I’m currently reading fiction by two authors, taking turns between them. One is “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins, and the other is the “People” stories by Zenna Henderson.<\/p>\n
I am enjoying both immensely, yet it has occurred to me that this is an odd pairing. Both are a series of science fiction stories about young people trying to deal with a strange and often frightening world. Yet in many ways they send exactly the opposite message.<\/p>\n
Collins paints the world her characters must face as a brutish and nasty place, one in which growing up is a constant and uncertain struggle for survival. Henderson acknowledges that reality can be treacherous, but effectively says that once we go through our internal struggles to define ourselves — to figure out who we truly are — the world is a beautiful place that is waiting to welcome the full flowering of our being.<\/p>\n
The former says that to survive we must learn how to cloak our true self, and the latter says we must learn how to accept and reveal our true self.<\/p>\n
I wonder whether the difference is partly due to a cultural shift over the decades. Henderson was writing mainly in the early fifties to the mid sixties. Collins is, of course, writing her stories now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m currently reading fiction by two authors, taking turns between them. One is “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins, and the other is the “People” stories by Zenna Henderson. I am enjoying both immensely, yet it has occurred to me that this is an odd pairing. Both are a series of science fiction stories about … Continue reading “Current reading”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8153"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8153"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8156,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8153\/revisions\/8156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}