easy one this time

[boxofdelights]

• What are you reading?

Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells

• What did you recently finish reading?

All Systems Red, by Martha Wells

• What do you think you’ll read next?

Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy, by Martha Wells.


Also this essay by Rebecca Solnit:

There’s another analogy that comes to mind. When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity. May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid – full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.

I think that is the quintessential Rebecca Solnit metaphor.

Comments

[kore]

Isn't she great? I love her.

[boxofdelights]

Even when she's writing about terrible things, I feel better after I read it.

[jesse_the_k]

Precisely -- A Paradise Built in Hell provided the foundation. Lucy Jane Bledsoe's 2018 book The Evolution of Love builds on it, imagining how the folks left behind by Californian collapse practice mutual aid. (If you're interested I'd be happy to lend it.)

Anthemic ideas slip off her fingertips so often! May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup.

[lunabee34]

Imaginal cells. I love that.

Poem title!