Una forma de vida - Amelie Nothomb

1ª ed.: 2010
ed. sp.:
auth.: Amelie Nothomb [ author, leidos ]


Correo diplomático es un pleonasmo. "Dipolomático" tiene por etimología el antiguo griego diploma, "papel doblado por la mitad", es decir pliegue. La diplomacia empezó con la correspondencia. En efecto, una carta puede ser una manera de decir las cosas con amabilidad. De ahí la contaminación histórica de ambas prácticas: un diplomático suele escribir misivas con frecuencia y el estilo epistolar suele adquirir modales diplomáticos. (pag.65)

The Maze Runner (Trilogy)

[wiki] The_Maze_Runner
[wiki] The_Scorch_Trials
[wiki] The_Death_Cure

La Mística de la feminidad - Betty Friedan

1ª ed.: 1963
ed. sp.: Diarios de las estrellas
auth.: Betty Friedan [ author, leidos ]


La mística de la feminidad» es un clásico del pensamiento feminista que se publicó originalmente en Estados Unidos en 1963. Se trata sobre todo de un libro de investigación respaldado por un abundante trabajo descriptivo, y sólo como consecuencia de esto se acaba convirtiendo en un libro militante, lo que lo aproxima al otro gran clásico del siglo XX, «El segundo sexo», de Simone de Beauvoir. Friedan llama “mística de la feminidad” a esa imagen de lo “esencialmente femenino”, eso de lo que hablan y a lo que se dirigen las revistas para mujeres, la publicidad y los libros de autoayuda. Es una horma moral, fabricada en esos años, en la que se pretende, como en un lecho de Procusto, hacer vivir a todas las mujeres. Es algo inauténtico que, si se intenta llevar a cabo, produce consecuencias cada vez más graves. Comienza por un difuso malestar y termina por producir enfermedades verdaderas. Precisamente el libro comienza con un capítulo titulado “El malestar que no tiene nombre”. Estamos ante un libro extraordinariamente influyente que ha resultado ser decisivo en el acompañamiento de uno de los cambios sociales más determinantes del siglo xx: la posición y autoconciencia de las mujeres como grupo.

Star Diaries

1ª ed.: 1957, 1971
ed. sp.: Diarios de las estrellas
auth.: Stanislaw Lem [ author, leidos ]

Dzienniki gwiazdowe is a 1957 collection of short stories by Polishwriter Stanisław Lem, expanded in 1971 around the character of space traveller Ijon Tichy.

Considerada casi unánimemente la obra maestra de Lem, y descrita a menudo como una comedia cósmica en el escenario de un universo desbocado, Diarios de las Estrellas narra las aventuras de un cosmonauta dedicado a la interminable tarea de explorar y modificar las estructuras, tanto cosmológicas como cronológicas, más sorprendentes e insólitas. 

Compuesta de una primera parte de Viajes y una segunda de Memorias, estos Diarios de las estrellas -que se publican ahora por primera vez en un solo volúmen- son probablemente la mejor muestra de la aguda e ingeniosa crítica al antropocentrismo que caracteriza las mejores obras de uno de los grandes clásicos europeos de la ciencia ficción. 

Sinopsis 

(from wikipedia)

