Oddly, this 1930 description of the hundred hundred billion years “history” of humanity’s existence was at the same time fascinating and forgettable. Given its scale and my inability to read this quickly, it was hard to remember everything – though it seemed cool while I was reading it. All along, I thought “There are so many amazing ideas , several authors could make careers by writing stories based on single paragraphs in this book.” But now, I am now hard pressed to say what most of those ideas were.
It would augment this story to illustrate it, so you can see all the different kinds of people, and maybe time lines. The winged people, the furry people, the seal-people, the people with brains so large they have towers built to hold them. There could be sidebars explaining different religions and technologies. You know, like a good science text book. It would be cool. (Ha! Arwen informs me there is such a thing.) I also wonder if the discussions on evolution and pre-genetic “human engineering” did not get this book banned in some times and places. And as was the author’s intention, this read like a history book, not a story, and he acknowledges the scale of it in his epilogue: “Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them.”
Scale! In every paragraph is encompassed a fiery idea, plot, and theme, which is wonderful to behold, yet as distant and unattainable as a star. To give it emotion and relativity, situations must be examined much more microscopically, within the idea, plot, and theme. The scale of a story can affect the quality and type of emotional impact.
It would augment this story to illustrate it, so you can see all the different kinds of people, and maybe time lines. The winged people, the furry people, the seal-people, the people with brains so large they have towers built to hold them. There could be sidebars explaining different religions and technologies. You know, like a good science text book. It would be cool. (Ha! Arwen informs me there is such a thing.) I also wonder if the discussions on evolution and pre-genetic “human engineering” did not get this book banned in some times and places. And as was the author’s intention, this read like a history book, not a story, and he acknowledges the scale of it in his epilogue: “Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them.”
Scale! In every paragraph is encompassed a fiery idea, plot, and theme, which is wonderful to behold, yet as distant and unattainable as a star. To give it emotion and relativity, situations must be examined much more microscopically, within the idea, plot, and theme. The scale of a story can affect the quality and type of emotional impact.
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