Wednesday 5 April 2017

River Bend Road

SM Stirling, A Meeting At Corvallis (New York, 2007), Chapter Twelve, p. 309.

Since, in Change Year 9, a battle is about to be fought near River Bend Road, Salem, I thought that it was appropriate to find an image of the real place - or at least close to it. This picture advertises an address on River Bend Lane. When a place is fictional like, e.g., Poul Anderson's Archopolis, there cannot be any photographs of it although there might be magazine or book cover illustrations.

Ten years of weather and floods have left drifts of silt where grass and brush now grow on the road. Further down the river, in the former city, some buildings have been ruined, burned, overgrown and flooded! As Mike Havel observes, such scenes will always haunt those like him who remember the Change but will then become ancient ruins like the Pyramids to subsequent generations.

Is something like this in the future of our civilization?

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Yes, something like the ruins you commented on is going to happen to our civilization as well. Because no merely mortal human civilization can last forever. And it's more likely than not to include violent and massive destruction as well.

That's another reason for getting OFF this rock as fast as possible! It's FOLLY to persist in keeping all our eggs in the only basket we have, planet Earth.

Sean