New Zealand Cannabis Referendum

With the cannabis referendum I was quietly confident the time had finally come for Aotearoa New Zealand to act sensibly on the issue, I was surprised by just how annoyed I was, when the vote went no, still pending specials mind you .

In a perfect world no one would use cannabis and no one would use alcohol. I 'm a puritan about alcohol I despise the stuff and it bothers me that it is accepted as a default drug that is more normal to use than to avoid. It enhances bravado, foolhardiness, carelessness, ego and imperviousness. all of which this world has way too much of.

Not only is it legal but it is legal to push it with advertising, it kills by inspiring violence and dangerous deeds. It kills by direct physical destruction to human bodies, it damages the liver and increase rates of cancer. The emergency wards fill up on a Friday night due to idiots getting tanked and their stupidity enhanced.

Cannabis is a drug too and causes harm, but whereas a drunk person will blithely ignore the greatest art, a stoned person is likely to be stunned by the impression of even inferior art. You can be amazed by simple piece of music, lost in self contemplation, overcome by humility all things I would love to see enhanced in our culture. Wouldn't it be great to see an explosion of appreciation and wonder?

While a drunk and a stoned person will both have their driving performance impaired, a drunk person will drive too fast and be overconfident, while a stoned person will drive too slow and be overcautious.

We can awaken out sense of wonder without drugs, but currently we have a ubiquitous drug that vanquishes wonder. I am ashamed of you New Zealand for voting to keep laws that do more harm than good, that destroy lives for a victimless act, that hurt Maori disproportionately.

How do we react to the news of Donald Trump being infected with Coronavirus?

 What a strange time and how am I to react to the news that Trump has contracted Coronavirus? My first reaction was not sympathy for the man, I don’t want him dead, I don’t even want him to suffer, but I do want him to stop leading the United States and not just because he is a Republican President with policies I disapprove of, but because I think he is a genuine threat to democracy, and I base this on what he himself says “there will be no transfer of power” etc .

Trump’s neice wrote a book about with a subtitle “How my family created the world’s most dangerous man” and on reflection while there may be worse people in the world than Donald Trump, I can’t think of anyone more dangerous than he is. His sister talks of his cruelty and lying and says "Donald's out for Donald" reflecting on the war dead Trump says “what was in it for them?” Donald Trump is self centred, only looks out for himself and has no sense of altruism.

There are now over 200,000 dead in the US from Coronavirus, for such a technically advanced country this is appalling and it is obvious that so many died because Donald Trump did not act, he did not try to save the populace of the US from a deadly disease and while it is possible to contract the disease while still trying to do everything right, Donald and his entourage & supporters have not tried to do everything right. Just days before going to hospital he was criticising Joe Biden for wearing a mask all the time.

Trump might be ill, but while we can feel compassion for him we must not let that compassion make us think that he is not still uniquely dangerous. We have seen the Bob Mueller regarded Trump impervious to the law due to a DOJ Policy regarding indicting a sitting President. We have seen the Senate refuse to even hear the evidence of his corruption because he belongs to the majority Party. We have seen Trump break the democratic safeguards of the seperation of powers, with a subservient AG, corruptly loyal to Trump rather than law.

Trump represents a danger to the world, he has a legacy of death, violence and corruption that is clear to read. That he may be suffering now doesn’t suddenly turn him into a nice man, I do hope he starts to contemplate the things that he has done and repent, but mostly I hope that he is removed from his position of power where he is uniquely dangerous to democracy, civility, decency, honesty and compassion.

A portrait of Donald Trump

I keep thinking about the conundrum that is Donald Trump, why he was elected and why he still has support. In an attempt to understand I thought I'd put some of my thoughts down.

First off even his supporters don't seem to make the case that he is a good and decent man. He gets support from single issue voters as he runs an anti abortion line, although I get no sense that this is from principle. In like manner he has a lot of support from Christian Evangelicals even though he is clearly not religious. But what is he? I'll return to the issue of what his appeal is later.

