On Sat, 19 Apr 1997 15:34:15 -0500 Michael Marc Levy wrote:
> Between them, Slonczewski and Moffett are sort of a two woman
Quaker SF
> sub-genre all by themselves, aren't they. Yes, we talked aobut
> Slonczewski's Quakerism, and I brought in a colleague of mine who
is a
> Quaker (also a Zen Buddhist and a Jew simultaneously, but that's
another
> story) to discuss Quakerism and its rather successful history of
passive
> resistance.
>
> My favorite scene in Slonczewski's books, by the way, occurs in
The Wall
> Around Eden. In it a biker gang bent on trouble breaks into a church
where a
> group of Quakers are holding a meeting. By chance a severely
retarded
> young woman is standing near the back door holding a baby and,
when the
> bikers break in, she hands the baby to the head bad guy who's so
totally
> freaked out by the baby and not knowing what to do with it that it
> totally defuses the dangerus situation. I don't know how believable
the
> scene is, but it works just great in the book.
>
I had forgotten this scene, but it is a classic piece of Quaker
resistance. Don't just say "No", find something else to do. I know that
this is a feminist discussion group but my passion is for pacifist
fiction. Does anybody have more suggestions? My first two sf books
when I was twelve were Brian Stableford's The Florians and Joe
Haldeman's All My Sins Remembered, both with strong messages
about the need to say no.
> Farah, I wish I'd been able to take your history courses as history
minor.
> All we got to read were G.R. Elton, C.V. Wedgewood, Trevor-Roper
and the like.
>
> Mike Levy
]
Thanks for the complement! Today I found myself trying to explain a
section from The Wanderground (not a book I like too much) to a
group working on the American City. It took a while, but we got there.
Farah
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