Oil companies deserve their profits

Oil companies are making quite a bit of cash these days. This is one reason why they shouldn't be punished for making money.

Immigration protest halts transit

I had an appointment to look at an apartment in Campbell, CA last night. I took Caltrain to the San Jose station and went over to the VTA Light Rail platform. It was supposed to be a five minute wait for the next train, so I sat and waited. And waited. And waited. I noticed three helicopters hovering overhead. Hmmmm, something newsworthy is occurring nearby.

It turns out a large immigration protest in downtown San Jose stopped all lightrail service (and other street traffic) in that area. I would have just rode my bike to the apartment complex, but I decided against bringing my bike on the train yesterday. A train finally arrived but the apartment office was closed by the time I got there.

Ender's Game

Ender's Game is a scifi novel by Orson Scott Card. I read the short story back in the late 70s and became a Card fan.

I recently discovered that Ender's Game is being made into a movie. It should be interesting to see what happens with the movie. The script doctors will need to change the story significally, I think, to expand the appeal to a wider audience. The children going to Battle School, for example, will probably be teens or even young adults. The book is violent enough, but I imagine the movie will add sex. The action against the "buggers" may be a little closer, and of course the time will need to be compressed significantly since the final battle scenes take place over the span of several months.

Since discovering the movie production, I've picked up several of the Ender ... sequels? companion stories? Anyway, there are several follow-on novels that take place in Ender's universe and use many of the same characters. I've always known that Orson Scott Card is a practicing Mormon member of the Church of Latter Day Saints and I remember searching for (and not finding) bits of Mormon doctrine in Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Card introduces his theology in Xenocide but I totally missed it. It finally struck like a thunderbolt while I read Children of the Mind. If you're wondering, Card's whole concept of auia, "philotic connections," and creating living beings out of thin air are rooted in LDS theology. I've always thought these aspects of Mormon theology would make for good science fiction; I admit that knowing it takes some of the fun out of reading Card's novels. Oh well.

Ender and its sequels are kind of a sci-fi primer for LDS theology in the same way that Lewis's Narnia series or his awful Space trilogy are introductions to Christian thought.

Tags: orson+scott+card, ender, science+fiction, scifi, immigration, transit, oil