How do you know each other?
reosto tablets The stage is thus set for a comedy, but Kalfus's comedy of ideas is as dry as the scorched desert winds, and as black as the pitch poured into the Equilateral's trenches. By means of a?contemporaneous, first-person-plural narration ??? "We're surprised every time" by the Muslim call to prayer, they relate near the beginning ??? Kalfus keeps imaginative intellectual sympathy and devastating retrospective irony in miraculous equipoise. This can work to?purely comic effect ??? as when the narrators and the characters imagine that the vastly more advanced Martians must be using really enormous steam engines ??? and also in a more troubling vein, when the reader is led through the superficially plausible arguments of social Darwinism that we know later led to the 20th-century's racist eugenics. At one point Kalfus effects a devastating dramatisation of the mind's capacity for?intellectual self-justification, when Thayer is explaining to himself the necessity for a certain brutal action. On?Mars, the professor reassures himself, global conflict must have ended "only through the application of?the universal laws of evolution and natural selection, when the superior and inferior specimens of the Martian race diverged into separate species, as is inevitable on Earth. A race of savants and a race of slaves ???"