Whoa. Heavy.

The struggle between parent and child that is the explicit subject of so many bedtime stories is only implicit here. Indeed, there's no parent on the scene. The story begins with the little rabbit already in bed. It is seven o'clock. A few pages later, according to the blue clock on the mantelpiece and the yellow clock on the bed table, it is seven-twenty. Then it is seven-thirty, then seven-forty. When the "good-nighting" begins, it is not clear who is doing the speaking. The moon is rising, yet the light grows dimmer. The clocks tick on-- seven-fifty, eight o'clock. A parent is bigger than a child, but still a person. He or she can be appealed to, as in "Bedtime for Frances," or even tricked, as in "Good Night, Gorilla." The arrangement here is completely uneven. Time moves forward, and the little bunny doesn't stand a chance. Parent and child are, in this way, brought together, on tragic terms. You don't want to go to sleep. I don't want to die. But we both have to.

So writes Elizabeth Kolbert in a review of Goodnight Moon, for The New Yorker magazine.

[Hat tip to Lance Mannion.]

SFnal concept of the day...

Anne at the amazing Transhumanist blog Existence is Wonderful (what a sweet title, too!) has an amazing post today that wanders outside the boundary lines of Daniel Dennett's book Kinds of Minds to ask, "How do we recognize a mind different from our own?"

She points out, rightly so, that we have trouble affording the same rights and responsibilities we take for ourseves to a mind possessor of type Homo sapiens who is in significantly different from us: the autistic, the chemically dependent, the insane.

(Note that this is one of the major themes of the Journal Entries, and the entire point of Dreamteam Calamities: the five women at the heart of the story were assumed to be mind possessors from the beginning; Shardik violated their right to self-determination, and from then on this taint of sentimentality over self-determination hovers over the series.)

Greg Egan also dealt with this heavily in Diaspora, but Anne points out that other minds may have impacts on one's perception of resource scarcity, and may have needs as an infovore.

It's a great post that crystallizes a lot of the thinking within my stories, and those of other posthumanist writers. Strongly recommended.

New Story, Glass

I really should pay attention to my own damn website, shouldn't I?

Ladies and gentlemen, while I wasn't looking too closely, the Journal Entries website went ahead and posted Glass Reunion, a M/M Furry story set in Seattle a few months after One Last Chance, which was set in New York. Our hero, Suba, is a cynical one celebrating his hundredth birthday.

This story was inspired by a street sign. Enjoy!