Truth of the Divine by Best Selling HotDog Girl. Lindsay Ellis
Chapter 17: More of the Same
DHI Book Club Discussion by pibbs
protected by Fair Use, bitch
This chapter starts with Cora's ringtone.
”I’m an asshooooyooyoyoooyoyooole. ”
Denis Leary’s voice jerked Cora back into wakefulness as it piped from her cell phone,
It's Sol wondering where she is. & is in her room demanding to know why Kaveh is free and has an earbud. She pees and gets water. Then this indecipherable shit:
“Enola said Obelus’s three Similars are still here, looking for him. Is that true?”
“ Yes. Obelus’s subordinates returned upon direction from their Autocrat.”
&, like a man, is trying to fix a problem and is curt. Cora, as a woman does, gets sand in her vagina.
If the surveillance apparatus finds him, then his Similars will find and extract him immediately. If you intend to disclose the truth of Obelus to the militarists, I will prevent it. ”
Holy shit , she thought, stung. He did it again. She knew they didn’t have the luxury to squabble, not now, but it was so hard not to be mad at him, not to allow the internal space for how hurt she was by all this. In his alien head, he was only acting logically; really, wasn’t she the problem for having a problem? Obelus wasn’t even in the body that had harmed her so badly anymore. And now Ampersand had taken a mere suggestion about using the American surveillance state to their advantage and assumed it was a threat of betrayal.
Yeah, I bet to Lindsay reason and logic is very alien.
Anyway, Kaveh returns. He has questions.
Why Enola wanna die?
Then this tiresome response.
“Their social structure is basically built around a practice called dynamic fusion bonding in a social group called a phyle ,” said Cora. “It’s sort of . . . nonmonogamous pair bonding. Group bonding, if you will. A phyle contains between five and ten symphyles fusion bonded to each other. As they are exceptionally long-lived, this practice helps maintain social bonds over a very long lifetime, but one quirk of the deal is that they all choose a predetermined date to die, together. So no one dies alone, and no one ever really knows grief. In theory.” To keep things from getting too confusing, she omitted the whole “ Oligarchs aren’t allowed to form phyles ” detail. Trying to keep track of who was connected to whom in the Superorganism’s top caste required vector calculus that she was too tired to explain at the moment.
Fucking look at that mass of pointless words. That's one fucking paragraph!
&: Dude, what do you really want?
Kaveh: To talk to Enola.
&: What's in it for you?
Kaveh: (insert convoluted explanation about aliens and personhood and civil rights)
&: But you make propaganda?
Kaveh: Nah. You get editorial approval.
This is so stupid.
Kaveh: You gonna clean Enola?
&:
I must prioritize locating Obelus. Enola’s well-being is secondary.
Kaveh: Can I wash him up then?
&: Sure, buddy. But don't tell no one where he is, or I'll move.
Kaveh: Cool beans!
&: But you hurt my butt buddies, including Cora, I'll kill you!
Cora omits that last bit. & bugs out.
Kveh: Whoa! Did he teleport.
Cora: That's stupid. He turned invisible and left out the window.
Kaveh: The name Enola Gay is kinda... gay. Can we change it?
She regarded him, suddenly struck by how eager he was to get involved in this. “What do you want, Kaveh?”
He considered, then gave her a cheeky smile. “A Pulitzer.
Sigh.
“What do you really want?”
“Full, natural personhood,” he said, growing serious. “Full human rights. No in-between. You are either a person, or you’re not.”
Double sigh. Nothing ever happens in this book. Just talking and talking and feelings and inner monologue.
“That’s very generous for someone who’s only just met them.”
“It isn’t about them.”
His growing seriousness shook her. “What do you mean?”
“The paradox of anti-government hysteria is it tends to lead to authoritarianism. The arrival of space aliens has not united humanity; they’ve only made us more tribal, more fractured, and it’s only going to get worse in the months and years to come. And now you have these proto-fascists arguing against the very idea of alien personhood and advocating for the creation of a whole different category of person altogether. One might almost say . . . three-fifths of a person.”
Trump bad. Is that the symbolism here? I think Lindsay has gone so far up her own ass, she's gotten completely lost in her own literary devices and doesn;t even know what she's railing about anymore. It's all just dumb.
She curled her lip up in disbelief, almost offended by such a comparison.
“We’ve been down this road before, we Americans,” he said. “Do you see what I’m getting at? Starts with ‘slave’ . . . ends with ‘ery.’”
Oh, shut up, you vapid whore.
“I feel like you’re not listening to me. It’s not about them. I have no doubt Ampersand could protect himself, or hell, leave the country, settle in a less fashy one. Leave the planet, whatever. This isn’t about them.”
“Then what is it about?”
“It’s about us. It’s about how we treat our aliens, our lower classes. If they create a whole new class of person with fewer rights than a natural person, one created specifically for a nonhuman alien, how long do you think it will be before they start applying that to human aliens as well?”
Yawn, Lindsay. Yawn. This is so played out.
...Third Option to become law because it could apply to all aliens. Not just the extraterrestrial kind....
...the first thing that happens is the revocation of hard-won human rights. That’s what happened in Germany when the Nazis came to power....
...That’s what happened during Reconstruction after the Civil War. And that’s what’s happening here now...
This book finally got funny.
And the chapter ends with these “deep” themes .
