COVID-19 update and Kipling
Jul. 11th, 2021 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anna_wingBack in lockdown again, no leaving the house except for work and groceries. Much of this is being ignored, because people have to eat, but least they're wearing masks.
My friends of Asian extraction living or working in European countries are grimly hunkering down in face of the locals' mad insistence upon lifting all mask and distancing restrictions, just so that they can get drunk en masse, wander about breeding new variants, and kill yet more of their fellow-citizens. My friends are all vaccinated, but none of them fancies catching it again, even if the likelihood of a serious case is much lower. We're none of us spring chickens any more, and some are over 60.
I am feeling a little tetchy about it all.
It is not widely known, but among Rudyard Kipling's short stories are some extraordinary works of science fiction, though from this end of the Trousers of Time they read as perfect steampunk. Like the rest of his work, they are rather more complex than people who dismiss him as a hidebound imperialist (usually without reading him) think. I consider him one of the great minor poets, myself, even if he was a bit off about the geography of Myanmar.
https://americanliterature.com/author/rudyard-kipling/short-story/as-easy-as-abc "As Easy As ABC"
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29135/29135-h/29135-h.htm "With The Night Mail"
My friends of Asian extraction living or working in European countries are grimly hunkering down in face of the locals' mad insistence upon lifting all mask and distancing restrictions, just so that they can get drunk en masse, wander about breeding new variants, and kill yet more of their fellow-citizens. My friends are all vaccinated, but none of them fancies catching it again, even if the likelihood of a serious case is much lower. We're none of us spring chickens any more, and some are over 60.
I am feeling a little tetchy about it all.
It is not widely known, but among Rudyard Kipling's short stories are some extraordinary works of science fiction, though from this end of the Trousers of Time they read as perfect steampunk. Like the rest of his work, they are rather more complex than people who dismiss him as a hidebound imperialist (usually without reading him) think. I consider him one of the great minor poets, myself, even if he was a bit off about the geography of Myanmar.
https://americanliterature.com/author/rudyard-kipling/short-story/as-easy-as-abc "As Easy As ABC"
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29135/29135-h/29135-h.htm "With The Night Mail"
no subject
Date: 2021-07-11 08:01 am (UTC)That is a reasonable feeling. I came to this post directly from a similar conversation with
I don't have anything especially intelligent to say about Kipling's science fiction at the moment except that I am glad you like it; I especially love the worldbuilding of the magazine around "With the Night Mail." I fell very sharply into his poetry in 2006 and it's turned up in a whole bunch of places since.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-12 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-11 11:07 am (UTC)Yeah, I'm just about the only person wearing a mask in the grocery stores these days. The deaths don't seem real to them if they don't happen right there and then.