth Vader’s declaration of paternity at the end of The Empire Strikes Back was so very secret a revelation that the crew’s scripts were written falsely, such that during the filming of the scene, the actor said something entirely different, while Jones dubbed the real line in later (of course, since it wasn’t Jones in the Vader suit, the last part is almost certainly true). My own reconstruction has it that, to downplay the deception, the actor must have said something that kind-of-almost would have made sense.  And the only other even halfway-consistent alternate history would have been, I feel, for Obi-wan himself to have been Luke’s father. And what would that have meant?

Speaking of Faith is pretty darn awesome as radio programs go. The tag line is “… conversation about religion, meaning, ethics and ideas …” (formerly “… conversation about belief, meaning, ethics and ideas …”, which in my mind scans better). These topics do produce fantastic conversations, and I’ve encountered quite a few of them just by wandering over to the website and shuffling through the archive episodes. This week, I discover TV and Parables of Our Time, a conversation with media scholar Diane Winston of USC.

I didn’t like this episode at first, but even by the end of the first listening it makes a lot more sense, and I think many of you would be happy to think through its themes, as well–not to mention its references. (Battlestar Galactica serves as the “star” example of a TV show that grapples with big questions; Lost and House play second bananas.)

Enjoy … and while you’re at it, enjoy The Novelist As God and A History of Doubt, Speaking of Faith programs from earlier this year.  All are related somehow to the place for storytelling, and narrative-making, in the human mind.

So I’ve got this friend who, with a few compatriots, is in the beginning throes of a new weblog.  And while the writers may be a bit alarmed if we actually turn our attention to them (those of you at Harvard in April 2001 may remember a certain Matt W. response to “neo-fascist refutations of neo-communist propaganda,” vaguely apropos of the Mass Hall sit-in), I can’t help but be a little out-of-sorts myself at an apology tucked in to the post “The Tour de Bookcases”, by one of my friend’s co-writers.  I’d like to take the opportunity to defend a passion shared, I dare say, by many of us, including the self-deprecating author at Three’s Prime.

Hannah wrote:

Our books describe us: they expose our studies, our interests, our values. They also expose the values we think we should project: there is a reason the religion and philosophy books are in the living room and the fantasy novels in the bedroom. While I am a great believer in the importance of fantasy and fairy-tales, putting those books in the living room would make me feel a need to explain them to all of our guests: “Yes, these are children’s books. They are ‘easy’ to read; they don’t have the weight of tradition. Yes, they are escapist. But is that so wrong?” I love the novels I read, but I am still somewhat embarrassed by them. I don’t read them to discover fundamental truths about the world, but simply for entertainment. The religion and philosophy books, on the other hand, are in the living room to convey, “We are Christians. We are proud of our faith, and want you to know about it. But we are also thinkers. We read and study and learn. Our faith is intellectual, as well as evangelical.”

My instinct is to suspect this lady needs more friends who read—or at least some new sources for ideas about books. Ideas such as C.S. Lewis’s in An Experiment in Criticism, that the value of a book may lie less in how it is written and more in how it is read. I haven’t met Hannah or her bookshelves, so there is the possibility that I would agree with her that her fantasy collection is escapist, childish, flighty. Yet this is unlikely.  And even if it were true, I would nonetheless take umbrage on behalf of the rest of us readers—and writers.

In my comment to Hannah’s post, I mention The Lord of the Rings and Lord of Light as examples of “weighty” fantasy. Tolkien’s masterpieces are properly not novels at all, but romances (which I would expect Hannah, as a self-described literary critic, to appreciate).  Zelazny’s is a far more modern form and yet draws on ancient traditions in a sophisticated way.

What man who has lived for more than a score of years desires justice, warrior? For my part, I find mercy infinitely more attractive. Give me a forgiving deity any day.

Being a god is the quality of being able to be yourself to such an extent that your passions correspond with the forces of the universe …

Forget about the theological discourse. The very grammar of this book isn’t meant for children.  And anyone who mistakes it for a children’s book merely because it deals in the fantastical is missing the point to a potentially dangerous extent.  (See Michael O’Brien’s bizarre characterization of Dune in his literary criticism A Landscape with Dragons: the battle for your child’s mind: “The author’s [Herbert's] mind is religious in its vision, and he employs a tactic frequently used by Satan in his attempt to influence human affairs. … The people settle for the lesser evil, thinking they have been ‘saved’, when all the while it was the lesser evil that the devil wished to establish in the first place.”)

Do I read fantasy and other speculative fiction to be entertained?  Yes.  Do I read it to discover or cement elemental truths?  Heck, yes! Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis books (also known collectively as Lilith’s Brood) contain, among pages and pages of acute observations on personal relationships and power plays, one of my favorite images for soul-sickness anywhere on this green Earth.  I wish that, like Aaor in Imago, my body began to disintegrate when I felt unloved.  —Okay, so I don’t wish that, literally speaking—it could get kind of messy at times—but the idea of physically expressing my psychic state in such an obvious way is deeply attractive. All literature is metaphorical, and the metaphors in good speculative fiction are gorgeous and subtle and deeply, deeply spiritual.

And I am proud to say those characters and that imagery live in my mind and in my actions.