Aug 31, 2025
"Did you try razing their homeworld?" "No. Got the Jaguars', though. Well- we sacked it, I suppose, not really 'razed' per se."
(Inspired by a chat with @frogblast-the-ventcore.)
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"Did you try razing their homeworld?" "No. Got the Jaguars', though. Well- we sacked it, I suppose, not really 'razed' per se."
(Inspired by a chat with @frogblast-the-ventcore.)
A happy Sixth of June to megalomaniacs everywhere regardless of the number of eyes they may be in possession of.
The location:
A ComStar monastery, some time in the 3040s or so. It's late at night, the place is a dappled mixture of cool, wind-brushed darkness and pools of fluorescent lights where the moths and bugs of this world congregate in swarms. Hardly a sound except the ever-present whir of electronics and the footfalls of patrolling Com Guard.
All who have the privilege of sleeping now are taking full advantage of it- busy is the life for the scions of Blake -except for one. Alone in his monkish cell, Frederick Steiner continues the greatest work of his life, typing away fervently at the next chapter of his immortal magnum opus, featuring what he aims to make remembered as the greatest character ever put to the pages of fiction: Anastatius Focht and the Methods of Pragmatism.
George Steiner as a child and his father. This is very important.
I must have been six years old or something and heard a conversation in Paris, and I think I asked him what the difference was between a stock and a bond or a bank and a burse. And he said, 'I know so that you will never get the answer.' He had decided then that he would make possible for me to be a scholar or a writer. That the purpose of his life was that I should not know such nonsense. And that I should never lose my time with something that idiotic. And this is a deeply ambiguous position because to be a leading - and he was - international investment banker and to feel that this is only an instrument so that your son - or daughter, I have a sister - should not know about that world...now that I am myself getting old and have children, I know this is an ambiguous and in some ways self-destructive position. But it made my life possible.
George Steiner in this interview about his father, Frederick Steiner.