I have been reading his niece Mary Trump's book to get an understanding of the man. The main picture that emerges is that Donald's father Fred Trump went into business with his mother and became very wealthy through Government property development programmes. Fred was very success driven, he was also a failure as a human being, in that he lacked humanity and particularly empathy, humour & love.

Donald's mother Mary became seriously ill just before he turned 3, so that for some years afterwards she wasn't there for him and it seems like there was no strong bond between them from that point. His father while he became the only available parent could not be regarded as a caregiver. As a child Donald became something of a bully, he was sent to a military school to try to curb behavioural problems. It doesn't appear that Donald could ever have been described as a nice person.

Donald's sister Maryanne helped him with his school work and it seems he hired someone to sit his entrance exams to university. His intellectual ability was never that great.

However it was Donald who his father Fred ended up favouring and it seesm to have been for a number of reasons, they shared a belief that winning was the important thing, that admitting mistakes was a sign of weakness and it was always important to appear strong and Donald had something his father didn't have and that is a gift for self aggrandisement a natural aptitude for publicity. what he lacked was Fred's sound business sense and attention to detail. But early on in Donald's career Fred was able to use him as the front man, the face of the deals do the necessary behind the scenes work and the deals would pay off. However Fred pumped large amount of money into Donald and of all his children only really Donald. Donald became used to basically being given money.

This strikes me as why he likes corrupt dictators, they know all they have to do to make Donald happy is give him money.

I have recently been reading some Seth Abramson, partly his tweets but also some excerpts from his "Proof of" series books, I have the first of the series on order, these are quite long books so I don't expect a lot of people to read them. But he calls himself not a journalist but a meta journalist, I think "macro journalist" would be more fitting. What he does is act like a historian but using recent materials to draw on a huge variety of good quality journalism, which is all referenced, to draw a bigger connected picture. Most journalism covers a single topical story and so fails to let us form a complete picture.

It seems to me people think that there should be a single smoking gun instance with Donald Trump and that it hasn't happened. After all Muller didn't find Collusion in the Russian investigation, even though Muller said that he wasn't trying to establish Collusion and that the Muller report confirmed nearly all the instances of contact between Russians and the Trump campaign. The problem seems to be not that there isn't enough evidence but that there is too much.

Now coming back to what Trump's supporters see in Donald Trump, I think there is a certain amount of schadenfreude they love the fact that he annoys Democrats and Liberals so much. He really deals it to them. He appeals to the anti woke crowd, because Trump is certainly not woke, I think they are refusing to look at the fact that in a way he becomes the caricature that is the woke crowds bogeyman. There is also the element of tribalism that has been around for a long time, he has had cheer leading from the Fox network and whatever the connections with Russia are he has used conspiracy theories, hyperbole, lies and bluster to undermine the very idea of verifiable facts and Truth.

Those are my thoughts for the day.

Recommending Autobiography of a Yogi to Landon Lofton

Landon Lofton wrote a great piece "Owen Barfield and the Threat of Logomorphism" which I read part one of in one of my videos, the description of this video has links to all 3 parts. The occassion of this blog is that Landon Loftin asked for book recommendations, this was his request:

I try to read as widely as I can, so I have long made a practice of reading any book that anyone recommends to me on the condition that they read a book that I recommend to them. So let me know what you think I should be reading.

Finding what to read is an interesting exercise, I have found people online like Andrew Baker and Landon whose work I have got value reading from, I sometimes ask friends for specific recommendations, I also like reading works from friends, my friend Dan wrote a novel and I found it fascinating to read what Dan wrote. I find Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphic ressonance applicable here, where he posits and has results supporting the idea that learning something the first time is alwasy the hardest as it is repeated it becomes easier for subsequent people even if there are no direct links, so reading something that no one else has read is likely harder than reading something that lots have people have read and this might be why it is a good idea for an author to give away book at certain times, as it is important for some people to read your book as it can help to make lots of people read your books. It was infact through Rupert Sheldrake that I first heard of David Bentley Hart whose work I particularly admire and yet I think they have quite different sensibilities. I find it an interesting topic as to how we come to read certain books.

