Wednesday, 2 October 2024

The 1980's

"The Sensitive Man."

Here is another date reference although not to a specific year. Elena Casimir, FBI agent and temporary ally of Simon Dalgetty, is described as:

"...a child of the strangling dying cities and shadowy family life of the 1980's..." (VII, p. 177)

We saw a dead area of Chicago in "Un-Man" which, according to the Chronology of the Future, is set in 2009, five years before "The Sensitive Man." There are enough clues that a skilled sf writer would be able to compose an historical account of this half century from World War III to the rebuilt world of the early twenty-first century. Some such account provides the background against which we follow the adventures of Un-men, the sensitive man and an FBI agent. Later, there will be Planetary Engineers, Extra-solar colonists, Traders, Coordinators, Nomads and Galactic psychotechnicians - a history of the future.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I think Detroit, in the US, is the closest example I know of for such a dying city. It had a peak population of nearly two million in 1960, but now only about 640,000. This sharp decline was due to many reasons: political, socio, economic.

Ad astra! Sean