Fun, though not over the top. Great writing, though his style becomes very familiar.
[preface, quoting Fedric Jameson in his elegy for Philip K. Dick]
"It may be the very conventionality, the inauthenticity, the formal stereotyping of Science Fiction that gives it one signal advantage over modernist high literature. The latter can show us everything about the individual psyche and its subjective experience and alienation, save the essential - the logic of stereotyes, reproductions and depersonalization in which the individual is held in our own time."
They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts; sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by.
The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!
'The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses.'
'Oh yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed we found dead people.
'And Father started giggling,' Castle continued.
'He couldn't stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head, and do you know what that marvellous man said to me?' asked Castle.
'Nope.'
' "Son," my father said to me, "someday this will all be yours." '
'He was in the S.S. for fourteen years. He was a camp physician at Auschwitz for six of those years.'
'Doing penance at the House of Hope and Mercy, is he?'
'Yes,' said Castle, 'and making great strides, too, saving lives right and left.'
'Good for him.'
'Yes. If he keeps going at his present rate, working night and day, the number of people he's saved will equal the number of people he let die - in the year 3010.'
