jam

I really liked Out of The Silent Planet. It felt to me like a book that still has something for us now, all of us living in a world that moves so quickly often without any real reflection on why. Why do we live the way that we do, why do we innovate and expand the way that we do, if not for the love of others? What does it really mean to care for mankind? Really poignant especially now that even the effort of reflecting is being lost to the convenience of asking a machine that's accumulated endless datapoints, so many people failing to remember that art is what gives us some chance to process our world.

It's also pretty funny. I liked the line when Ransom was like "hmmm... if the sorn are the intelligenstia they must secretly rule the world" lol

Of course there are some points I got hung up on--certain assumptions even C.S. Lewis (who I feel very intently makes a point here of making people question their assumptions) couldn't escape, like the justification of the hrossa's language being the dominant one (reading to me almost as an analogy for English being what it is in our world, from a fair point of view a signifier of neoliberalism and neocolonialism), and there being two fixed sexes for every species, even the alien ones.

Kind of funny that human thought has changed so much without really changing at all, which is to say that even with all this progress fear still rules us.

He thought only of the old forests of Malacandra and of what it might mean to grow up seeing always so few miles away a land of colour that could never be reached and had once been inhabited.

I like that Ransom goes back to earth. The future will not be some miraculous return to an ideal, imagined past (Malacandra), it'll have to be won through mess and cooperation and effort, through trusting each other in ways we still have time to remember.

Pretty boring. I like Kojima's work and I think his love of art and its creation come across pretty joyfully and unapologetically here, but as a collection of essays there were only a few moments where I felt like I was learning anything new about him or about our relationships to art in general. Interesting set of recommendations, but not a book I'd be willing to properly sit through again.