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Pluto: Melodrama Unleashed, Part III
Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry. (TV series, 1966–69, aka Star Trek: The Original Series.) Love’s Reflection by Carol North. (Awe-Struck E-Books Inc., awe-struck.net, 2008.) Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer. (Tor Paperback, April, 2007.) Moonstruck by Susan Grant. (Harlequin, May, 2008.) Captain’s Fury, Codex Alera 4, by Jim Butcher. (Ace Hardcover, December, 2007.) Readers of this column are familiar with the Mirror Initiation, the ritual where you see yourself, truly, as you really are. It’s usually a shock like no other. It cuts through all the white lies and evasions you tell yourself to rationalize your reprehensible behavior. And it triggers true change. For two months now, we’ve been talking about Pluto as the inexorable force for change, mostly as the multi-generational force, very impersonal, a juggernaut the individual can’t stop or deflect. But Pluto has a personal effect on individual lives, too. You can see this most clearly by watching the phases your life goes through as Pluto transits a given house. What Pluto means to you can be seen in your natal chart by sign, house, and aspect analysis combined with how your focus of attention changes as Pluto transits your houses. Who you are may be most clearly revealed by Sun, Moon and ascendant, but the resources you have to call on show in the transits of the slow, inexorable, cumulative, sometimes explosive manifestation of Plutonian influence. So Pluto joins the individual to the nation and even world civilization, and authorities suggest that the position of Pluto in your natal chart is a clue to your recent past life. Pluto represents forces, trends, movements, tides, cycles that are so huge we can’t see them because we live inside one part of one of them. Pluto shapes things, not just in a single 280 year circle around the Sun, but in multiples of that. Pluto’s waves of change last thousands of years. Living memory can’t connect the dots of that pattern. Even recorded history doesn’t note the bits and pieces that belong to a coherent pattern ruled by Pluto because the recorders, too, don’t live long enough to see the pattern. As far as I know, only one cognitive function of humanity can connect those dots and reveal Pluto’s pattern. Art. Most specifically, the art of fiction. As I’ve discussed in this column in 1994 to 1997, art is a product of what the artist discovers when traversing the astral plane. The artist’s higher mind encompasses a vision and brings it back to try to convey it to us within our limited perspective. The view from the astral is wide enough and deep enough to let the artist discern a pattern of change as big as the one Pluto signifies. Thus fiction, and especially science fiction and fantasy, is the tool of choice for an artist who wants to paint us a picture bigger than our personal reality. Though the stories of SF, Fantasy, SF-Romance or Fantasy-Romance may be Saturn or Neptune driven, with plots that are Mars or Uranus driven, the backgrounding, the world building and the art of integrating the background with the characters, paints a Plutonian picture. Sometimes that Plutonian element in a novel or TV show is hard to see. It’s supposed to be hard, its extra value delivered upon re-reading or re-viewing. The artist shows us our own world from a new perspective. That’s why Star Trek (the original series) doesn’t look so great today, and why even the plots don’t have much meaning to younger people today. That show was about the 1960s (Pluto in Virgo), before Women’s Lib, during Martin Luther King’s campaign that started in Selma, Alabama. The results of that change hadn’t materialized yet. Star Trek was about making that change happen. On Star Trek, a TV network first broadcast a black woman kissing a white man. Gene Roddenberry had to fight the networks over that one scene. He won. He had a vision. He showed us the future. Art holds up a mirror to reflect back at us the civilization we are embedded in. We see not only ourselves, but the external values we have internalized. Some people thrill to the sight; others shun it. Most people live their lives without formulating a coherent personal philosophy (Jupiter). They “believe” contradictory things and don’t try to resolve them. Most people believe they don’t have a philosophy, but everyone has a Jupiter and ultimately it rules a part of our lives. Fiction can show you this mystical mirror that will reflect back at you the philosophy you have hidden in your subconscious. What books interest you? What characters do you respond to? What makes you cry, laugh, scream? Try these books for the view in that mystical mirror. Love’s Reflection by Carol North, an e-book in all formats from Awe-Struck E-Books Inc. Awe-Struck publishes top quality writing that satisfies all my criteria for excellence. Love’s Reflection is a nifty tale of a nerdy scientist who creates a robot to be the woman of his dreams, the spitting image of his favorite movie star. Then the robot is mistaken for the star, and the star finds out about it. This is a good read about what defines humanity and individualities.
