Readers write: Hope for the future, blustery weather, and animal rights
Letters to the editor for the Feb. 17, 2020 weekly magazine. Readers discuss animal rights, science fiction writers, blustery weather, and more.
Hope for the future
I enjoyed the cover story titled “The world in 2050” in the Dec. 30, 2019 & Jan. 6, 2020 Monitor Weekly, which covered speculative and science fiction. People often dismiss these genres as unimportant or repetitive, but in fact, science fiction authors are experimenting with the possibilities of the future. That probably explains why their viewpoints are often dystopian. But most also end in hope or at least the chance of survival.
Robert A. Heinlein, for example, knew the limits of life in space. No air or water means no life.
Ursula K. Le Guin had so many ideas on the state of the world. In “The Lathe of Heaven,” a character whose dreams become reality is still challenged by the racism, lack of resources, environmental problems, and overpopulation issues that affect us all.
John Scalzi, who writes very humorously and yet also seriously about humanity, has given us “Old Man’s War,” in which regenerated humans get to feel alive again and fight aliens – then realize that maybe their situation isn’t quite so simple.
But all these authors offer a chance at survival. We may still change the future if we can save ourselves. It’s hard to have happy endings when the world is slowly being destroyed by warfare and neglect.
Linda Combs
Converse, Texas
Blustery weather
Murr Brewster’s Jan. 27 Home Forum essay, “Me, my garbage cans, and the spinning of the globe,” is wonderful – more, please, from this writer. Thanks from a former Kansas girl who loved the power of a windy, thundering storm! (Lovely follow with Melissa Mohr’s In a Word column on folderol, too!)
Carolyn Leigh
Tucson, Arizona
Animal rights
Regarding “Property or person? How animal rights could open a new moral frontier” in the Dec. 16 Monitor Weekly:
Where would it lead if animals gain rights as people under the law? Will a man who keeps a service animal be convicted of slavery? If a dog kills another dog, must it be convicted by jury and sentenced to life imprisonment? Will chimpanzees be able to own and inherit property?
Judges are bound to class more and more animals as sentient enough to be, as discussed in the article, “nonhuman person[s].” There are ways to avoid mistreatment of animals without the fiasco of designating them as people, or demeaning humans by classing them as “animals,” as this article does.
John Juedes
Yucaipa, California