So I like Landon's idea that you recommend one to him and he'll recommend one to you. So whjy did I recommend the Autobiography of a Yogi?
The first and most obvious reason is that it had a big effect upon me. I realise this isn't always the best reason to recommend something to someone else, but all books that i would recommend first off I have to think of as a book of value. So this is the starting point.

Some of the reasons that this book appealed to me won't apply to Landon, I had a need for this book, I did not have a religious or spiritual upbringing and even now I am not really part of religious community. I'd say that I had a spiritual hunger that this book helped satisfy. While I had read religious books before and found them appealing the reason that this was different is that it gave me a much more concrete sense of the immanence of God. Yogananda died in the late 50s so he was not that far from me in time, he spent a good deal of his life in the USA so there was also not much of a cultural abyss between us either and he expresses a closeness and intimacy of God, of God being always with him not an abstraction or as something that is hidden from our minds and the world.

Landon is far more steeped in religious cultural than I was, so won't have the hunger that i experienced, however as a religious person a good religious book can be appreciated. But there is another aspect of this that I think is important at this time and that is around the whole question of what is religion, now again I think Landon has a pretty sophisticated appreciation of this but I think culturally we don't. We tend to think of religion as a set of beliefs that we choose to hold and this feels very modern to me, whereas particularly for pagan culture religion was an intrinsic part of how the world was actually experienced, now it is a much more individual thing with a greater element of choice. But then we have the issue if God is one why is religion not so? We live in a time where we can be immediately aware of people in different continents, we can even have a face to face conversation with them via technology. I think what this means is that if we belong to one religion we have to have something of a framework as to how our religious view fits into the framework of other religions, of course within the Christian world we have had a similar issue between various denominations. One obvious way through this that has a certain simplistic appeal is to think our religion is correct and the others are all wrong. The trouble with this is that an external part anti-pathetic to religion a reasonable secular atheist will hear the various denunciations and agree with them all and be happy in their belief that they're all wrong.  DBH's book The Experience of God, is a better way forward and shows how the major Theistic traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism all share basically a common conception of God and a conception that interestingly isn't the one generally argued against by Atheist materialists.

The Autobiography of a Yogi is a good book in terms of inter religious framework is because firstly Yogananda has dealt with this question specifically in his "The Science of Religion" but also because he as an Indian Yogi came to the US and addressed and interacted with American's directly, he wrote the book in English primarily for a US audience.

Reading Autobiography of a Yogi, eventually lead to me getting initiated into Kriya Yoga practice, so  it's not of strictly intellectual interest to me, it is particularly good though that their is a tradition published material in this tradition, Yogananda's brother disciple Satyananda wrote 4 biographies of Kriya Yoga masters featured in Yogananda's book, the lineage was continued in India by Hariharananda who wrote works on Kriya Yoga and the current master Prajnananda has written a number of biographies and books on the teachings.

Lastly I have just read an essay by Landon on the relation of G K Chesterton to David Hume's thought largely on the subject of Miracles. This is an aspect I am very curious about for Landon's response because many miracles are related here, I certainly await his response with interest.

Elizabeth Knox - The Absolute Book

I do not read much New Zealand fiction and in fact I regard few if any New Zealand novelists as great. Ronald Hugh Morrison, Janet Frame, Margaret Mahy & Elizabeth Knox are however writers who I have respect for.

Before reading the Absolute Book I had only read 3 of Elizabeth Knox's novels, the 2 Dream hunter books and Mortal Fire, these are all young adult books but they are all good. They are imaginative, unique and for me open up possibilities of what a New Zealand novel can be.

My sister in law was reading the Absolute Book and I was attracted by the cover and put off by it's size, but the idea of a large scale adult fantasy novel by Elizabeth Knox somehow got under my skin and I felt compelled to buy a copy and read it. I'll frame my appreciation rather negatively first  in that if I find myself not particularly appreciating a novel I will put it down and stop reading, that did not happen with the Absolute Book, there were a few times where I felt like skipping through but then events would unfold in various ways and it kept a hold of me until the end. That in itself is an endorsement.

