More than one blog posted here at Ascribe has dealt with the importance of reading books. How reading books makes one a good writer. So much enrichment: escape, inspiration, entertainment, information, healing – all the “tools” someone who hopes to one day write a good book needs.
Then there are the books you don’t really want to read, but know you should. The books that tell the stories of the Other, the disenfranchised, the exploited, of terrible events, injustices, of awful lives lived far away, of miseries lived just down the street. The books that teach hard lessons.
I’m presently reading a book my friend James recommended titled, Rare Earth. It’s co-authored by Peter Ward, Professor of Geological Sciences and Curator of Paleontology at U of Washington, and Donald Brownlee, Professor of Astronomy from the same university.
Briefly, the two posit that while organisms like microbes are very likely abundant across the galaxies, advanced life is another story. For a long-time devotée of the Star Trek vision of civilizations just waiting out there to be discovered, this is rather tragic. Worse, they go into great detail with astrobiology to explain just what a lucky crapshoot it was for life to form on our little blue planet in the first place, never mind evolving into multicellular creatures with tissues and organs.
As I keep reading and consider their data – that likely we are alone in the universe, after all – I find myself saddened by all the divisiveness on our tiny raft among the shining billions. I appreciate the pun of the title, Rare Earth, as the authors explain the unlikely geological, astronomical and biological forces that combined to allow life to evolve here.
I hope at the end of this book my takeaway will not be frightened by the fragile hold we have on a small world surrounded by cold, dark, and sterile outer space. I hope my understanding of how very lucky we are to even exist will speak to my writing, in whatever genre I choose to write. I hope that I will be able to convey the urgency we need to get along, to put made-up divisiveness aside. That in some short story or other they could recognize the urgent need to act in terms of our handling of resources and treating each other better.
I hope I will be able to, maybe in a poem one day, get people to see how much we have in common, in our shared biology and our dependence on the delicate balance our beautiful planet has been maintaining to keep a livable environment for all us animals safe in our quadrant of a silent outer space.
That would make me a good writer, indeed.
