A View From Space

"President Kies Farren Siliom stood on a broad transparent platform, the wide orb of the Earth coming into view beneath him as Axis Euclid rotated. Five hundred square meters of stressed and ion-anchored glass and two layers of traction field lay between the president's conference chamber and empty space; he seemed to stand on a stretch of open nothingness."
-Greg Bear, Eternity (London, 1989), p. 9.

This passage is a visual description. We think that it should be drawn or filmed. But we also appreciate prose, especially since it tells us what a picture cannot, i.e., the real nature of that "...open nothingness."

Under Recovery legislation, mental therapies have been applied on Earth. Belligerents have been pacified and:

"Mental illness and and dysfunction were virtually eradicated." (ibid.)

Meanwhile, I have received a vision of the future from an unexpected quarter. Waiting for a funeral service to begin, I read the introduction to the Anglican hymn book, revised in 2000. Whereas the original version had been used throughout the British Empire, the editors recognized, first, that life had changed and that many issues had become less certain in the twentieth century and, secondly, that this most recently revised edition is to be used in a new century of probably unimaginable social changes - in other words, a science fictional century.