Monday, December 24, 2012

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

Continuing with the next book Xenocide . It is getting considerably harder to read though I still enjoy inventive concepts with different life cycles, ways of thinking and some general philosophical concepts regarding human nature and how aliens would perceive us. There was one long discussion on what drives humans in their lives in relation to their gender. I though it was very well written and kinda blunt and open without hiding any details. Another one I liked was on human intelligence or rather lack of it.
Religious overtones are getting much stronger and i find them distracting. I don't really see what they do for the story. In some instances I think they make characters less believable. In one instance converted to Christianity piggies make references to Jesus and his sacrifices when talking about themselves. This really sounds stretched coming from the creature on a different planet thousands of years into the future that really never had a place in that religious concept. Piggies are not related to Humans at all.  Piggies own origins might be not entirely natural so I really don't understand  why would Piggies would fall for Christianity beside the fact that author really wanted it to be there.
Luckily, there was no attempt so far to bring Christianity to buggers. I still see authors personal search for answers here as he questions gods in one place but then changes his view in other parts of the book.
I will finish the book though not sure how long that would take. At the same time being a slow read leaves time for thoughts and doodles. So I did bunch of doodles in my tiny sketchbook and played with some of them in Photoshop. Here is one page with more Buggers. I am interested on how they could look considering that they all are the same but different depending on their function in the hive. Soldiers, workers, etc. There should be more functions such as engineers, guards,.. So I doodled thinking of how they could evolve starting from the same place. I like the idea of the some sort of fangs functioning as communication antennas becoming a distinction and the posture and arms for different functions.
Second sketch is the idea of the buggers spaceship. They are very practical so I would think buggers would use most simple shapes but still have some bug-type esthetics with big chunks connected with small links. 



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