All of the Elizabeth Knox novels I have read have had an element of fantasy to them, more in the tradition of Margaret Mahy and Diana Wynne Jones than that of Tolkien or Dunsany, although one could make a case for some similarity to the work of Charles Williams as his novels are likewise set in this world with the fabulous encroaching into it.

I admit as i get older an increasingly sense of envy has crept into me with my novels reading due to my own unfulfilled desire to write one. This novel is not one I wish I had written but ti does have many elements I would like in that phantom work, I appreciate the world transformation and the use of mythology.

The main character and in fact most of the characters are shown as flawed and while this does mean there is no single character that i loved in the novel, their flaws don't entirely alienate them from you so that when things happen to them and there are many happenings in the novel, I did find myself caught up in the action.

Unfortunately, for reviewing this novel it does have an involved plot that should be unfolded as you read rather than spoilt in reading an appreciation, so I am rather confined to writing my reaction, rather than a description of events and themes.

For me the origins of the fantasy novel are very spiritual or religious, George MacDonald's Lilith (1895) was both rich in the fabulous, full of profound transformations and reflections upon death and deeply religious as MacDonald had been a deeply religious man and writer and their is an incredible sense of divine love that is expressed in Lilith and all of his works. Tolkien was a devout Catholic and his religious concerns are central to his mythos, C S Lewis too combined the religious and the mythic.

Elizabeth Knox has a post Christian secular sensibility, she comes across as a woman of our time and yet a woman and writer who is steeped in the imagination and has chosen to express herself and her concerns through fantasy. She is an outspoken defender of the imagination. See her excellent address here: https://festival.nz/documents/92/Useless_Grasses.pdf…

What struck me as strange though about this modern sensibility is that the Sidhe (fairy folk) and Demons are portrayed in this novel and while Angels are not excluded by the mythic paradigm, they don't play an important role and while Gods too can inhabit the world, there is not a sense of the God of classical Theism, the Brahman that is the base of all existence, the uncreated creator and while the characters may face spiritual danger their response is never prayer, this seems to place it within that strange topography of contemporary spirituality. I have seen some criticism of the end of the novel, which is the pay off or resolution of the events, but for me I find the end satisfying as it is a vision of the goal, an expression of what is to be hoped for and it gives the novel heart and strengthens its sense of purpose.

I'll cover two more themes the first seems to mirror Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in that it explores the implications of the self destructive power of a sinful act and the struggle for redemption. This gives the novel a sense of gravitas.

The last theme has a sense of horror for authors and book lovers it is the destruction of books and libraries by fire or loss of funding.

Overall, I was pleased to read the book, it is an expression of spirit and an impressive achievement, I found myself marvelling at the art, the weaving of the strands of story, it is a large novel not just in pages but in invention and scope, I think Elizabeth Knox has created an important New Zealand novel and at some stage I suspect I'll read it again.

Sci Fi

I understand that to make a successful youtube channel you should have a tight topic focus and upload videos regularly. But I want this channel to be a reflection of my sensibilities in the aspirational sense of expanding the discussion of meaning and spirit and in the sense of being honest about my own interests. This video is meant to be the later, while science fiction novels are only some of many things I read they really have been a part of my life.

I quite like  pop culture, it seems to have a vitality and avoid the nihilism of much contemporary "serious" culture. I've loved George Lucas' Star Wars movies and I'm impressed with how engaged fans are about them, for me they embody a lot of the vitality of early science fiction novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and E E Doc Smith, obviously Lucas was inspired by the earlier Flash Gordon movie serials and he certainly has a ver 1950s sensibility which I love. It was a retro future that Lucas presented to us. I'd love for film makers to look to earlier science fiction novels for inspiration, I think there is plenty of untapped potential, it would mean they would be showing audiences what they want rather than doing market research to find out.

J G Ballard has said

For me, science fiction is above all a prospective form of narrative fiction; it is concerned with seeing the present in terms of the immediate future rather than the past. 

