Friday 4 March 2022

The End

Right now several timelines are running in parallel in my brain: Wellsian, Heinleinian and Andersonian future histories and our timeline in which I have lived so far from 1949 until 2022, roughly corresponding to the first half of Robert Heinlein's Future History Chart. Given the recent IPCC report, I do not expect our civilization to last beyond the end of this century.

Wells's Time Traveler:

"...thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end."
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), EPILOGUE, p. 101.

In Heinlein's "The Year of the Jackpot," everything that can go wrong does, culminating in the Sun exploding and chopping off the concluding sentence.

Poul Anderson wrote In Memoriam.

Anderson's Ythrians see the shadow of God the Hunter across the future.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And the stunning incompetence and bungling of "Josip" and his Democrats gives all too ample grounds for pessimism!

Ad astra! Sean