in which I fail at thinking up an appropriate title...

[llwheeler]

I had a lovely weekend. My cousin's wedding was gorgeous; the service was held out on a terrace and the weather was everything they could have wished for. It was a great time. The rest of the weekend was spent catching up with family, which means lots of drinks, lots of stories, and lots of bad jokes. Good times.

What I'd more like to talk about in

Comments

I never thought of it that way

[anonymous]

Hi Lillian. I'm glad that you liked the book. I find it particularly interesting that Khellus' machinations resonated with you in this way, because I hadn't really considered him from this perspective before. I'm sure lots of readers look at Khellus and see a fantastic, super-human character; and in many ways, he is. But his ability to read and manipulate people can be uncannily evinced by many a social engineer irl.

Khellus thus has greater contemporary relevance than he may appear to at first glance. Bakker might have thought of him as the epitome of immorality according to Kant's categorical imperative, because he treats people as means rather than as ends-in-themselves (this is why lying is a violation of said imperative). And that fact that the encounter between him and Cnaiür parallels your own life experience lends even more weight to such an interpretation.

Anyway, what I think that this demonstrates is that using people as means rather than treating them as ends is destructive and dehumanizing for everyone, and many people are too dismissive of "womanizer" as a category simply because it is gender-specific; they don't realize that people of either sex can be used or manipulated, especially in romantic relationships, and the "womanizer" is merely a particularly salient manifestation of this fact.

-Derek

Re: I never thought of it that way

[llwheeler]

Derek,

Thanks for your comment. I particularly like and agree with your last paragraph. As for contemporary relevance, I think that any piece of art which is worth recommending to another must be relevant, regardless of whether it's "just a fantasy" or any other genre that gets poo-pooed in mainstream circles.

-Lillian