That's a funny thing of course because the future has not happened whereas the past is rich in detail, it has texture and is populated with a variety of creative people. But the direction of our sight as a culture seems to be orientated to the future, we're always looking for the next big thing, new technology, we want the new music or the new movie. I also wonder if a lot of Science Fiction is also the imagination trying to explore the fabulous while captivated by materialism or scientism.

CS Lewis writes of what he likes best in science fiction and this is also the heart of it for me:

I turn at last to that sub-species (of science fiction) in which alone I myself am greatly interested. It is best approached by reminding ourselves of a fact which every writer on the subject whom I have read completely ignores. Far the best of the American magazines bears the significant title Fantasy and Science Fiction. In it (as also in many other publications of the same type) you will find not only stories about spacetravel but stories about gods, ghosts, ghouls, demons, fairies, monsters, etc. This gives us our clue. The last subspecies of science fiction represents simply an imaginative impulse as old as the human race working under the special conditions of our own time. It is not difficult to see why those who wish to visit strange regions in search of such beauty, awe, or terror as the actual world does not supply have increasingly been driven to other planets or other stars. It is the result of increasing geographical knowledge. The less known the real world is, the more plausibly your marvels can be located near at hand. As the area of knowledge spreads, you need to go further afield: like a man moving his house further and further out into the country as the new building estates catch him up.

This to me is what George Lucas taps into, for instance in The Phantom Menace when Quigon Gin and Obi Wan meet Jar Jar Binks, Binks takes them to the hidden underwater city of the Gungans, he is exploring the same sense of wonder that he sets on earth with his Indiana Jones movies.

Brian Aldiss saw Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as the first Science Fiction novel, there are other early practioners like Jules Verne & HG Wells but for me it was the popular form of Science Fiction that emerged in the US and culminated in the 50s. This was a literary form that was anathema to intellectual tradition.

The idea of the future was vibrant in the 50s with the race to the moon, US cars were styled like space ships. We had sci fi movies The Day the Earth Stood Still, When Worlds Collide, This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet in the cinema sci fi didn't reach its culminating expression until Star Wars in 1977 but Lucas was steeped in the 50s. The 50s appear to me as being a decade of the future, an optimistic if naive future.

Science fiction has been a part of my reading over a long period of time. I'm in my late 50s now but I first read it in my teens. I recently thought about the books that mean sci fi to me, while academic or popular lists will include H G Wells the Time Machine, War of the Worlds, Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World. When i thought of my own canon 3 books not so well known came to mind. Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford D Simak, Slan by A E van Vogt, and Star Born by Andre Norton. I have just re read all 3 and this has been a satisfying personal experience. I think the act of rereading is  important.It not the making but the deepening of a relationship.

Because I am talking about reading science fiction, I'll start with a few quotes on the nature of reading and the novel, Rudolf Steiner has this to say:

 Anyone who reads a book is drawn out of the egoistic circle of his individual life, for it is not he alone who absorbs the author's thoughts; even when he is only half-way through a book he is already sharing these thoughts with a great company of other readers. And so, through this kinship of soul-experience, a certain human community is formed. This is an important characteristic of spiritual life: it has its springs in freedom, in the individual initiative of the single human being, and yet it draws men together, and forms communities out of what they have in common.

Rudolf Steiner - Inner Aspect of the Social Question https://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0193/19190211p01.html

Now something from Colin Wilson, who puts the beginning of the novel in the 18th Century, when Samuel Richardson wrote his wildly successful novel Pamela. Wilson speaks of the reader of that novel having this experience:

She has made the discovery that ‘living’ isn't necessarily a matter of physical experience, that the imagination is also capable of voyages. Today, this sounds utterly banal; in 1740, it was as startling as discovering you could fly by flapping your arms. Richardson had taught the European mind to daydream.  

Wilson further says"

 . . . In two hours, she lives through more experience than in two years of daily routine. 

Wilson goes on to talk about the kind of pessimistic cul de sac that the 20th Century novel had got itself into. He says this about Science Fiction:

Science fiction sprang from the progressive beliefs that are the essence of science. The spirit of science is a spirit of enterprise, it follows naturally that writers should ask themselves how far the human race can advance through enterprise.

