I made some notes as I read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Orson Scott Card’s The Worthing Saga:
- Heinlein as Jubal Harshaw on the compulsive reading of news or Gossip Gone Wild: most neuroses can be traced to worrying about the troubles of five million strangers; and
- Card: the premise that civilization requires the institution of marriage (presumably the monogamous sort); setting aside whether a population can be successfully seeded from a relatively small number of couples, does this stand to reason?
The Mormon mind-set is prevalent, but this isn’t a criticism of Card. First, I don’t think I could’ve picked two more diametrically opposed views of the perfect society than in SIASL and TWS. Second, if I’m honest with myself, Heinlein’s mind-set was probably no less prevalent in SIASL; it just so happens that his is closer to mine than Card’s is.
On telepathy and lying: in TWS, Martin tells his daughter, Faith, that she can’t lie to him. I don’t think this stands to reason. Children experiment with lying from a very early age, and, as they get older, successfully lie to their parents, partly because their parents assume they know them so well. Even in the case of a telepathic parent and child, each of whom can block the other’s thoughts, I can see this working. Experimenting with familiar thought patterns, with a reasonable level of privacy during adolescence, etc. I believe a child could convince a parent that they were being truthful, by exhibiting a familiar, if highly complex, facade.
