[REVIEW] Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden

When I made a posting on rec.arts.sf.written asking for Geoff Ryman's E-mail address so that I could compliment him on The Child Garden, nancylebov suggested that perhaps I should make my thoughts on the novel public. That suggestion has produced this posting.

(For your edification, here is an interview with Ryman from March 2001.)

( The setting, in brief. )

( Why I like it so much. )

Incidentally, Ryman has a nice hypertext novel 253 online. Go, read.

Now, if only I can find an E-mail address so I can compliment him properly.

( Counter )

UPDATE (12:34 PM) : This posting on rec.arts.sf.written provides a useful annotated bibliography to Ryman's published works.

[BRIEF NOTE] Milton and Megaterrorism

I haven't been writing about my final course for my MA degree and possibly the final course of my academic career, Milton and Empire. That's a pity, since it was a fascinating course, examining as it did the interfaces between Milton's authorial persona, his written works, the culture and politics of the England of the Interregnum and Restoration, and the wider European sphere.

The course lasted six weeks. In the final week, we read Samson Agonistes, his verse retelling of the story of Samson from the Book of Judges. For your reading convenience and pleasure, the relevant chapters are excerpted below, taken from Project Gutenburg's King James Bible.

( Judges, Chapters 13 through 16 )

Recently, Samson Agonistes has become the subject of much debate in the academic community because of questions over Milton's motivations. Did Milton imagine that killing hundreds of people based on what he had Samson believe was God's will was a moral thing to do? If so, how are we 21st century postmoderns, living in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, supposed to treat Milton? D.D. Guttenplan's article "Is Reading Milton Unsafe at Any Speed?", published in the New York Times on 28 December 2002, aptly summarizes the debate:

Was Milton a terrorist sympathizer? John Carey of Oxford University, co-editor of an edition of Milton's poetry, seems to think so. Writing in The Times Literary Supplement of London on the anniversary of Sept. 11, Professor Carey said that in the weeks following the atrocity he had been haunted by the similarities between the biblical Samson and the hijackers. "Like them Samson sacrifices himself to achieve his ends," he wrote. "Like them he destroys many innocent victims, whose lives, hopes and loves are all unknown to him personally." Professor Carey wondered whether "Samson Agonistes," with Milton's sympathetic portrayal of his hero, should not be "withdrawn from schools and colleges and, indeed, banned more generally."

In his reading, the whole of Milton's work -- epic poetry, religious tracts, radical pamphlets on the side of Parliament in the English civil war -- puts one cause above all others: obedience to God. "I have no doubt," he writes, "that many of my fellow Miltonists will resist" his interpretation "because it flies in the face of what they believe as good post-Enlightenment liberals." Liberals, he says, believe in objectivity, disinterested consideration of evidence, procedural safeguards for justice and above all in the primacy of rationality. "Milton," he argues, "believes none of those things."

Professor Fish says he responds to reviews only to correct factual errors, and won't be writing to the T.L.S. He has nothing but praise, though, for Professor Carey's edition of Milton. "I would agree with Carey that the Milton I describe could be thought of as a dangerous person," he said in an interview. "It depends on what you want from poets. If you want to find political values or eternal sentiments you can agree with, Milton is a problem." Which isn't to say Professor Fish has any sympathy for calls to ban the poetry -- or for the argument, implicit in Professor Carey's attack, that postmodernists like him have no basis from which to condemn the attacks on the World Trade Center.

"What I do deny is the possibility of independent, neutral reasons," he continued. "I also think it is a mistake to say that men like bin Laden have no morals. He clearly has moral and ethical views that for many reasons we are entitled to reject and despise. The fact that our reasons cannot be given a pedigree that takes them out of the world doesn't make them any less compelling."

This article goes into more detail on the debate over how, exactly, we should read and treat Milton.

My conclusion on the subject? Milton was a man of his time. If we don't accept the Commonwealth's standards for religious toleration (or lack thereof), why should we be particularly concerned about Milton's support of mass murder in the name of God? It only really matters if we want to make his moral standards universal in time and space. Considering the origins of the Protestant sects (Baptists, Methodists, et cetera) of our era in the Dissenting Protestant sects of his, it may be something for those sects and their members to be worried about.