Letters from the Earth
The eponymous story, “Letters from the Earth,” is a set of eleven letters written by Satan to the archangels Gabriel and Michael about his travels. Satan finds human beliefs about themselves almost insane, pointing out that their conception of heaven leaves out everything humans find most pleasurable in life (particularly sex). He also considers God’s hypocrisies: not forgiving Adam and Eve even though humans are supposed to forgive transgressors; forbidding jealousy but then calling himself a jealous God; killing all the large animals during Noah’s flood even though they weren’t guilty of anything; allowing cruelty and misery to torment the innocent.
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- That said,"Letters From the Earth" by Mark Twain is an excellent companion volume to the Screwtape Letters, taking an opposite position (and from the perspective of a somewhat more exalted demon).
- Asimov's two big universes, found in the Robots series and the Foundation series, (which turned out to be the same when he revisited them in the 70's and 80's) are simply wonderful. By far my favorite sci-fi, and among the most enduring works in the genre. I read them both every two or three years, and sometimes grab one off the shelf when I just want something to read. The early Foundation is sort of a future history version of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (I seem to recall that was intentional, actually). Asimov's autobiographies and the posthumous book of his correspondence are all fantastic and insightful. I learned a lot from them, and my admiration for the man increased even more upon reading them.
Dune is also astoundingly good, though after the first three, the quality goes downhill (slowly, but surely). Definitely lots to think about.
Rendezvous with Rama left me breathless...and I could not put it down until I'd read the last page. I've returned to it a couple of times, and loved it every single time. The later Rama books are deeply flawed, and should have never happened (they were not written by Clarke, and it shows), as they make Rama seem...hmmm, I can't really think of the right word that expresses it. Cheap, dinky, small, something bad. But Rendezvous is a must read for everyone.
Douglas Adams, of course. The whole Hitchhikers' series is a must, while the Dirk Gently stuff is also funny, but not sci-fi and not mandatory.
I mentioned in another thread my love of dystopias, and one of the best ever is The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. She's one of the best sci-fi writers alive (she doesn't exclusively write sci-fi, however). Oryx and Crake is also fascinating.
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. I enjoy all of Vonnegut's work, but Cat's Cradle is a magical perfect novel.
I don't know if everyone would agree that it's sci-fi, but Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth was an eye opener for me when I was a kid (I went on a Mark Twain kick when I was in elementary school...no one ever told me that all of his books weren't kids books, so I read everything I could get my hands on after being hooked by Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn). Turns out Mark Twain was seditious, heretical, and quite the troublemaker all around.
- Twain was mentioned in the article a couple of times with various works more or less stating "God apparently made everything like this on purpose:
>In Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth (published posthumously in 1939), Satan sends a series of reports from Earth to the archangels Michael and Gabriel. In Letter VI, Satan marshals the evidence to call God a “malevolent lunatic”:
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>The Christian begins with this straight proposition, this definite proposition, this inflexible and uncompromising proposition: God is all-knowing, and all-powerful.
>This being the case, nothing can happen without his knowing beforehand that it is going to happen; nothing happens without his permission; nothing can happen that he chooses to prevent.
>That is definite enough, isn’t it? It makes the Creator distinctly responsible for everything that happens, doesn’t it? . . . .
>Then, having thus made the Creator responsible for all those pains and diseases and miseries above enumerated, and which he could have prevented, the gifted Christian blandly calls him Our Father!
- I read Letters From The Earth. On the surface it's a rather scathing mockery of mainstream Christianity and morality of the time, but there's more to it. A disturbing and difficult work. Bitter, seeped in frustration both of the soul and libido, viciously polemic, yet sometimes tender and wistful. It mocks religion, but mostly to get at the real problem, of how religion alienates man. Maybe from himself. Or from God even, if you want to view it that way. Some sort of deep spiritual or moral scream of frustration and despair wrapped in some flowery religious allegory. I am rereading it now and some of the letters are indecipherable in their overall meaning, if any.
It's probably fitting that it's up on sacred-texts.com though whether it should be there as satire of religion, or as accidental revelation, I'm still undecided.
- Your gymnastics achievements are pretty cool, I have to admit. I wish I’d ever had a body like yours; I can barely touch my nose to my knee without bending it, and I still can’t do a simple handstand, even backed by a wall. And it’s a huge step up from many, many high-schoolers who spent those same thousands of hours playing Mario 64, getting drunk, and screwing.
With regard to high-school achievements, though, what do you think of Julian Assange, Jon Lech Johansen, William Kamkwamba, and Aaron Swartz, who were high-school-aged at about the same time you were? When they were 14-18 years old, they disrupted overseas nuclear research; enabled free software to play DVDs; electrified their town with a windmill built from scrap; and contributed to defining RSS, published a standards-track RFC on RDF, and defined the Creative Commons metadata standards; respectively.
