'I'm Kenyan, don't shoot' - the athlete who says he was duped into the Russian army
Sep. 19th, 2025 11:05 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
“Look, look, I like Brendan Carr,” the senator said. “He’s a good guy. He’s the chairman of the FCC. I work closely with him. But what he said there is dangerous as hell.”
“He says, ‘We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.’ And I got to say, that’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”
You don’t have to fully understand something to enjoy or get value out of it. New York Times bestselling author William Alexander expands this idea to life itself in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Sunward. Read on to see how the world, though sometimes scary and incomprehensible, can also be pretty amazing.
WILLIAM ALEXANDER:
Sunward is space opera about parenting—specifically about parenting robotic kids, and more broadly about parenting kids who are wildly, gloriously, transformatively different from ourselves.
It started as a short story that I wrote for Sunday Morning Transport, when pandemic parenting was much on my mind. My own kids were stuck at home, quarantined from the world but still trying to learn about it via disembodied classrooms. Their experience of grade school was simultaneously contracting and expanding in ways that I had no frame of reference for—except maybe in science fiction. Home was a spacecraft, isolated in the void. We lived in cramped quarters, bouncing off the walls and staring out the windows, but at least we could communicate instantaneously with every other ship and station.
This mix of coziness, claustrophobia, catastrophe, and possibility messed with my head. I tried to squeeze the whole mess into a short story. Then the story grew into a novel—albeit a short one—about parenting juvenile bots in a turbulent solar system.
Science fiction has lots of robotic kids. Some inhabit Pinocchio retellings, others Peter Pan retellings. Some are changelings, embodying old fears alongside newer uncanny valleys. Samuel Butler panicked about mechanical offspring in his 1863 essay “Darwin Among the Machines” (which also predicts eventual war between the machines and humanity). Osamu Tezuka’s beloved Astro Boy broke ground for so much of our science fictional landscape; his 1962 story “Robot Land” includes a robotic uprising set in an amusement park, published eleven years before the movie Westworld.
Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects (which you can find in his second collection Exhalation) critiques the impossible shortcuts that we almost always take in our stories about mechanical people. “Science fiction is filled with artificial beings who, like Athena out of the head of Zeus, spring forth fully formed,” he says in the story notes, “but I don’t believe consciousness actually works that way.” The digients of his novella are infants raised up by the constant attention of caring adults. Intelligent life needs to be nurtured. It takes time. There are no shortcuts.
As adults we become increasingly skilled at pretending—to ourselves, and to everyone else—that we stand on certainties. Kids know better. They are much more accustomed to moving through worlds that they don’t understand, and don’t yet expect to. They find ways to navigate incomprehension.
Science fiction can help us remember how to do the same—not necessarily in its literal predictions of the future, or in its warnings and cautionary tales, but in the way SF fosters an intuitive sense that all of this… <flails at the world like an unhappy muppet> …could be wildly, gloriously, transformatively different.
Sunward: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-eighth issue:
“Demetrios of Bactria as Deva Gobujo and Other Indo-Greek Myths of Japan,” by Lucas Christopoulos.
https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp368_demetrios_of_bactria_deva_gobujo.pdf
ABSTRACT
A particular Buddhist divinity named Gobujo is represented in several Buddhist temples in Japan dating from the eighth century on. Originating in Nara, its distinctive representation remained constant through the centuries in other temples in Japan, characterized by his wearing plate armor like that of Tang dynasty Chinese and Tocharian portrayals, holding a Japanese katana broadsword in his right hand, and having an elephant head positioned on his head. Chapters 1–3 of this article trace the way in which the divinity was created from the image and cult of Demetrios of Bactria, following his conquest of India and because of his support for the Buddhists of India, together with the transmission of his fame through the ages in the Buddhist sutras. In chapter 4, we will also investigate other related myths, cults, and customs in Japan, especially Buddhist theatrical plays, which also originated with the Indo-Greeks and traveled all the way through the Tarim Basin and China before reaching the archipelago at the easternmost point of the Silk Road — that is, Kyushu and Nara.
Lavishly illustrated with rare works of art.
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All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/
Selected readings
Do you routinely have part-worn clothes around?
Never. Clothes are on my body or in the laundry.
0 (0.0%)
Maybe one or two items
2 (33.3%)
Half a dozen outfits in various stages of wear at any given time
3 (50.0%)
My entire clothing stock is spread around my living space in a quantum superposition of dry laundry not put away and various stages of wear
1 (16.7%)
Do you think it's totally normal to have multiple part-worn items lying around the bedroom etc?
Absolutely
3 (42.9%)
It's not ideal but mostly, yes
3 (42.9%)
I wouldn't say normal, but people do it
0 (0.0%)
Why... why would you do that
1 (14.3%)
What's worst
Washing clothes every wear
2 (33.3%)
Wearing clothes for multiple days
0 (0.0%)
Not tweaking your outfit every day for the exact circumstances
0 (0.0%)
Clothes
4 (66.7%)