I want to decide who lives and who dies.

Hmmm... A little extreme. I was thinking about it more from the point of one random person. If you start healing everyone you meet, you start to generate attention and crowds...

Who said it had to be dramatic? Why not make it so he could heal someone across the globe just by thinking about it?

Valid points. I was more thinking about elevator in a hospital / ICU / emergency room. Somewhere that a person rushing through and brushing against / bumping into someone would not be noticed by anyone, including the one healed. Same talent, different application. Trust me - drama or theatrics is the least thing I would want if I could do that.

This also addresses that "I decide who lives or dies" situation. It is quick, not necessarily making a choice for or against anyone based on any predispositions.

Anybody read the 'Worthing Saga' by O.S. Card? It was the first book I read by him, in an out of print edition called 'Worthing Chronicles'. Anyway, the device used by Card in this story is that there are a group of telepaths who ease human suffering telepathically (make a recent death a distant memory, take away pain etcetera). Their progenitor (Worthing) is revived after millenia of being in suspended animation and makes them stop. Most of the book is back story explaining exactly why. Essentialy in the end the reasoning is boiled down to: "without suffering there can be no joy".

An interesting read, and the 'healing at a distance' thought made me think of it. Has anybody else here read this?

I'm not sure I agree with the full line of thinking, but it's an interesting theoretical question: if you could stop suffering, at what point is it wrong to do so?

-Zeke

Then you invite the "Superman complex" where you feel guilty for the people you had the ability to save, but didn't.

I've read most of Card's stuff including the Worthing saga. IIRC, the twist was that the telepaths had been doing the healing for so long that no one alive remembered what pain was like so when the telepaths stopped, there was a major backlash. Overall, I didn't enjoy it as much as the Ender and Alvin Maker series. I felt he was trying to make the point that there are "reasons that God doesn't intervene when he has the power to do so even if we don't understand them". A little too preachy for me. He had another story (Lost Boys) that did the same thing.

Regarding the puzzle box, my first thought was "Dinosaurs...big fecking dinosaurs, the human race needs some more predators running around to put things in perspective". Then the paranoia set in. "Who the hell else has one of these things?!? and I pushed the second button and all the boxes were gone that ever existed now or in the future. I wonder what historical figures would have done with such a device? Say if Ghandi, Oppenheimer, or Tesla were given their own 5 button box.

Uh-oh, this is taking a religious turn.

Quote:
Valid points. I was more thinking about elevator in a hospital / ICU / emergency room. Somewhere that a person rushing through and brushing against / bumping into someone would not be noticed by anyone, including the one healed. Same talent, different application. Trust me - drama or theatrics is the least thing I would want if I could do that.

Pessimistic viewpoint: There are security cameras in hospitals, you know. Do that a few times and you get to spend your remaining life in a cell somewhere, forced to heal whatever ailing dictator the CIA wants to keep in power under threat of torture.

I've heard that the more Card wrote, the more he tried to infuse his writings with his Mormon faith, which is why it comes of preachy. I could be wrong about that, though. Ender's Game and Speaker for the dead both came off as pretty secular to me, though clearly Speaker had more of a preachy edge to it. In Ender he was really just trying to set up a character and not preach anything, and this seemed to work a lot better.

Worthing Chronicles was one of his earliest novels (1983), so the preachiness I think is more from lack of experience as an author. It was heady reading when I was 12 though! I think later on he manages to better segregate his faith from his writing, although I still think you can see it an almost all his works if you know to look. Personally I put Worthing Chronicles just behind Ender's Game in my ranking of Card books (which runs from pretty good/one step below Asimov to pure crap (Hart's Hope, Wyrms, the entire Homecoming series)).

-Zeke

OSC seems to have been a very sick fellow.. good stories, but.. about that preoccupation with children..

Ender's Game is one of my favorite Sci-Fi novels ever. I think it's funny that he basically wrote it (or rather expanded a short story) to do nothing more but set up Ender's character for SFTD. In fact, origionally he was just going to do it as a foward to SFTD but he just couldn't jam the character development into so short a space.

Sometimes the by-product is better than the product itself!

Jeff

Agreed - I think that Ender's Game (the short story) is the best the guy ever wrote; SftD was good, but I could not make myself to wade through the rest (and my expectations were high based on the first encounter). I found the story in one of my all-time-favorute SF tomes, a locally-produced anthology also containing masterpieces like Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon and quite satisfying prose like McIntyre's Dreamsnake. Sigh, like too many of books from my library, I lent it to someone and it never came back...

One of the best things I read recently (last few years) was reading Norton's Anthology of Short Fiction cover to cover. It took a while (and I have to admit I couldn't bring myself to read all of Faulkner's 'The Bear'), but it was so pleasant. 100% good stuff, no clunkers whatsoever.

-Zeke

Thank you for the pointer. I wasn't aware of this Norton series of anthologies and reference works; interesting one-stop-shop source. A bit expensive and Amazon does not ship second-hand stuff to Croatia, but I will try to find it elsewhere.

Heh, browsing around I found another Northon anthology, The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (I don't like books with the word 'book' in their titles) edited by two of my favourite authors, Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler. It seems that most of the reviewers don't particularly appreciate their selection criteria

The Norton books are often used as textbooks in University, and, occasionally, high school, classes.