Thursday 31 August 2017

Oblique Comments

Characters in fictional futures comment on their pasts, thus enabling their author to comment obliquely on our present, e.g.:

"'Bad for human folk to live as the ancients did, and worse for the land and the other kindreds.'"
-SM Stirling, The Given Sacrifice (New York, 2014), Chapter Twenty-One, p. 434.

Characters in alternative history fiction can comment on what would to them be an alternative history, e.g., what might have happened if Einstein and Planck had not collaborated but had continued to work independently? For Poul Anderson's speculative answer, see here.

One of Alan Moore's "Watchmen" comments that, if the US had not won in Vietnam, then it would have gone mad as a nation...

I can remember similar oblique remarks in works by Heinlein and Asimov but I am sure that blog readers can think of others.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Dang, I know I read many of these "oblique" comments in the works of Anderson and Stirling. When done well readers simply accept them and hurry to find out what happened next. Boiled down, I seldom gave PARTICULAR notice to these oblique comments.

Alan Moore's "Watchman" was all too correct! The Sixties and Seventies were bad years for the US. And if we had not bungled the war in Vietnam so badly, those bad years might have been avoided.

Sean