Rollback, by Robert J. Sawyer, which shows us the long perspective on what makes for a good life. Set in 2048 (when Pluto will be in Pisces), a woman who decoded the first message from the stars received by the SETI project is dying of old age (twelfth house), happy with her husband who is also nearing his end. A new message arrives, but nobody can read it. A billionaire offers them both a “rollback”—rejuvenating them to their thirties—if she’ll decode the new message. They accept, but her rollback doesn’t work while his does, and he becomes young and lusty once again, taking up with a young SETI astronomer while she struggles to decode the message using her forgetful old brain. Rollback is a beautiful piece of SF about old-love and young-love ripening when Sawyer reveals the content of the new message and the huge Plutonian change it will make in our world. Susan Grant’s SF-Romance, Moonstruck, A Tale of the Borderlands, explores the ways in which losing virginity changes a person and what it means to be the only virgin on a starship full of tough customers. She shows us how a jaded captain used to “only sex” changes when she falls in love for the second time in her life, and discovers the unique experience of making love instead of “just sex.” Oh, Star Trek fans will love Grant’s Borderlands series. Admiral Brit Bander, starship captain, is a woman with a sexual appetite and a lust for definitive action. She carries a huge emotional load that demands obsessive (Pluto) behavior. Now, that has to change because she’s been given a new ship to command and a First Officer (you guessed it) who was her enemy, her nemesis, the symbol of all that’s despicable in her world. But that was before the war ended. The Borderlands universe will be familiar to some of Grant’s fans, but Moonstruck is an independent study in the reconstruction (Pluto) of a society fragmented for centuries by war (Pluto). This novel gently introduces a universe so fraught with complexity you will live in it for years to come. In fact, the Borderlands saga may reflect the turmoil in the Middle East as Star Trek did Viet Nam. It is nation building seen from within. But Grant shows us how it is that the glue that holds the universe together is love. Grant takes us on a love-venture (loventure?), not so much a “romance.” We delve into a relationship forbidden by religious and cultural rules, forbidden by the common sense rule of the Service that sexual relationships up and down the chain of command do more harm than good, and forbidden by emotional rules about sleeping with the enemy. This starship captain has few qualms about “just sex” with anything male, enemies included (remind you of James Kirk?). So no harm done? Right? Uh-oh. But then it dawns on her that it isn’t “just sex.” Read Moonstruck—even if romance isn’t your field. This one is one of those mystical mirrors in which you can see your world, and your place in it, from a new perspective. I have not reviewed the first three books of Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series because I have a very hard time getting “into” novels tht switch point of view wildly. It’s like looking into a beveled mirror reflecting patchwork bits this way and that—making no pattern I can discern. So I opened Butcher’s fourth Alera novel, Captain’s Fury with trepidation—then couldn’t put it down! He’s mastered point of view craft! The switches now make sense and follow the story line. Even without reading the previous novels in this tightly knit series, this one makes sense. It’s a Roman Empire type novel, where one heroic legion officer is given a punishment assignment, to hold a border fort against impossible odds with no reinforcements or equipment. Politically, he’s been assigned to die. His disobedience causes all sorts of political havoc which he ignores. He’s too busy studying the enemy and figuring out how to solve the problem the enemy poses for the sake of the Empire, rather than simply killing them all off which would harm the Empire.. He’s changing the structure of his world.
Send books for review in this column to: Jacqueline Lichtenberg, email jl@simegen.com for instructions. |
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