The other day I talked with a couple of people who have actually read their copy of NEQUA. It was interesting to get their take on the book.

One person mentioned that he had enjoyed the inclusion of political ideas in NEQUA and that he had always wondered how Kim Stanley Robinson ever convinced himself that political commentary could be hidden in between the lines of his Science Fiction. I commented that he didn’t seem to hide ideas he just revealed them slowly and with sardonic humor. The Years of Rice and Salt instantly came to mind. It was political, but I took it in, as commentary of a spiritual nature. 

I remembered that when I first read The Years of Rice and Salt, I had just come across the idea that we usually view time on a vertical axis rather than on a horizontal plane. We should try thinking about time as a horizontal plane of events, a chronology of "events" that seem to have taken place along side each other. The horizontal idea coupled with a little reincarnation, allowed that we are born into a period just to the right of last time, IF, WE PROCEEDED correctly through last times lessons. 

IF WE HAD FAILED we were reborn to the left of where we had been and took enough of our personality along that there was always a nagging, déjà vu, feeling just behind almost every big decision we made. We lived almost all of the same life over again. It would explain several events in my present life.

"Do you really know?" Yes, I know, I know that this feeling is not just the results of spicy chili or too much wine. I’ve had the feeling, when stone cold sober. A feeling that “last time I really screwed up big time and at this same exact point in my life” It was accompanied  with, whole blood chilling sentences, that reverberated in my head, “No No don’t mess this up again” followed by a calmness, when the new decision was being encompassed and acted out like an actor on the stage.

 I would say that the writing in “The Years of Rice and Salt” indicates that Robinson has also had that same terror.

There are also the statements or a poetic turn of a phrase, that seems to speak specifically to my heart from time to time which seem to me to also be reminders, not just soulful, rather a soul full and spilling over moment.

Such is the line in “Amazing Grace”  -----“which saved a wretch like” or when Ira Tucker steps into “Love Me Like A Rock” with Little Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon.

Don’t ask me why but hearing Fred Sanford (Red Foxx), while courting a lady on Sanford and Sons say, “Nothing like two free birds getting together over a bottle of Ripple” provides some of the same type of heartfelt feeling.