• Introduction and Introduction to the Expanded Edition, in whichProfessor Tarantoga presents the latest information on the documentation of Ijon Tichy's exploits.
• "The Seventh Voyage", in which a spaceship defect forces Tichy through a series of time vortices, creating a multitude of temporal copies of himself.
• "The Eighth Voyage", in which Ijon Tichy represents Earth to petition for its admission to the United Planets.
• "The Eleventh Voyage", in which Ijon Tichy travels in disguise to the planet Circia to attempt to bring an end to hostilities coming from its robot population.
• "The Twelfth Voyage", in which Ijon Tichy employs Prof. Tarantoga's new invention of time acceleration on the planet of Microcephalics.
• "The Thirteenth Voyage", in which Ijon Tichy sets out to meet Master Oh. Instead, he finds two planets (Pinta and Panta) ruled according to the Master's principles. On Pinta, people are trying to become fish using a technique called evolution by persuasion. On Panta, all inhabitants are identical clones and exchange their jobs daily.
• "The Fourteenth Voyage", in which Ijon Tichy goes hunting for Squamp (Polish: kurdel) - an animal whose area is several hectares and is being puzzled by mysterious objects, called scrupts (Polish: sepulki).
• "The Eighteenth Voyage", in which Ijon Tichy helps create the cause of our universe from a single electron.
• "The Twentieth Voyage", in which Ijon Tichy is forced by his future self to lead a programme to ameliorate Earth's and mankind's history.
• "The Twenty-first Voyage", in which Ijon Tichy visits Dykhtonia - a civilisation which achieved total corporeal and mental plasticity after a thousand-year rule by automorphists, the local equivalent of transhumanists.
• "The Twenty-second Voyage", in which Ijon Tichy learns of the troubles of evangelising extraterrestrial civilisations.
• "The Twenty-third Voyage", in which Ijon Tichy visits a tiny planet, whose inhabitants save living space by frequently storing themselves as 'atom dust'.
• "The Twenty-fourth Voyage", in which Ijon Tichy visits a civilisation which has assigned all power to a machine to establish planetary harmony. The machine changed them all into shiny discs to be arranged in pleasant patterns across their planet.
• "The Twenty-fifth Voyage", about the evolution of potatoes.
• "The Twenty-eighth Voyage"

The dark beyond the stars

1ª ed.: 1991
ed. sp.: La oscuridad más allá de las estrellas
auth.: Frank M. Robinson [ author, leidos ]



Sociedad cerrada, nave generacional. Singularidad en las relaciones humanas, amistad, sexuales, paternidad, procreación... Como subproducto un sentido exaltado de respeto a la vida como algo exiguo, extraño y valioso. 
¿cómo ejecutar un motin cuando no estás dispuesto a ejercer la violencia?
¿es la vida una constante o una excepción?

SINOPSIS
The story is told through the narrative of Sparrow, a crew member aboard the Astron, which is a multigenerational starship sent from Earth on a search for life on other planets throughout the Milky Way. Sparrow fell off a cliff during one planetside excursion and is stricken with amnesia. No one will discuss his past with him and the computer has restricted his data, reasoning that he should "look within" to fully recover. Sparrow struggles to revive his memory and familiarizes himself with the Astron, the crew, the enigmatic Captain Kusaka, the state of the ship and its mission; in which the search for life has lasted over 2000 years with no success.

The ship has slowly shrunk from cannibalizing sealed off sections for parts and breaking apart from centuries of wear; meanwhile, the crew has dwindled from generations of selective breeding. The Captain wants to take the Astron to a section of the galaxy where stars are more numerous and older where planets are more likely to harbor life, but to do so they would have to cross the empty space between spiral armsthey call "the Dark". Most members of the crew know that they will not survive the journey since it would take several centuries to cross and the ship would not make it with its current rate of attrition of their closed ecological system. But Captain Kusaka, who is immortal and obsessed with exploration, does not heed to the warnings and will do whatever it takes to complete the mission. As a result, the crew secretly try to plan a mutiny to seize control of the ship and return to Earth, the only place they know that harbors life.

Sparrow refuses to join the mutiny with his friends against Kusaka, but is torn since he knows they won't survive the trip and that chances of finding life are almost nonexistent, thus making the mission futile but the Captain won't accept it. Things change when Sparrow slowly discovers that he is also immortal like the Captain, and that he has lived previous "lives" on the ship as the same man but with different names and his memories of every previous identity are erased every generation by orders of the Captain. He learns that he originally volunteered for the role to be the mirror for every crew to "remember what its like to be human"; since they've been isolated from the rest of humanity over the centuries the crew has formed their own collective-mind culture that's overly benign and incapable of harm since they regard life as the most precious thing in existence (also makes them reluctant to mutiny). Sparrow also learns that he was the first mutineer and Kusaka erased his memories to keep the crew in line and Sparrow from seizing control of the ship since the Astron's central computer only responds to the minds of the immortal crew members, and should they be removed the ship would not function and would drift through space forever.