...Nevertheless, at its best there is a great deal to be said for science fiction. It often shows a vitality and inventiveness that have been absent from literature since the nineteenth-century romantics. Its writers have, it might seem, become slightly delirious at being told that they needn't worry any more about Ulysses and the end of the modern novel, and have plunged into a debauch of pure fantasy. 

 The Strength to Dream

I noticed that the books I picked had certain things in common all had telepathy & a sense of evolution to the next stage of humanity. They were all critical of elements of the present & they all had a positive future possible in the foreseeable future.

Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford D Simak starts with a preamble about space flight, how mankind had tried going to the stars but had discovered that the human body and the technology just couldn't manage the feat, they tried and eventually realised it was impossible, and this failure created a collective depression. However eventually they realised there was another way, where they got people with paranormal abilities and used a machine to send their minds out to the various planets, this space endevour is presided over by a company called Fishhook who have a monopoly. The main character Sheppard Blaine is one of these paranormal astronauts and at the start of the novel we have this scene where he makes contact with an alien:

It was seldom that one contacted a telepathic creature. Other abilities and traits and idiosyncrasies that made telepathy seem a pallid thing were not at all uncommon, but only rarely did they prove as useful as the plain, old-fashioned telepathic art.
And the creature spoke.
' Hi, pal, it said. I trade with you my mind.
Blaine’s mind screamed soundlessly in outraged surprise that came very close to panic. For, suddenly, without warning, he was a double thing — himself and this other creature. For one chaotic instant he saw as the creature saw, felt as the creature felt, knew what the creature knew, and in the same instant he was likewise Shepherd Blaine, Fishhook explorer, a mind from out of Earth and very far from home.

Sheppard, his mind combined with an alien, goes on the run from Fishhook and the rest of the novel is his adventures, he draws from this alien knowledge from time to time to do some amazing feats. Later in the Novel he manages to return to visit that pink creature this time using just his mind with no technological help:

And he was really there. ’Without machine or body, without any outward trappings,
with nothing but his naked mind, Shepherd _Blaine had come back to the Pinkness.

Paranormals are hated by the mass of humanity and throughout the novel Sheppard is trying to escape from both Fishhook agents and the unruley mob, towards the end of the novel he raids his slimey alien knowledge to finds a way to move physical bodies between planets and he shares this knowledge with the paranormal community. He has found a paradisiacal planet  that they can go to leaving the petty mob of regular earthlings behind :

‘Last night,’ Blaine said, slowly, ‘Fishhook became obsolete.
We don’t need Fishhook any more. We can go anywhere we wish. We don’t need machines. We just need our minds. And that is the goal of all paranormal research. The machines were never more than just a crutch to help our limping mind. Now we can throw away that crutch. We have no need for it.’

He brought out the slimy alien knowledge and ‘held it for them to see until they became accustomed to it, then step by step he showed them the technique and the logic, although
there really was no need, for once one had seen the body of the knowledge, the technique and the logic became self-evident
Then he repeated it again so there’d be no misunderstanding.
The minds drew back from him, and he stood alone with Anita at his side.
He saw them staring at him as they drew away.
What’s the matter now? he asked Anita.
She shuddered. It was horrible. '
Naturally. But I've seen worse. ..They had never really touched an alien concept, and that was all this concept was. It was really as slimy as it seemed. It was only alien. There were a lot of alien things that’ could make one’s hair stand up on end while in their proper alien context they were fairly ordinary. 

The next novel A E von Vogt's Slan is the earliest of these three novels, it was Vogt's first novel, originally serialised in 1940 the story starts with the protagonist as a young boy named Jommy Cross, he's a mutant known as Slans, who are physically stronger, more intelligent and have tendrils in their hair that allows allows them to communicate telepathically and read minds,  his mother gets captured and killed but he manages to escape and in the pursuit he finds a hiding place under a set of stairs:

...he felt the thought of that other person out there, a sly, knowing thought, hopelessly mingled with the wild current of thoughts that beat on his brain. Not once did that somebody else stop thinking about this very hole. Jommy couldn’t tell whether it was a man or woman. But it was there, like an evil vibration from a warped brain. The thought was still there, dim and menacing...

