"He told me, as well as he was able. But no words, in 1951, could have conveyed what I have since experienced, that wild, eerie, hilarious, terrifying, grotesque, mind-bending assault upon every sense and common sense which is Telegraph Avenue at the close of the seventh decade of the twentieth century."
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), IV, p. 41.
The 1960s had been a legend when Wanda Tamberly was growing up. Walking along Telegraph Avenue in 1965, she is disappointed by scruffiness, pretentiousness and self-righteousness. Handed a pompous peace leaflet, she smiles sweetly and identifies herself as a fascist warmonger. She is not and should not call herself that even ironically.
When, in 2319, Carl Farness says that he and his wife had grown up in the 1960s and '70s, a period of sexual revolution, Doctor Kwei-fei Mendoza smiles grimly and replies that fashions come and go.
Finally:
"That Everard had been recruited in New York, A.D. 1954, and Nomura in San Francisco, 1972, ought to make scant difference. The upheavals of that generation were bubble pops against what had happened before and what would happen after."
-Poul Anderson, "Gibraltar Falls" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 113-128 AT p. 114.
However, Nomura is twenty five, a new recruit, whereas Everard is of an unknown age and possibly by now more foreign to Nomura than someone born two millennia later than either of them.
3 comments:
Paul:
Spider Robinson wrote a short story, "The Time-Traveler," about a fellow who traveled from February 1963 ten years into the future, at a rate of one second per second, by the means of being locked up incommunicado in a banana republic's prison. He found 1973 very changed from the world he'd known just ten years before.
Allan Cole and Chris Bunch jointly wrote a novel, Freedom Bird. At the beginning, it has the usual disclaimer about its characters being fictitious, etc. Well, not quite the usual. Cole and Bunch stated that fictional persons, events, and places included "Ronald Reagan, LSD25, ... the entire Year of 1967, the City of San Francisco and the State of California."
Right...
Kaor, Paul and DAVID!
About the only thing I can say here is that I would have appreciated Wanda Tamberly's sardonic sense of humor and agreed with Dr. Mendoza. Also, the Sixties and Seventies of the 20th century was a bad time for the US.
Sean
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