When they leave the last star system explored to enter "the Dark", Captain Kusaka tries to suppress the conspirators even though they are benign, but Sparrow gives them the resolution to fight when they learn that since the ship has traveled so far through relativistic time dilation, human civilization on Earth has ceased to exist and that they are the only known lifeforms left in the universe and that by venturing on would endanger them all, and since the governments that sent them out no longer exist also mean that Kusaka is no longer lawfully in command. Realizing that the crew has the will to turn against him, Kusaka decides to kill everyone and venture on alone by depressurizing the entire ship. Sparrow and his friends successfully get most of the crew onto shuttles and landers in time before life support fails and he fights Kusaka alone in the hidden bowels of the ship that hold the preserved remains of the original first generation crew, which trigger all of Sparrow's memories and past personalities to surface at once in adissociative identity breakdown, which leads to the resurfacing of his original identity: Raymond Stone. In the ensuing fight Raymond fatally wounds Kusaka and before he dies he apologizes for everything he has done to the generations of crews for the sake of the mission and for what he did to him as friends when they left Earth.

With the mutiny over, Raymond takes command of the Astron and sets a course back to Earth, which takes 20 generations (400 years) to reach. During that time, Raymond watches the crew he has known age and die and recycled for mass on the ship as well as their descendant crews come and go, thus making him realize the value of life and the price of immortality.

The story ends when the Astron, after 2500 ship-years (or approximately 17,000 time-dilated Julian years as calculated earlier), finally returns to an uninhabited Earth for the descendants of the original crew and Raymond to repopulate. While they are celebrating, they are shocked to discover an alien ship has also found Earth.

REFERENCIAS

"...naves generacionales (...) como CITA CON RAMA del recientemente desaparecido Arthur C. Clarke con un punto de vista muy indirecto, UNIVERSO de Heinlein, el gran pope del género y el que le dio cierto renombre al termino, NAVE ESTELAR de Brian W Aldiss o UNIVERSO CAUTIVO de Harry Harrison;..."

Himno - Aynd Rand

1ª ed.: 1938
ed. vo.: Anthem
ed. sp.: Himno
auth.: Aynd Rand [ author, leidos ]

"Adoro a los individuos por sus enormes posiblidades como tales, y detesto a la humanidad, por su
incapacidad de estar a la altura de estas posibilidades"

"... estamos haciendo un trabajo que no tiene objeto, salvo el deseo de hacerlo."

SINOPSIS
(extraido de wikipedia)

La novela, que consta de doce capítulos, cuenta la peripecia vital de un joven de 21 años llamado Igualdad 7-2521, cuya historia conocemos narrada en primera persona por medio de su diario, escrito a la luz de las velas en un túnel bajo tierra. Igualdad describe sus anhelos, su infancia y adolescencia y la sociedad totalitaria en la que vive, situada en un futuro indeterminado, denominado el Gran Renacimiento, cuando los hombres habían descubierto la Gran Verdad. Esta es la gran verdad que deben recitar obligatoriamente los estudiantes, justo antes de irse a dormir:

Nosotros no somos nada. La humanidad lo es todo. Nos es dado vivir gracias a nuestros hermanos. Existimos por ellos, al lado de ellos y para ellos, que son el Estado. Amén.
La lápida frente al Palacio del Consejo Mundial también ilustra el ideario del régimen:

