Sunday 18 June 2017

No Ivory Towers

My task is twofold: to blog but also to communicate that bloggers do not post from ivory towers. Real life is happening and even accelerating. However, it is this life that is reflected in fiction, even in fantasy and sf.

Poul Anderson's and SM Stirling's characters respond, whether heroically or discreditably, to crises and catastrophes, as do the inhabitants of Earth Real. This evening, sitting for meditation, I was interrupted by a knock at the door. The Boddhisattva calls. Muslim neighbours were collecting money to help the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire in London. See here and also here.

In Poul Anderson's "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" and History of Technic Civilization and in SM Stirling's Emberverse series, we follow a single family through several generations. Thus, it is not entirely inappropriate to consider the generations of our own families from time to time. See here.

Every day, politicians and populations make decisions that propel humanity into a future probably more fantastic than any imagined by sf writers. We each participate in this history while continuing to read Anderson and Stirling.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And one possible future I ardently hope our politicians and their voters DON'T propel us into is the world seen in Anderson's "Murphy's Hall." A world where mankind made the fatal mistake of turning AWAY from the universe and adopted disastrous policies leading to the human race's EXTINCTION.

Sean