The Waiting Stars

tl;dr I get really off topic really fast.

The Waiting Stars is one of those stories that I really like and I know is a good story, even though I have no idea why. It's kind of like Jared Newman's means essay last year: to this day, I have no idea exactly what that was about, but it was a glorious piece of literature.

I think it's interesting that giving birth to a Mind is such a terrible thing. If you show just a straight up video of childbirth everyone assumes it's disgusting, unnatural, and evil, which I think both says a lot about sex ed and how weird childbirth is. I read somewhere that pregnancy and periods and all that suck so much because a child requires a huge amount of commitment and resources, so the mother's body tries to make it hard to get pregnant. Anyway, it's amusing that, once you think about it, most people would probably think giving birth is some evil, unnatural, disgusting thing if they just saw a video.

I'm a little bit confused as to what the Minds actually are. Are they ships? My initial thoughts were that they were some sort of JARVIS-thing where they controlled/were the ships themselves, but I'm not sure how that fits in. Is the Institution on a planet? What kind of scale is that, where ships from around the galaxy can have their minds taken to a single planet?

The Minds also reminded me of that super-old cliche of difference leading to fear and hate. The Institution and people like Jason mean well, but they still see the Minds as unnatural/evil or something or something to change or avoid. There's this really good kid's book series called Animorphs (which some people probably remember from the 90s or whatever), but long story short it's really good and surprisingly dark and does some stuff with PTSD and fratricide that I Did Not Expect. The bad guys are brain-controlling alien slugs, but the thing is that they're not exactly evil by nature, they just can't see/smell/sense anything without controlling something else, so they can't really enjoy life and see and do things without taking over something else. They're still evil, though. It's complicated. Anyway, the point of this ramble (not that it really had one, all I can think of right now is this penguin that my sister showed me going NOOT NOOT for like 4 minutes) is that a lot of stuff seems bad or evil, but there's two sides to every story. That's not actually anything deep, on second thought. Rip.

I feel like the Asian-American part of this story is in its treatment of belonging and wanting to find a home. This makes the ending particularly interesting for me, as Catherine (which is a western name: west=planet, east=space?  Makes sense with the food clues) says she will come back but knows she won't. Is this symbolic of a return to Vietnam? There's also some nature vs nurture things going on in there, although forced amnesia puts the idea of forced cultural assimilation into play.

On math in literature: this is a bit off topic, but one of my favorite things is when sci-fi gives explanations that make sense. Obviously the explanations aren't going to be realistic- the cool stuff isn't realistic- but consistency is key to suspension of disbelief. I'm not really sure where I was going with this point. It's late, and I just watched 3 straight seasons of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The new movie's pretty good too, even thought it's just 2.5 hours of smashy-smashy bang bang.