Eric Klein (5)

I got gifted this earlier this year in exchange for a review. Having caught up on my review reading after Worldcon and the Hugo packet, I finally got around to reading it.

The book is a multi-author anthology about caring; both for children and for those in their twilight years. As much as anything, it's about needing to change (modern) society so that social capital is valued as much as (if not more than) financial capital - after all, what happens to financial capital when social capital show more is neglected?

Some of the stories come across as more worthy than others, and hence are on the dull or heavy-handed moralistic side, others have a lighter touch and are much more readable. One story was (to my mind) rather pointless; I got very little idea of the society and hence didn't make sense of the point of the story. Having said that, it may have been a translation issue.

My main issue is that the premise of the book doesn't take into account the different empathy levels that people have. Like so much in this mind space, the assumption is that everyone has the same empathic desires, but in fact this is not true, and this needs to be taken into account when designing such a society and how social capital is transferred between people within the society.

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