Monthly Archives: November 2015

Thanksgiving

I have much to be thankful for. All the normal things, like friends and family (neither are particularly numerous, but they make up for that in quality), the fact that I live in the greatest – if flawed – nation in the history of history. I have tremendous material comfort. Amazing technology. Generally good health among myself and family.

And of course, all my readers who thought that my mental meanderings and story were good enough to not just read, but buy and recommend to others. I’m humbled. For that I truly give thanks. And my publisher. I mean, how many people accidentally get one of those?

Going back to the earliest thanksgiving, what were they celebrating? Making it through the year. Why was that such a thing? I mean, all their ancestors had made it through the winter time and again, yes? So what’s the big deal, other than being in a new place? They’d tried something that sounded good –  communal ownership – and it had nearly killed them as each person tried to find gold or enrich themselves quickly while letting someone else do the hard but guaranteed method of survival and success called farming doing what needs to be done. Scrapping proto-communism and getting back to the fundamental reality of the world that there is no free lunch is what saved them.

Cargo cults always fail. Always. It is part of human psychology. We are flawed. We have huge brains, but it has few correct instincts, and it takes  a LONG time to program / train correctly (a couple decades of an ~eight decade life), and there are a lot of places it can go wrong. The more comfortable the world you live in is, the easier it is to not get the correct “how reality actually works” programming.

So – be thankful for what you have, tell those around you you love that you do, and never let comfort become too comfortable. But on this day – just enjoy the day.

Now, off to roast the bird!

Not a biblical scholar

I’m not a biblical scholar. Heck, I’m barely more than Biblically semi-literate.

So, of course, in my odd little corner of the universe, it makes perfect sense to write a SF book about the founding of a new order of monks, the Monks of St Possenti. This puts me in a bit of a quandary. I like the stories I read to be plausible, and require suspension of disbelief on only a few things, but not everything. If you want to stipulate FTL in violation of current known laws, great, run with it. But what I hate is when a story is purportedly in this universe’s future and it gets a lot of basic facts about physics or history or people totally fouled up. So when I’m writing it only seems reasonable to get what facts I can correct, so that others don’t have that same “oh, heck, not that silly and often-disproven trope again!”

So I need a little help here, by readers who are also familiar with the Bible, and hopefully a few that are specifically intimate with Catholic canon and monastic orders. Continue reading Not a biblical scholar