Somos uno en todos y todos en uno. No existen hombres sino solo el gran "Nosotros", uno indivisible y para siempre.
El uso exclusivo de los pronombres plurales (nosotros, vosotros, ellos) para referirse a sí mismo y a otras personas singulares se hace evidente desde el primer momento. También llama la atención el que, pese a estar situada en el futuro, se nos describe una tecnología primitiva, como velas para alumbrarse y carros para transportar el trigo. El personaje principal, Igualdad 7-2521, narra en el diario su infancia y adolescencia. Lo criaron, como a todos los niños en el mundo de Himno, separado de sus padres, en la Casa de los Niños. Después fue transferido a la Casa de los Estudiantes, donde comenzó su educación académica. En el último año, se dio cuenta que había nacido diferente, con una «maldición»: está ansioso por saber más y pregunta constantemente (los maestros llegan a prohibirle interrogar), y se siente poco dispuesto a entregarse a los designios colectivos, lo cual viola los principios sobre los cuales se funda la sociedad en la que vive. Igualdad, que lo que le enseñan se le queda corto, destacaba en matemáticas y en ciencias, y soñaba en convertirse en «estudioso». Sin embargo, el Consejo de Vocaciones, que tiene el poder de imponer a cada persona la profesión a la que iba a dedicarse, le asignó la Casa de los Barrenderos.

Igualdad acepta de buen grado el trabajo de barrendero, dispuesto a arrepentirse por su «transgresión» (su deseo de aprender). Forma grupo de trabajo junto con Internacional-4-8818 y Unión 5-3992. Internacional es excepcionalmente alto, un gran artista (esa es su transgresión, ya que solo la gente elegida para ser artistas puede dibujar) y el único amigo de Igualdad (tener amigos es también un crimen porque, en la sociedad de Himno, uno no puede estimar a uno de sus «hermanos» por encima del resto). Unión, “el de escasa inteligencia” sufre epilepsia.

Sin embargo, Igualdad sigue siendo curioso. Un día, encuentra la entrada a un túnel del metro en su área de trabajo asignada y la explora, a pesar de las protestas de su colega ya que toda acción no autorizada por el Consejo está prohibida. Igualdad se da cuenta de que el túnel pertenece a los «Tiempos Innominados», es decir, previos a la creación de la sociedad de Himno, y siente una curiosidad extrema. Durante las tres horas diarias que disponen para esparcirse, deja al resto de la comunidad en el teatro, entra en el túnel y se dedica a realizar experimentos científicos.

Trabajando un día fuera de la ciudad, en el campo, Igualdad conoce y se enamora de una mujer, Libertad 5-3000, a quien renombra en sus pensamientos (algo prohibido) como «la Dorada».

Continúa su trabajo científico, y redescubre la electricidad y la lámpara incandescente. Decide llevar sus invenciones al Consejo Mundial de los Estudiosos, de modo que reconozcan su talento y le permitan trabajar con ellos. Un reflejo social inculcado le induce todavía a sentir la necesidad de ayudar a sus conciudadanos. Sin embargo, un día descubren su ausencia de la Casa de los Barrenderos y lo arrestan. Lo envían a la cárcel, de la cual se escapa fácilmente (no hay apenas medidas de vigilancia, pues jamás nadie ha osado huir de un correccional), después de haber sido torturado cruelmente.

El día siguiente a su huida, se dirige al Consejo Mundial de los Estudiosos, y les presenta su hallazgo (la electricidad). Los estudiosos se horrorizan, y lo rechazan porque no había sido autorizado por el Consejo y su actitud amenaza con trastornar el equilibrio de su mundo. Cuando intentan destruir su invención, la toma y huye al bosque, fuera de la ciudad. Se trata de la Selva Innominada donde ningún hombre ha osado adentrarse antes por suponerse plagada de fieras.

