A Book Review (more like a sampling) The Star Dancers, by Spider & Jeanne Robinson |
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This book is primarily about dancing in weightlessness. "The word depression is tied to gravity. You can’t depress something in space, you can only move it. And the very word gravity has come to be a synonym for humorlessness. If there’s two things that’ll kill you early it’s depression and a lack of a sense of humour." "Weight is a verb. … It’s one of the strongest verbs in dance – the strongest, I guess – and you can make it do anything." "Her dance observed her self, and asked, "How have I come to be here?" Her dance observed the universe in which self existed, and asked, "How did all this come to be here with me?" And at last, observing her self in relation to its universe, "Why am I so alone?"" "He was one of those special people who so obviously love life, so much, that you feel like a jerk for not enjoying it as much as they are. And so you cheer up to about half their level, which is twice as cheerful as you were. And for the next little while, you notice that everyone you talk to seems to be smiling at you." "There’s an old audio recording called the Spike Jones Laughing Record, where the tuba player tries to play ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’ and falls down laughing, and the whole band breaks up and horselaughs for a full two minutes, and every time they run out of air the tuba player tries another flutter and roars and they all break up again, and once when Shara was blue I bet her ten dollars that she couldn’t listen to that record without giggling and I won. When I understood now that she was quoting it, I shuddered and dissolved into great whoops of new laughter, and a minute later we had reached the stage where we literally laughed ourselves out of our chairs and lay on the floor in agonies of mirth, weakly pounding the floor and howling. I take that laugh our of my memory now and then and rerun it – but not often, for such records deteriorate drastically with play." Stardancers are all telepathic too, which is something I haven't really highlighted at all here. I loved this book, and bothered to read what the critics said about it. This came off the net. It says it well enough… A critic suggested this view is a touch naive--corny, even--but there's something seductive about the brand of hope the Robinsons are peddling. In their vision of the world, marriages can work, people can change, and environmental degradation isn't an end, it's a beginning. It may sound corny, but at $28.50 in hardcover, it seems like a swell alternative to antidepressants. |
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| that reminds me to look up the principle of the standard piston-type pump. vane pump. | ||
to Karen's strange loop
to Spider Robinson