Seeking the human

It's always good for the ego to hear that one has generated "a very interesting post" and "discussion worthy of comment", especially from someone with as much insight as Dr C, referring to my Riding the (carrier) wave , and being compared to Montaigne caps it off nicely! Add to that the comment by Jim Putnam that the same post and its follow up "two posts that simply fascinate me", and I am high enough to take with equanimity the closely argued email from one Todd Martenson asserting that the same posts show me to be "a sad perthettic holow headed w@#ker with s#*t for branes and vaccum wear taste to be". (The @, # and * I have inserted myself where Mr Martenson used conventional letters of the alphabet; for the rest, however, I have quoted him verbatim.)

My reason for writing today, however is not to wallow in approval but to highlight another quotation: not from Ms Safka or Ms Le Guin, but from Seeker by science fiction writer Jack McDevitt.

Seeker was suggested to me by Donna (who, for professional reasons, prefers not to be more precisely identified). She reviewed it as part of a soon to be launched resource for enrichment of cross curricular input to science teaching, but it would be a good read for social studies too. Intrigued by her review, I bought a copy of the book and read it yesterday.

I was reminded very strongly, as I read Seeker, of John Dunning's The Bookman's Promise^[1] (recommended, as it happens, by Jim Putnam). The context here is antiques rather than rare books, and set ten thousand or more years in the future, but has Dunning's humanity about it and (like all the best science fiction) is really about ourselves here and now.

At one point, the narrator is in a museum within a city of the only other (ie, nonhuman) known civilisation in the galaxy. In the museum she reads the following:

Individuals tend to be docile, and may usually be approached without fear. But when humans form groups their behaviour changes and becomes more problematic. They are more likely to subscribe to a generally held view than to seek their own. [...] There seems to be a direct correlation between the size of a group and its inclination to consent or resort to violence or other questionable behaviour, and/or the predilection of individuals to acquiesce when leaders suggest violent or simplistic solutions to perceived problems.^[2]

That seems to me pretty much on the button. Guilty as charged.

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[1] Dunning, J., The bookman's promise : a Cliff Janeway novel. 2004, New York: Scribner.

[2] McDevitt, J., Seeker. 1st ed. 2005, New York, Ace Books. 0441013295. pp179-180.