Después de vivir en el bosque durante algunos días, viviendo de la caza y gozando de la nueva sensación de libertad, Igualdad tropieza con «la Dorada», es decir Libertad 5-3000, que lo ha seguido tras enterarse de su huida. Se abrazan, se aman (el sexo estaba reducido a una actividad anual con fines puramente reproductivos) y se esfuerzan por expresar sus mutuos sentimientos, totalmente nuevos, ya que no tienen conocimiento del pronombre «Yo». Tras largo tiempo vagando por la selva, se encuentran con una extraña casa en las montañas, construida con sofisticada arquitectura y materiales que no habían visto nunca antes (y que suponen construida en un pasado remoto, justamente el tiempo presente del lector), y deciden quedarse a vivir en ella.

Leyendo con fruición los libros de la biblioteca que había en la casa, Igualdad y Libertad descubren en ellos el pronombre «Yo», y entienden el valor sagrado y la individualidad que la palabra que expresa. Se dan nuevos nombres obtenidos de los libros: Igualdad se convierte en Prometeo, y a Libertad la rebautiza con el nombre Gea. Cuando está concluyendo la novela, Prometeo habla del pasado, se pregunta cómo los hombres pudieron haber renunciado a su individualidad y planea un futuro en el cual puedan recuperarlo.

El final del diario (y del libro) revela la «palabra prohibida»: la palabra es «yo».

La Ciudad de Zennox - Elena Cardenal

The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut

1ª ed.: 1959
ed. sp.: Las Sirenas de Titan
auth.: Kurt Vonnegut [ author, leidos ]

- chrono-synclastic infundibulum

- "The worst thing that could possibly happend to anybody," she said, "would be to not be used for anything by anybody" (The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut)

SINOPSIS

The protagonist is Malachi Constant, the richest man in 22nd-century America. He possesses extraordinary luck that he attributes to divine favor which he has used to build upon his father's fortune. He becomes the centerpoint of a journey that takes him from Earth to Mars in preparation for an interplanetary war, to Mercury with another Martian survivor of that war, back to Earth to be pilloried as a sign of Man's displeasure with his arrogance, and finally to Titan where he again meets the man ostensibly responsible for the turn of events that have befallen him, Winston Niles Rumfoord.

Rumfoord comes from a wealthy New England background. His private fortune was large enough to fund the construction of a personal spacecraft, and he became a space explorer. Traveling between Earth and Mars, his ship—carrying Rumfoord and his dog, Kazak—entered a phenomenon known as a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, which is defined in the novel as "those places ... where all the different kinds of truths fit together." Vonnegut notes that any detailed description of this phenomenon would baffle the layman, but any comprehensible explanation would insult an expert. Consequently, he "quotes" an article from a (fictional) children's encyclopedia. According to this article, since the Universe is so large, there are many possible ways to observe it, all of which are equally valid, because people from across the Universe can't communicate with each other (and therefore can't get into an argument). The chrono-synclastic infundibula are places where these "ways to be right" coexist. When they enter the infundibulum, Rumfoord and Kazak become "wave phenomena", somewhat akin to the probability waves encountered in quantum mechanics. They exist along a spiral stretching from the Sun to the star Betelgeuse. When a planet, such as the Earth, intersects their spiral, Rumfoord and Kazak materialize, temporarily, on that planet.

When he entered the infundibulum, Rumfoord became aware of the past and future. Throughout the novel, he predicts future events; unless he is deliberately lying, the predictions always come true. It is in this state that Rumfoord established the "Church of God the Utterly Indifferent" on Earth to unite the planet after a Martian invasion. It is also in this state that Rumfoord, materializing on different planets, instigated the Martian invasion. On Titan, the only place where he can exist permanently as a solid human being, Rumfoord befriends a traveller from Tralfamadore (a world that also figures in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, among several others) who needs a small metal component to repair his damaged spaceship.

