“She was like an old weatherworn emblem of wisdom – something you find in desert places, like the Sphinx – yet inside her was that enormous vacancy of ignorance which cast a doubt on all her wisdom.” (pg. 76, Washington Square Press)

In the immortal words of Lisa Simpson, “They expect you to lie a little.” But now we have Big Brother hanging over our shoulders while we fudge our resumes, and doing so could put you in prison for up to a year. No longer can you claim fluency in Swahili to gain that little extra advantage when applying for a job poking crippled cows with a forklift.

So, if elitist vegan activists can no longer get jobs in Midwest “agricultural facilities,” who can we rely on to abuse our food? “Illegals” perhaps? Normally I would say yes – but since these agricultural companies expect total honesty among their employees and are so stringent over trespassing violations, I can’t imagine they would ever hire anyone who misrepresents their immigration status or does anything to break the country’s sacrosanct borders and immigration laws. Right?

“What the hell, you go in there and order a cheese sandwich, they got a whole stack of them, already made up, probably since last Wednesday, and they take out one of them goddamned things, big fat piece of orange cheese in it, and throw on some grease, they pretend it’s butter but I sure don’t believe that, and then they go and they fuse it all together with a hot press there. My stomach’s still trying to break that thing down into something I can live on, just like a big piece, two big pieces, of bathroom tile with some mastic in between. …”

He was sublime as Seinfeld’s Mr. Pitt, but I will always remember him as “spinach chin.” I will miss his talents and the true class he brought to all his projects.

There’s a lot that is wrong in this story, the cheesy ending notwithstanding. For one,there is the bit of dialogue from the story, “Very little life is actually conscious. Animals, trees, insects are quick in their responses, but they aren’t conscious.” Now, attributing a lack of sentience to animals, that they are merely reactionary clockwork mechanisms, may have been the prevailing “popular wisdom” of the time, but of course it is flat-out wrong. And the notion that a human brain would work and react faster and better than a computer processor is similarly untrue. We do have unique advantages over our eventual robotic overlords, but reaction time is not one of them.

Still, Dick’s prescience in this idea of organic-synthetic symbiosis goes to show, despite his misfires, he still wipes the floor with us when it comes to conceptual sci-fi.

Prior to that, Hardy paints a perfect picture of a marriage dissolving (Chapter XL – Suspicion: Fanny is sent for). Granted, if your husband pines over a lock of a former lover’s hair, you can bet the honeymoon is over – and one could argue the marriage between Troy and Bathsheba was ill-conceived and doomed to fail from the outset – but a strength of this chapter, beyond its context within the overall plot, is his ability to capture that point in a marriage where the euphoric blinders have fallen and spouses realize they must find a way, if possible, to deal with this person for the rest of their lives.

…I know the depth of my selfishness. I cannot be at ease … if someone else is in pain … Sometimes this is mistaken by the innocent for unselfishness, when all I am doing is sacrificing a small good … for the sake of a far greater good, a peace of mind when I need think only of myself. (pg. 114)

I don’t think that sentiment is uncommon, yet most people delude themselves into thinking their motivations are pure. In the words of King Missile, “That’s the way we are. We are pigs.”

The book also has a great dissection of journalism, and a clue as to what’s gone wrong with today’s new media:

Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from our pride – in my profession a reporter’s pride, the desire to file a better story than the other man’s… (pg. 122)

Granted, the push for profit has had its own malignant influence on journalism, but Greene sees, rightly, the corruption in that desire to be “first,” where getting it first has more cachet than getting it right.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s ”A Pocketful for Dharma,” despite its flaws, strikes an interesting balance between a landscape of living building and a computer disk that can carry a copy of a human soul. Farscape put the concept of bioengineered ships upfront with the whole “I am on a living ship” line in the intro – a ship that later gave birth to a baby gunship. And, of course, the classic aliens, the xenomorphs,  have a penchant for organic architecture when they set up shop in a ship, on a new planet, or among a group of ill-fated human colonists. Welcome to a future where, as Marge Simpson would say, “Everything is something.” At least until the nanobots take over… then everything will be very, very tiny.