Renewing my heart

This quote came from a tweet of Margaret Attwood's that I read.  She was retweeting a comment by Cyndi Soderlund that she was "escaping to Discworld to renew my heart" (after reading the Handmaid's Tale and 1984).

This tweet appeared at the end of Trump's first week as President of the United States, and I understood exactly what she meant by it.  During his first week of office millions of people who'd never read 1984 before did, and millions more re-read The Handmaid's Tale. Both are challenging reading, both cautionary tales about what happens when decency fails and democracy crumbles.  They're important works, and startlingly relevant to this post-truth world we find ourselves in now.

But I'm English and living in the UK, and I have the luxury of being able to walk away from the Twitter and Facebook storms for a while to refresh my soul, and it's something I've had to do more of in the last few weeks than ever before.  Editors, agents, and writers that I follow on social media for their insights into writing and publishing have become extremely political on their feeds overnight.  And sometimes, I need to withdraw from the clamour.

For me, that often means re-reading work that's years old.  I had a spell of reading contemporary women SF writers' worlds recently, and sadly found that I couldn't fall in love with any of them.  The parade of kick-ass women with sassy put-down lines and casual sex lives depressed me.

So where do I go to renew my heart?  To books, of course.   For fantasy, it's Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsinger, a feminist tale of the first girl Harper on Pern.  Or it's to All the Weyrs of Pern, a tale of co-operation and collaboration of humans with AI to achieve an epic and almost-impossible goal.

Or it might be Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War military science fiction series.  I'll follow Ky Vatta as she forms the Space Defence Force and defends the galaxy from marauding pirates, almost single-handedly. 

These are all books with high ideals, a strong moral compass, and a positive mindset, qualities that seem sadly lacking in a lot of the real world right now.  And that's where I can be found renewing my heart when the real world just gets too much.