I won't cover the story of the novel, but it has a constant pacing, his abilities are used for problem solving there is no strong connection to nature, no greater appreciation of art. This description of earth's ruler gives a good flavour of Vogt's approach:

The man who came in and -shut the door behind him was magnificently built, greyed at the temples now, lines of age showing. But there was no one in all the world who would not have recognized that lean face, those piercing eyes, the ruthlessness that was written indelibly in those thin nostrils and line of jaw. It was a face too hard, too determined to be pleasant. But withal it was a noble countenance. Here was a born leader of men. Cross felt himself dissected, his face explored by those keen eyes. Finally, the proud mouth twisted into the faintest sneer.
Kier Gray said, “So you got caught. That wasn’t very clever.” 

At the end of the novel we are given to understand that Slan are the next stage of human evolution and all will evolve into them. One of the interesting things about it is that the evolutionary transition is happening in very conscious, even self conscious times in fact where there is conscious resistance to it.

The third novel is Star Born by Andre Norton, my step brother leant me this novel in early teens to read on the train journey home from my Dad's place in Palmerston North back to my Mum's in Hamilton, I'm sorry Michael I never returned it to you, this novel has two main protagonist both humans one Dalgard has been on the alien planet where the novel is set for many generations they have lost a lot of their technology but have become friends with the native merman who have strong telepathic abilities that they use to communicate with one another but also to speak to the lower life forms, the humans also have developed telepathic abilities if to a lesser degree,  here in this early scene we have Dalgard the naturalised human communicating with a creature I guess much like a rabbit:

Dalgard made mind touch. The hoppers did not really think—at least not on the levels where communication was possible for the colonists—-but sensations of friendship and good will could be broadcast, primitive ideas exchanged...

There isn't a sense of the earth being conscious like we get in Powys Glastonbury Romance, but we get a very engaging narrative which revolves around non telepathic, intelligent and technologically advanced but heartless and evil aliens who are trying to pick themselves up after having almost destroyed themselves through a terrible war. Parts of the landscape had been marred by massive tracts of rock that had been boiled by their powerful weapons. The early chapters alternate between the story of Dalgard and the story of Raf a pilot from a  second group of human's from earth who meet up with the evil aliens and help them recover some of their wicked technology. We follow Raf's struggles of conscience and his distrust of the aliens.

Reflecting on the evolutionary divergence as Dalgard and Raf meet towards the end of the novel, I won't detail the plot further but it may be the strongest plot of the 3 but at the end when the two of them part we get this section:

“You see,” deliberately he used the mind touch as if to accent those differences the more, “once our roots were the same,_ but now from these roots different plants have grown. And we must be left to ourselves a space before we mingle once more. My father’s father’s father’s father was a Terran, but I am—what? We have something that you have not, just as you have developed during centuries of separation qualities of mind and body we do not know. You live with machines. And, since we could not keep machines in this world, having no power to repair or rebuild, we have been forced to turn in other directions. To go back to the old ways now would be throwing away clues to mysteries we have not yet fully explored, turning aside from discoveries ready to be made. To you I am a barbarian, hardly higher in the scale of civilization than the mermen—” Raf flushed, would have given a quick and polite denial, had he not known that his thoughts had been read. Dalgard laughed. His amusement was not directed against the pilot, rather it invited him to share the joke. And reluctantly, Raf’ s peeling lips relaxed in a smile. “But,” he offered one argument the other had not cited, -“what if you do go down this other path of yours so far that we no longer have any common meeting ground?” He had forgotten his own problem in the other’s. 

I'll leave it there, these novels were fun to reread, they're mostly under 200 pages which I find an excellent length. If you've read any of these novels please comment I'd like to know what you think of them and if not please say something about what science fiction means to you and what novels you have loved. For me the genre had a vitality, inventiveness and a love of narrative that was so sadly lacking in a lot of 20th century novels.