insta!rec - Scheherazade by in-wintertime

Scheherazade by in_wintertime, rec stolen from 2naonh3_cl2

I really--I mean, *really*--want to devote a few hours to talking about this, but it's one twenty in the morning and basically I'm already screwed to zombiedom tomorrow at work.

But.

This and samdonne are the reason the lure of the gen side of the force is so fucking *powerful*. ltlj, pentapus, and miss_porcupine gave me a taste for it, and in_wintertime and samdonne have just helped it along. This story is amazing.

And for our next assignment: compare and contrast Your Cowboy Days Are Over by samdonne with Scheherazade. Mull on character-based plot and truly alien species. When you get done, thank God this is our fandom and we get to *read these*.

Fifty five thousand words, give or take. Bring coffee and some food. You won't be getting back up anytime soon.

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

It's a chance for us to see who they could have been and, in the twist I like even more, it's a chance for *them* to see who they could have been and to then be wonder what they are *now*. YES!!! That's exactly it!!! The reason I like multiverses (and the time travel/amnesia scenarios) better on a theoretical level is that the comparison doesn't remain with us the reader (b/c *we* can compare, John, FBI agent to John flyboy, but *he* doesn't have a real sense of his alternate self). In a multiverse, both versions exist within the same diegetic space; he gets to confront and face who he could have been, who he'll never be...

Because Midran thought that he understood everything, even though he didn't; and John was afraid that he had everything, even though Rodney, in the epilogue, explains that that isn't all of it. Yes, that's really the central philosophical conundrum of the novel, isn't it? Do our memories make *us*? I took a class years ago where we read Hans Moravec's Mind Children where he suggested that in the future we'd download ourselves into computers. And I kept on thinking "Where's the unconscious?" Are we still who we are if we simply add up all our memories? Or, said differently, are facts the truth? [Now, in a way, you went the opposite way, b/c the memories *are* selected and inflected via Rodney's emotional state, but even that is not sufficient, is it? There's still a surplus...and please stop me, b/c i'm catching myself saying rem(a)inder of the Real and having Zizek thoughts...runs off to her recovering Lacanian support group :)