(I’m not saying this to make you feel bad. My own achievements in high school consisted of learning calculus, learning a little about the internet, and not getting anybody pregnant.)
It’s true that most presidents from a hundred years ago are forgettable. I can list quite a number of people from before 1910, though — let’s say people who had a substantial impact in the 1890–1910 period: off the top of my head, Edison, his assistant Dickson, Tesla, Bell, Michelson, Morley, Einstein, Carnegie, Hollerith, Curie, Becquerel, Röntgen, Hearst, Gandhi, Jack London, Mark Twain, Darrow, Susan B. Anthony, and Cixi.
Looking these folks up, here are their achievements during that time. I deleted a couple from the list above because they didn’t achieve anything significant during that time.
Edison: funded the invention of motion-picture cameras and projectors and did some of the inventing. First commercial film piracy in 1902. Electrocuted an elephant in 1903 to publicize the dangers of AC electricity. Developed first commercially practical fluoroscope, killing his assistant Dally in the process. Invented prefabricated concrete buildings. (He did a bunch of other stuff, but that was before 1890.)
Dickson: led the team that did most of the inventing, founded the first film studio.
Röntgen: discovered X-rays, received a Nobel prize.
Tesla: supposedly discovered the skin damage caused by X-rays before Röntgen discovered the rays, invented RF oscillators, built the first (?) radio, maybe invented transformers, built a radio-controlled boat, fought for AC, supposedly invented ignition coils and spark plugs, invented AND gates (?), invented the bladeless turbine, built history’s largest Tesla coil, went broke and somewhat mad. (Too bad I didn’t think of Bose, Marconi, J.P. Morgan, or De Forest off the top of my head.)
Bell: led the Bell Telephone Company, built hydrofoils, commercialized the phonograph.
Michelson: made improvements in the manufacture of diffraction gratings. Michelson grating ruling engines are still in use today. (His famous experiment with Morley was in 1887, and his high-precision measurements of the speed of light were even earlier.)
Morley: Replicated the Michelson-Morley experiment to much higher precision with Miller.
Einstein: in 1905, published papers explaining the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy.
Carnegie: prevented the annexation of Cuba, launched Carnegie Steel Company, sold it for US$225 million, founded public libraries all over the US and UK, founded half of CMU, founded TIAA-CREF, failed to settle the Homestead Strike, which ended up killing a number of people.
Hollerith: founded one of the four companies that would eventually merge to become IBM and led the technical development of tabulating machines.
Curie: discovered that radioactivity made air conductive, discovered that thorium was radioactive, discovered polonium and radium, invented the word “radioactivity”, received a Nobel prize and many other awards.
Becquerel: discovered radioactivity, received a Nobel prize, died.
Röntgen: discovered X-rays, received the first Nobel prize in physics and several other awards.
Hearst: co-invented yellow journalism with Pulitzer, founded a national political party, and (again with Pulitzer) started the Spanish-American War, initiating US imperialism.
Gandhi: was accepted to the bar, failed at establishing a law practice, moved overseas, founded the Natal Indian Congress, led civil-rights activism in South Africa, survived a lynching attempt, organized a volunteer ambulance corps to support the British war effort against the Zulus, began to abandon his racist beliefs, gave up sex, and invented satyagraha.
London: got arrested for being a Socialist, and wrote The Call of the Wild, The Unparalleled Invasion, To Build a Fire, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf, all of which are still read today.
Darrow: represented Debs in the Pullman Strike case, once successfully and once unsuccessfully; helped organize the Populist Party; successfully defended Big Bill Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone; published his first book.
Twain: wrote Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Mysterious Stranger, Letters from the Earth, his autobiography, and a vicious literary criticism of the Leatherstocking series that’s better reading than the Leatherstocking series itself; did a six-year around-the-world lecture tour; survived a depression when everyone he loved died; introduced Helen Keller to the rich benefactor who paid for her education; became VP of the American Anti-Imperialist League; received an honorary doctorate; died.
Anthony: created the National American Woman Suffrage Association; worked for universal adult female suffrage in the US until six years before hear death. She succeeded 14 years after her death.
Cixi: led a coup d’état against her nephew, the emperor Guangxu, bringing herself to power, and later poisoned him with arsenic; abolished the imperial examination system; and, through political miscalculation, ended 268 years of Qing Dynasty rule in China and 2133 years of imperial rule in China; but kept China independent.
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So, I don't think it's hopeless to try to achieve things that will be remembered in 100 years. People do it every year. It's just that getting elected president isn't a particularly effective way to do it.
