primeideal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
primeideal) wrote2019-07-10 09:06 am
primeideal) wrote2019-07-10 09:06 am
Entry tags:
Amusing parallels
(Content note: praise of a work by an author who has some pretty terrible and dumb RL beliefs, I won't be going into those here.)
As I mentioned a few months ago I recently reread "Children of the Star" by Sylvia Louise Engdahl which held up pretty well. More recently I went back through "Star Child" by James P. Hogan. Not only do these have the same name scheme, they have fairly similar premises and themes!
Both of them are from the perspective of young people in a fairly isolated society, who gradually come to learn that they're the remnants of an apocalypse that destroyed an advanced civilization who had taken safeguards to preserve some remnant of their culture. And both have good, if occasionally anvilly, takes on how science and religion aren't necessarily at odds but rather answer different questions.
"Star Child" has some more supernatural elements ('sometimes people in this culture have prophetic visions, um...just cause!") especially in the third section, which I don't feel were necessary. It also has more of a separation between the advanced technology subculture and the regressed, fantasy-world subculture. (Although the part about the king and general "dying" and going to the "afterlife" was pretty funny, I didn't remember that.)
There's also no fanfic for either except that Be the First fic I wrote, maybe I'll have to request them both for Yuletide and be like "interesting parallels, go nuts." The king/the general are pretty shippable...
As I mentioned a few months ago I recently reread "Children of the Star" by Sylvia Louise Engdahl which held up pretty well. More recently I went back through "Star Child" by James P. Hogan. Not only do these have the same name scheme, they have fairly similar premises and themes!
Both of them are from the perspective of young people in a fairly isolated society, who gradually come to learn that they're the remnants of an apocalypse that destroyed an advanced civilization who had taken safeguards to preserve some remnant of their culture. And both have good, if occasionally anvilly, takes on how science and religion aren't necessarily at odds but rather answer different questions.
"Star Child" has some more supernatural elements ('sometimes people in this culture have prophetic visions, um...just cause!") especially in the third section, which I don't feel were necessary. It also has more of a separation between the advanced technology subculture and the regressed, fantasy-world subculture. (Although the part about the king and general "dying" and going to the "afterlife" was pretty funny, I didn't remember that.)
There's also no fanfic for either except that Be the First fic I wrote, maybe I'll have to request them both for Yuletide and be like "interesting parallels, go nuts." The king/the general are pretty shippable...