DFW Planetary Society Book Club discussion

Hey Mark. Thanks for the discussion.

To the point of the discussion about Islam, it is true that the majority of the middle eastern countries are majority Islam and do have a lot of cultural and political unrest. But there are a huge number of other countries in the world that are majority Islam and enjoy a peaceful and socially progressive atmosphere. While many of the people in Islamic majority countries do consider Islam to be their culture and government, this is not an Islamic issue. This is a geo-political, and cultural issue with those countries.

There have been theocracies that have also been horribly oppressive and unjust, and some of those have been other religions. So trying to attribute political unrest and warring tendencies to Islam is a conflation of where the problem lies, and leads to stigmatizing and fearing huge numbers of innocent and incorrectly classified people based on their faith, There are a lot of examples in human history that show that can lead us down an unproductive and dark path.

Now as to the question about the book and the author, if the author is trying to make a parallel with political and cultural situations that we are currently experiencing, and the author believes that complete isolation is the correct solution, then I completely disagree. That doesn't change the fact that I completely enjoyed the book.

I think it more likely that the author may have been making a correlation to the fact that isolation and a lack of understanding and cultural sensitivity could lead to misunderstanding and conflict, but that is probably my bias at work a bit as well. So regardless of intended message and outcome, I don't change my opinion of the book, or its value as a work of literature.

I know what if feels lie to feel like that no one in popular culture shares your point of view. I have lived a lot of my life in that neighborhood, but saying nobody is still a stretch. This isn't the first time I've had this conversation, and I'm sure it won't be the last. There are a lot of people who agree with you.

So I had to look at what you were referencing about ze and hir, and after reading some articles on what you were talking about, I still don't see this as a "crusade" on the author's part to try to normalize the use of gender neutral pronouns. That being said, I wouldn't care if it was an attempt to normalize this, because gender is also a social construct and has nothing to do with biology, but I know that is an opinion I have that you don't share, which is fine.

This still feels to me like the author serving the universe that she has created and doesn't seem like any sort of political statement to me, particularly seeing as how this language wasn't directed toward humans except by alien species that had trouble identifying gender of humans. This language in the book had nothing to do with identity, but biological function, which seems to be where you prefer to draw gender lines, so it seems like it should line up more concisely with your ideas of gender identity than it does. But I don't mean to make assumptions about your ides, just a thought.