First, thank you for many page views yesterday and so far today despite no new posts from me since the day before. A change of blog focus may be imminent. For quite a long time, I have found it easy to reread Poul Anderson's Technic History and to post briefly about textual details. A couple of things have happened to disrupt that routine. Meanwhile, because of my interest both in Poul Anderson's future histories and in his aliens, I have been advised first to read a novel by CJ Cherryh (which has been ordered from Amazon) and secondly to read that book in its entirety before discussing it here. That will take some time. What else is going to happen remains to be seen. Life continues but changes.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Welcome back! And you have not been the only one ordering books. Today I ordered a copy of Jennifer Rosato's and Allan Vincelette's (editors) EXTRATERRESTRIALS IN THE CATHOLIC IMAGINATION (from Cambridge Scholars Publishers, a British press). This is a collection of essays by Catholic scientists and writers discussing how their faith affected their thinking about the possibility of life, esp. intelligent life, existing on other worlds.
By now, I have a pretty fair collection of works by writers discussing the idea of life other worlds. Such as Poul Anderson's pioneering and unjustly forgotten IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS? (1964), Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ booklet INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE? (2005), Michael A.G. Michaud's maasively thorough CONTACT WITH ALIEN CIVILIZATIONS (2010).
And I'm currently reading Avi Loeb's EXTRATERRESTRIAL (2021), which discusses what he believes were the first signs to be discovered of intelligent non-human life.
To be complete, I should also mention WOULD YOU BAPTIZE AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL?, by Guy Consolmagno, SJ and Paul Mueller, SJ. A book collecting and discussing some of the questions the staff of the Vatican Observatory gets.
And there's also my own effort in this blog, of discussing such issues, springing from the works of Poul Anderson, titled "God and Alien in Anderson's Technic Civilization."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Loeb thinks that there are signs of intelligence elsewhere?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, because he does not believe the Oumuamua "object" was a naturally occurring comet or asteroid, but an alien artifact. If even HALF the anomalies about Oumumua discussed in his book cannot be shown as having convincing natural causes, then he made a convincing argument!
The chief flaw I found with Loeb's book were his superficial comments about the Galileo affair on pages 33-34. The confusing, confused, and muddleheaded Galileo business was much more complex than those remarks indicates. A matter discussed, btw, in one of the chapters in WOULD YOU BAPTIZE AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL?
Ad astra! Sean
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