clara_swift and goodnightlady. May you both enjoy an excellent day and a wonderful year to come!* I stumbled across some older posts that I found to be thought-provoking regarding young adult dystopian fiction. At Tor.com, Jo Walton argued in "The Dystopic Earths of Heinlein's Juveniles" that, taken as a whole, Robert A. Heinlein's juveniles paint a rather bleak and pessimistic picture of future Earth. Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing prompted an interesting series of comments about this, and Patrick Shepherd at Hyperpat countered in "The Pessimistic Heinlein" that Heinlein only created bleak futures in order to give his young heroes opportunities and motivation for improving their own situations and often the world at large. (Note: A list of Heinlein's juveniles is here.) Do you have any thoughts on this, my friends?
* From
read_lotr_aloud: "March 25 is Tolkien Reading Day, a day given over to the reading, and appreciation, of Tolkien's works. In honor of that day, I thought maybe we could all read and post a favorite passage from LOTR. Then, as I do with the chapter readings, I will gather links to all the readings into a master list that I will post here at Reading LOTR Aloud. This will be strictly informal - no sign ups necessary. I will post a reminder closer to the day and then on the 25th make a post where you can comment and leave a link if you do a reading. I hope some of you will take part! I already know what I am going to read!"* I did it: I finally joined BookMooch! In many ways, I find Bookins more user friendly, and I'll definitely be using it as well, but I must say it is great to have the ability to share books internationally via BookMooch.
"Free will is a golden thread running through the frozen matrix of fixed events."
- Robert Heinlein, The Rolling Stones (1952)
