Friday 3 September 2021

Enclaves

In Coventry, in Robert Heinlein's Future History, there are three sections, for extreme individualists, for extreme statists and for Angels of the Lord. That third group has a reigning Prophet Incarnate in direct line of succession from the First Prophet, Nehemiah Scudder.

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, there is a Reservation where people live in the old, chaotic, pre-Fordian way with worship of deities including Jesus and women getting pregnant and giving birth. Huxley said in an Introduction to a later edition that, if he had written the book at that later date, then the Reservation would have included a small community pursuing sanity which, for Huxley, would be through mysticism.

I think that Huxley's point can also be made about the communities on the cybercosm-ruled Earth in Poul Anderson's The Star Are Also Fire. Some of these communities engage in senseless violence. Sure. But some others would value and seek sanity.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And there's also the exile planet we see occasional mention of in Anderson's Time Patrol stories, where temporal criminals captured by the Patrol would be banished. That too was an enclave.

One point I thought of just now is that we don't know if time criminals sent to the exile planet were either sentenced for life there or for varying lengths of time. It probably depended on the gravity of their crimes.

Ad astra! Sean