Last night I read the new Sirenia Digest which contained "PASSAGE OF VENUS IN FRONT OF THE SUN", a new story from Caitlin R. Kiernan. It's good, beginning with sort of a drowsy mood and becoming a story about a very gentle alien invasion of Earth.
The aliens are primarily concerned with stories, their society somehow not being able to generate such things. The discussion then becomes about censorship and the destruction of works of fiction. It's a timely topic when people from both political sides these days have started to endorse the destruction of texts. Caitlin makes reference to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Francois Truffaut's film adaptation of the book. I think the two great works to read on the topic are that and Milton's Areopagitica. Milton gives the devil his due (as usual) and famously describes books as living things, capable of exerting real influence on people's minds. But he just as famously said that he cannot praise a "cloistered virtue", a person whose virtue is due entirely to never having been exposed to challenging ideas. The fact that people are so quick to fear works of fiction these days is surely a sign of rampant cowardice, cowardice being something that used to be regarded as a negative trait.
"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister'd vertue, unexercis'd & unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary." - John Milton
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