Sunday! “The Book of X” by Sarah Rose

Rufus F.

Rufus is a likeable curmudgeon. He has a PhD in History, sang for a decade in a punk band, and recently moved to NYC after nearly two decades in Canada. He wrote the book "The Paris Bureau" from Dio Press (2021).

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5 Responses

  1. Saul Degraw says:

    So does this book let us see how we are?Report

  2. Jaybird says:

    Okay. Saw Passengers.

    A cute AAA movie with cute AAA stars and really good special effects and an interesting philosophical question: Are Extroverts Allowed To Do Whatever They Want?

    You know the basic plot: Chris Platt is on a colony ship in hypersleep when they encounter an asteroid field that messes with the foolproof engineering devices on the ship. He wakes up, falls in love with the face of one of the other passengers in the sleeping pods, wakes her up, and then they fall in love, she finds out that he woke her up, and then they argue about it for a while.

    What I did NOT know was that there were additional actors in the flick (not just the dancers in the video game, the voice actors for the robots, and the absolutely magnificent bartender): But, like, someone who could push the plot along.

    Anyway, the main philosophical question is whether Chris Platt murdered Jennifer Lawrence by waking her up. Well… yeah. Kinda. I guess. He took away the life she thought she was going to have and, instead, forced her to have a different one.

    So a very slow-motion murder is marked on Chris Platt’s soul.

    But the movie has a bunch of things happen and, wouldn’t you know it, the thing that woke Chris Platt up in the first place has a bunch of cascading failures that threaten the entirety of the ship. So Chris Platt and Jennifer Lawrence fix the problem and they make the ship foolproof again.

    They establish that Chris Platt was likely to kill himself from loneliness without another person there… either fast through the airlock or slow through the bottle. By waking Jennifer Lawrence up, he saved his own life. By saving his own life, he made it possible to save the rest of the ship.

    So if you want to wander into Utilitarianism, the movie was a trolley problem. Do nothing and kill everybody or pull the lever and just kill Jennifer Lawrence.

    He pulled the lever.

    But, and the movie was explicit about this, they found that the autodoc could be set to put Jennifer Lawrence back in hypersleep. He could have put her back in there and been alone for the rest of his life. Hey, he had a good year with her.

    There are a lot of people who never have a good year with anybody. He had a good year. That would have been enough.

    Anyway, he then gave her a choice about whether to go back into stasis. So… finally, at the end, a choice was offered.

    As such, she got offered the type of death she wanted. And then she picked it.

    Friggin’ Extroverts.Report