Matthew Vickery, President of the Parliament of Man on Avalon, complains about defence spending:
"'When I think of the prosperity that tax money, those resources, could have brought, left in private hands - or the social good it could have done in the public sector - Give you military your heads, and you'd build bases in the fourth dimension to protect us against an invasion from the future.'
"'We are always being invaded by the future,' Ferune said." (p. 490)
First, we notice that Vickery is a skilful politician, able to appeal to two constituencies simultaneously. Secondly, we appreciate the wisdom of Ferune's response. A Zen monk said that, at any moment, we do not know what is going to come up, either without or within. So we need two things: a lot of experience of past situations but also alertness to whatever is new. Vickery's sarcastically intended bases in the fourth dimension are a good concrete metaphor for alertness. We cannot see into the fourth dimension but we can be alert to what comes out of it.
4 comments:
Incidentally, that is a takeoff on something Lord Salisbury said in Britain while he was PM in the 1890's -- that if you gave the military their head, they'd insist on the necessity of bases on the Moon to guard against an invasion from Mars.
That must have been in the air -- it wasn't long before H.G. Wells wrote THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Now THAT was interesting, that Anderson might have been inspired here by something said by Lord Salisbury!
Salisbury did not necessarily need to have read anything by Wells, he might have read Jules Verne's FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, pub. before Wells' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I think both Wells and Salisbury were drawing on something "in the air" of the time.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, such ideas were floating around in Salisbury's time. The later 19th century was when we see some men seriously thinking about scientific space travel. Tsiolkovki's (spelling?) experiments with rocketry in Tsarist Russia about that time also comes to mind.
Ad astra! Sean
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