Gotta love logic

This evening Atty decided he was scared of his skeleton pajamas, since they might attract skeleton ghosts. I informed him that his dogs (he has a small army of plush dogs) would protect him. It reminded me of a similar incident with Dante a while back.

"Daddy, I can't sleep - I'm scared of ghosts"
"D, you know that there's no such thing as ghosts - they're not real"
"But I'm scared of them"
"Don't worry, Brown Bear and your other bears will protect you" (Where Atty has dogs, Dante has bears)
"But they're just toys, Daddy, they're not real"
"That's OK, ghosts aren't real either, which means that your bears can protect you against them"

Dante thinks for a moment, and nods, satisfied, and lies down to go to sleep. Gotta love a kids that's willing to accept logical arguments.

The New Space Opera

The New Space Opera is a collection of short stories by a range of authors, showing the breadth and depth of writing that falls into the "New Space Opera" sub-genre.

It's something I realise I've been reading a lot of in recent years. It's Space Opera, but written in the wake of the Information Revolution; which has transformed how Sci Fi writers envision the future. Notably missing from this collection are two of my favourite authors, Stross and Banks.

There are some great stories in this collection; some will stick with me for ages, and some are the kind where I'll forget the story, but the ideas will be integrated into my brain, and I'll probably read them in the future and wonder why the technologies all seem so familiar.

Some of the high points: Dan Simmons' Muse of Fire melted my brain; Walter Jon Williams' Send them Flowers felt like a Beat Generation road trip in a parallel universe; Alastair Reynolds' Minya's Flowers was food for thought. Note for further investigation: do all good modern Sci Fi authors have names ending in 's'?

So the future is going to be dark and mysterious and complex and textured. We may be the only civilization we ever meet, but otherwise we'll be a minor player in the vast and incomprehensible game of galactic politics. Physics is Einsteinian, but wormholes or a Many Worlds universe may let us get around that to travel the greater universe freely.

I got a lot out of The New Space Opera, even though I don't think it's necessarily the best that the genre has to offer. A lot of the tales in this compilation were really bursting at the seams of the short story format, and were clearly aching to be filled out to novel length, so that the strong characters and huge ideas has space to stretch their legs.