The Early Days of a Better Nation

Sunday, September 26, 2004


Catching Up

I've been away for a bit, and I don't expect to do much blogging in the next couple of months. I'm working on a new SF novel, provisionally titled Learning the World, and the deadline looms. After I finish it I intend to plunge straight into the next, because I already have the notes for it that I usually spend a few months scraping together.

On holiday I read Richard Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable and Steve Jones's Almost Like a Whale, both well worth reading. The latter made me want to re-read the book on which it's modelled, The Origin of Species. I read the 6th edition when I was at university, and it's about time I read the first. It'll have to wait its turn on the stack, though.

What incited me to read the Dawkins book was having, a couple of weeks ago, read his essay collection A Devil's Chaplain, where he says:
It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say 'Enough!' Let our tribute to the September dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.

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