Salo, the Tralfamadorian explorer, is a robot built millennia earlier to carry a message to a distant galaxy. His spacecraft is powered by the Universal Will to Become, or UWTB, the "prime mover" which makes matter and organization wish to appear out of nothingness. (UWTB, Vonnegut informs the reader, was responsible for the Universe in the first place, and is the greatest imaginable power source). A small component on Salo's spacecraft breaks and strands him here in the Sol System for over 200 millennia. He requests help from Tralfamadore, and his fellow Tralfamadorians respond by manipulating human history so that primitive humans evolve and create a civilization in order to produce the replacement part. Rumfoord's encounter with the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, the following war with Mars, and Constant's exile to Titan were all manipulated via the Tralfamadorians' control of the UWTB.Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China and the Kremlin are all messages in the Tralfamadorian geometrical language, informing Salo of their progress.

As it turns out, the replacement part is a small metal strip, brought to Salo by Constant and his son Chrono (born of Rumfoord's ex-wife). A sunspot disrupts Rumfoord's spiral, sending him and Kazak separately into the vastness of space. An argument between Rumfoord and Salo moments before, left unresolved because of Rumfoord's disappearance, leads the distraught Salo to disassemble himself, thereby stranding the humans on Titan. Chrono chooses to live among the Titanian birds; after thirty-two years, his mother dies, and Constant manages to reassemble Salo. Then, using the part delivered so many years previously by Chrono, he repairs the Tralfamadorian saucer.

Salo returns Constant to Earth, where Constant dies experiencing a pleasant hallucination secretly implanted in his mind by Salo. >>wiki

REVIEW  >>from

The Sirens of Titan may be Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, but it’s also one of his most sure-footed and successful works. In this book, Vonnegut attempts to answer the ultimate question–”What is the purpose of man?” And this he does with copious amounts of dark humor and much aplomb. In true Vonnegut fashion, he introduces a wholly human character caught in the maelstrom of chance. Malachi Constant, our unfortunate protagonist, is both likable and unlikable. At the very least, he is strangely relatable. Despite being a billionaire, (the richest man in America), there is an emptiness that gnaws at Malachi, an existential dilemma he can’t shake. He waits to be given purpose by God or the Cosmos, or whoever it is at the end of that endless phone line that stretches through Space.

Purpose comes in the dubious form of Winston Niles Rumfoord, the only human being to have ever been chronosynclastically infundibulated. Rumfoord had ridden out to space with his faithful dog, Kazak, when his ship ran straight into a chronosynclastic infundibulum. This space phenomenon enables Rumfoord to see all things in the past and in the future. It offers Rumfoord a type of omniscience that would be god-like, had it meant that Rumfoord was exempt of whatever it was Fate had in store for him. The trade-off to gaining almighty knowledge is that Rumfoord and Kazak were spread thinly throughout time and space. They began to exist in a wave phenomena that enabled them to materialize on Earth, Mars, and Mercury in predictable intervals while staying properly stuck in Titan.

Rumfoord and Malachi’s paths cross when Rumfoord asks his wife, Beatrice, to invite the latter to one of his materializations. There, Rumfoord reveals Malachi’s fate to him. Malachi and Beatrice were set to be sent to Mars where they would fall in love, have a child, and grow old in the beautiful Saturn moon, Titan. Rebelling against this idyllic albeit forced setup, Malachi does what he can to make Beatrice hate him–and he succeeds for a time. It almost seems as if Beatrice and Malachi would never cross paths again,  but as is one of the greatest themes in The Sirens of Titan, there is no escaping fate. And true to Vonnegut’s style, Malachi and Beatrice both suffer tremendously before something too distorted, something too similar to resignation to actually be called a ‘happy ending,’ takes place.

The next time we see Malachi, we see him as Unk. A low-ranking infantry officer in Mars who has just had his memories erased for the nth time. This is an unusual case in Mars. Usually, you get your memories wiped clean once, get your antenna installed, and you’re obedient and thoughtless as sheep soon after. But in Unk’s case, he always manages to regain thoughts of Earth and past memories, sometimes with the help of his best friend, Stony Stevenson. He always seeks out his mate, Beatrice, and child, Chronos. He always imagines Earth to be a better place where he can be with his family at last. In Unk, Malachi has become the opposite of who he always thought he was. As Unk, Malachi could live without a penny to his name but with the dream of family and friendship to get him through whatever fix he was in.

