Damn it, the heat is practically melting my brain. It’s been near 100 degrees all weekend, and as humid as a tropical rainforest. Which means that by the time I get home it’s like 120 degrees inside my apartment and disgustingly moist.

It’s as if the damned summers from the Midwest have come to San Diego to haunt me.

My kingdom for some A/C.

But I’m really digging this book I’m reading, entitled The Snow Queen. These kinds of stories—hard science fiction melded together with cutting edge post-modern/post-colonial critical analysis—always arrest my imagination. Joan Vinge tackles both imperialism and misogyny. Other authors who successfully pull this off that I’ve read are Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler. Richard K Morgan does a fine job as well in his Takeshi Kovacs novels. Charlie Stross plays with this terrority too. And wwhat thetse writers do for science fiction, China Miéville has done for fantasy.

The idea of interstellar empires has fascinated me, and as a child of the new diaspora of globalization, I am fascinated by the speculations and the possible prophecies writers imagine about what will happen to the people on the periphery. The minorities, the folks on the far end of the tech gap, the disempowered, and the underserved. The sociopolitical dynamics of technology interest me as much as the technology itself.

I find myself looking up to the sky, with the stars drowned out by the artificial glow of the sodium and fluorescent lights of the city, seemingly forever out of reach.

Will we even return to the moon in my lifetime, much less make it to Mars, much less make it beyond our heliopause? (Although the Pioneer and Voyager probes will eventually reach interstellar space.)

But not all new worlds are external worlds floating around in the cosmos, and I realize that I’ve left much territory in my soul completely fallow. As I learn to strip away the doubts and misgivings from the past that weigh me down so much, I’m finding that the world isn’t such a terrible place after all (although there is much in it that is terrible) and maybe, just maybe, I’ll find a little piece of the universe that I can call my own.

Enlightenment? Not quite.

But every journey starts with the first step, as the cliché goes.