October 25 - Volume Two

We needed a break from contract mediation this afternoon, so we took a walk -- and then the admin team wasn't ready for us, so off I went to Volume Two for a handful of used books, three of the five SF from the 60s and 70s:

• Poul Anderson, The Horn of Time ($2.99: "The 20th century played a game of nuclear Russian roulette. And lost.")
• Poul Anderson, New America (autographed, and yet $2.99: 200 years ago, the 21st-century World State sent the Jeffersonians into exile on another planet - but is the cosmos still big enough for both groups?)
• Lester del Rey, The Eleventh Commandment ($2.99: "Earth was a teeming, desperate hell-hole... over-populated beyond the wildest nightmare and rife with starvation and disease. And still the people multiplied. They had no choice. The Eleventh Commandment ordained it, and the militant ruling religion enforced it.")
• Graham Purchase, Anarchism and Ecology ($7.99, from Black Rose Books: "the history of our slow alienation from locale ... [toward] a social-ecological revolution")
• Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica ($4.99: eco-sabotage versus corporate plunder, as expiration looms for the international treaty protecting the continent! Oh, shut up, I think it'll be amazing. Shut up! I really do!)
• Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars ($4.99: the second volume in the terraforming of Mars)

Book-shopping didn't calm me down much, but that's okay. I've really enjoyed the experience of contract negotiations, as well as mediation: lack of admin buy-in and movement aside, I'll keep doing this work.

And also keep reading terrible SF. I wonder if there's any connection....