Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

I'm operating on less-than-optimal amounts of sleep, today (for reasons which will become obvious), but please bear with me. Or don't. You can skip the dull parts about a series of books you may never have read (which I'll hide behind the cut-tags), and just get to the part where I hope the relevance to my own recent journey will become clear.

Or just skip the whole thing.

But I think there's a point buried in here somewhere, and it's important to me to try to put it into words, for my own sake, so . . .

REVIEWING THE BOOKS:

It's been not quite two and a half weeks since I discovered -- to my mingled delight and horror -- that P.M. Griffin had written and published three brand-spanking-new Star Commandos novels since 2002.( Read more... )

It was kind of like the 6th season of "Buffy", in that the "nemeses" of our heroes (in this case, the most-highly-decorated-in-the-history-of-the-Terran-Federation Commando team headed by Islaen Conner and her former-alien-foe-turned-devoted-husband-and-second-in-command Varn Sogan) seem a tad petty and mundane, though still deadly.

But then -- in the case of BtVS -- you realize that the real enemy Buffy and Co. faced in season 6 wasn't meant to be the nerd trio at all, but rather an inner crisis of meaning and confidence and identity (some might argue that they were way too young to have mid-life crises or to be candidates for Individuation in the Jungian sense -- but if you've been saving the world alone or together since you were sixteen-year-olds, who's to say you can't face a mid-life-type crisis of meaning in your early twenties? Especially if you've come back from the dead twice already?) ( Read more... )

From my point of view (as an ardent and annual re-reader also of the works of Lois McMaster Bujold), I see Islaen and Varn having just arrived, after two years of marriage and saving the world(s) on a regular basis, at the place where Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan and Aral are at the end of Bujold's Shards of Honor and Barrayar, and it's time to see what kinds of trouble their kids and their friends' kids and all those people whose lives they've touched and enriched can get into and get back out of again (possibly with a little help from the old folks).

Or maybe Griffin will just leave that up to her readers' very active and happy imaginations.

AVAILABILITY:

In case anyone else cares (and if you grew up on Andre Norton in your youth and adore Lois McMaster Bujold in your maturity, as I do, then you really might want to check these out as sort of the 'missing link' between those two authors' gifts and perspectives), the full series is as follows: ( Read more... )

WHY AM I SO OBSESSED?:

(Beyond the obvious and too-easy answer that I'm just an obsessive-compulsive grad. student/minister/middle-aged spinster who needs a good dose of romance, space-battles, and butt-kicking heroism now and then, to keep me going.)( Read more... )