¡John Kessel escribió!

Uy, ¡qué felicidad!. Lea:


Dear Maria Jose,

Here is the brief statement I wrote about land mines. I hope it is useful to you.

Take very good care of yourself and those you love.

John K

PS: As I write this the Colombian singer Juanes is on my TV at the New York Thanksgiving Day parade.






As a science fiction writer, I have spent much time in my life thinking about the ingenious creations of the human race. Human beings, these curious apes, like to tinker with things. We really are quite extraordinary creatures, miraculous in our ability to make new things, things that would never be seen in a state of nature.

This has led to marvelous inventions that have made our lives better. In the room where I am sitting as I type this are a hundred objects created through the intense, applied mechanical ingenuity of thousands of people. The electric lights. The computer on which I write these words. The iPod that contains thousands of hours of music. The books that I have read and studied for most of my life. The cell phone beside my keyboard.

One of the other ingenious things men have created is the land mine. One can recognize in the creation of these weapons the same creativity and cleverness that has built so much of our modern world. This is the dark side of that cleverness, the shadow of our monkey intelligence put in service of our apelike violence.

Land mines kill and maim many innocent people. Their indiscriminate use is a threat to people decades after the conflict that caused their dispersal is forgotten. Through a terrible irony children, because they can be attracted to these small, interesting objects, are particularly vulnerable. I wish they had never been invented.

The legacy of war is pain and death, and any state that uses such weapons has a moral obligation to clear them after the conflict is over. Better still, land mines should be banned, along with all the other ingenious methods that human beings, we clever, homicidal apes, have created to destroy each other.

John Kessel
Raleigh, NC, USA


Para saber quién es John Kessel: http://encuentrofractal.com/invitados/john/