Blog subjects can come out of the blue. SM Stirling's Change survivors include Mormons and that reminded me of something that Poul Anderson wrote:
"I hope my Mormon friends won't mind me saying that their church, like our country, has a grand science fiction flavor about it. That ecclesiastical division into stakes and wards is pure Heinlein, isn't it? And so, by the way, is the raw courage with which their pioneers entered the wilderness."
-Poul Anderson, "The Discovery of the Past" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 182-206 AT p. 199.
Heinlein's Future History includes an American theocracy. We have mentioned Mormons a few times. A few more thoughts came to mind but they are not really relevant to anything else so I will leave it there.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
The interesting thing about the Mormons is that, if they had arisen before the US had expanded west of the Mississippi River, then they might very well had set up a theocratic state in what became the West of the US. How might history have changed if the US had to face a powerful Mormon theocracy blocking further expansion westwards?
Therefore, I'm not surprised that remnants of the Mormons, post-Change, attempted setting up their own state. It was their bad luck to be stuck between the "United States of Boise" and the truly vile C.U.T.
Sean
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