Thursday 23 March 2017

Fiction And Reality II

Yesterday was a day of fiction-reality interaction on the blog:

Lancaster, with its rich and varied history and Asian and European immigrants, feels like a precursor of Poul Anderson's Terran Empire - but that is because fiction reflects reality, in this case with international and interracial relationships projected onto an interstellar and inter-species scale;

we enjoy sitting at home safely reading about the exploits of Dominic Flandry while the media reports wars waged by Parliaments and, yesterday, an attack on the British Parliament.

When we read science fiction in the twentieth century, 2017 was part of the future but now, in 2017, it is the present from which humanity might advance to a high tech future like Anderson's Technic History or regress to a post-technological future like SM Stirling's Emberverse. (Stirling's fictional premise is that technology simply stops working but we can imagine several other ways to lose technology either through natural events or through our own actions.)

Today, plans are changing but I might be out in the good weather and not blogging as much.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

The first chapter of THE GAME OF EMPIRE gives us a very good science fictional explication of a futuristic multi-species society. And touches on the ways different religions and ideas might affect those races.

Yes, either natural catastrophes or human folly could force the human race back to a more primitive level of technology.

Sean