Now, with such noble dreams, one would expect Unk/Malachi to get the happy ending he’s after. Maybe Malachi could escape to Earth with Bea and Chronos, grow some potatoes. Be a self-sustaining family with little contact with the outside world. But to end the book this way would equate to pussy-footing around life. Like most talented and sadistic writers, Kurt Vonnegut knows the value of a relatable hero. He knows the appeal of the long-suffering protagonist. He doesn’t waste the chance to play up the dark comedy called human existence.

At the start of the story, Malachi’s name is explained to the reader. Malachi means faithful messenger. This is the root of Malachi’s early existential drama. He awaits the message he’s meant to deliver, he waits for a higher purpose. Turns out, his purpose was to create Chronos with Bea. Chronos becomes the faithful messenger in the story. He delivers a piece of metal to Salo, a Tralfamadorian traveler marooned in Titan. Salo, himself, is a messenger–a machine designed by human-like creatures from the planet of Tralfamadore. Salo was sent into Space to travel billions of years in search of a specific alien civilization. The piece of metal (Chronos’ good luck piece) is the replacement part Salo needs to fix his ship. In the end, Malachi did find purpose, he did find his place in the great scheme of things. But did he really find purpose or was he only ‘a victim of a series of accidents.’ From the all-knowing and all-seeing perspective of God and any other chronosynclastically infundibulated being, is human life merely a straight line, or even a tiny, fixed point set against the vastness of the Cosmos? Is there no higher purpose? Or if there is, is it a purpose worth living for?

Like a seasoned pro, Vonnegut has his main character (and the reader) jumping through hoops, suffering burn after burn. And yet, on Unk goes. Against all odds, Unk goes–that you almost wish for a deus ex machina, for a red herring of sorts. You think ill of Rumfoord and shake your fist at his cruelty, only to realize that his life was the biggest joke in the book. There are a lot of emotions to be gone through in The Sirens of Titan. There are a lot of surprises too. And while the bleak nature of the book’s humor may make you want to let go of the book and seek some sunshine, you always go back to it, because quite frankly, it’s that good. It’s more than just a page-turner, it’s a thinking piece. It’s a fecking good piece of literature that thankfully sticks.

The Sirens of Titan is definitely one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years. Worth recommending to anyone interested in Science Fiction, Philosophy, and great literature, in general. If you loved Slaughterhouse Five, this would be right up your alley.

REFERENCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS...

SUBRRAYADO...

- chrono-synclastic infundibulum

- "The worst thing that could possibly happend to anybody," she said, "would be to not be used for anything by anybody" (The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut)

Downward to the Earth - Robert Silverberg

1ª ed.: 1970
ed. sp.: Regreso a Belzagor
auth.: Robert Silverberg [ author, leidos ]

SINOPSIS

Edmund Gunderson was the Terran administrator of the colony world of Belzagor, and he returns to it after it has gained independence, feeling a sense of guilt for the way he has treated its dominant species, the elephant-like nildoror, whose animalistic appearance had kept Gunderson from taking them seriously as sentient beings. On his return, he feels a new sense of kinship with the natives, perhaps more than for the Terran tourists. The nildoror undergo a process of rebirth, and Gunderson’s greatest guilt comes from having denied rebirth to seven nildoror to make them help him repair flood damage. He encounters his old colleague Jeff Kurtz, who had undergone the rebirth ceremony only to be turned into something monstrous. Nevertheless, Gunderson dares to subject himself to the rebirth ceremony, which brings him a new understanding of the native creatures and new powers by which he can heal Kurtz and bring new understanding to others. >>wiki

REFERENCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS.
Heart of Darkness - Joseph conrad. Implicaciones del colonialismo.