Here is an example from Sandra Miesel's Introduction to Poul Anderson's first future history series:
"1958, the year the H-bombs fell, set human history careening in a new direction. So obvious is this nexus, an entire genre of fantastic fiction asks the question 'What if World War III had not happened?' Although romantics prefer to imagine alternative twentieth centuries as lost paradises of peace and plenty, the opposite is likelier to be true."
-Sandra Miesel, The Psychotechnic League IN Poul Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 1 (Riverdale, NY, 2017), pp. 3-4 AT p. 3.
The opposite is indeed likelier. Unless we were living in a paradise of peace and plenty but didn't realize it? (Some orthodox Trotskyists denied that World War II had ended yet because the aftermath did not conform to Trotsky's expectations.)
I am sure that Sandra Miesel consciously echoed Anderson's Time Patrol series by using the word, "nexus."
11 comments:
Well, compared to the previous century the 21st -has- been an era of peace and plenty, globally speaking. A lower percentage of the world’s population is living in absolute poverty that ever before, economic modernization has spread very widely, and the number of people killed in conflicts has been irregularly declining.
*Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stiring: So far, that is roughly the case. But I would be happier if more people were seriously trying to get OFF this rock! I can't help but think a serious move into space would lead to unprecedented and totally unexpected changes I believe would be mostly good. Which is why I'm so keen on hoping Elon Musk founds his Mars colony.
Paul: And MY pet "what if" of history is wondering what kind of world might now be existing if there had been no Sarajevo Assassination in 1914. There simply would not, could not have been the WW II we had without WW I.
Ad astra! Sean
Mr Stirling,
good news! But bad on other fronts.
Paul.
It depends on what you have the time and resources to worry about. I was the youngest of four brothers, and thought of myself as the dreamy, bookish one who was protected.
Then recently I got to comparing childhoods with some other writers here — all younger than me — and I realized that compared to them, my upbringing was like Conan the Barbarian. These were people who’d never seen people die, had never been in a serious fight, had never been hungry because they couldn’t get food, and I could go on.
Most of the things they worried about seemed utterly unimportant to me — emotional states, feelings of non-acceptance, and so forth. The phrase “first-world problems” came to mind, and I was mentally comparing them to a family friend who’d been arrested by Idi Amin’s secret police and taken away to be fed (literally) to crocodiles, and escaped by jimmying the lock on the trunk (boot) of the car they’d stuffed him in, rolling out onto a dirt road in the night, and sneaking through the bush 250 miles to the Kenyan border.
Not having your self-image validated by society seems a bit... trivial by comparison.
Meditation should help us to see through any self-images - and not reinforce them.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I too am in your age range, and I have to admit most of the "first world" problems bothering younger writers also applied to me. I too never had to endure the worries and dangers you listed. So this was not limited only to people born about 25 years after us.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yeah, depends on circumstances. My father, grandfather and father-in-law were soldiers in an era of war; my mother met people whose close friends had been decapitated by head-hunters on the upper Amazon and her father had been critically injured by diphosgene gas on the Western Front. One of my great-uncles starved to death in the 1930's -- though that was quasi-voluntary: he gave his food away to hungry children.
Hell, I've been charged by a rhino, and clubbed semiconscious and, as far as I could tell, deliberately drowned. (I still have no idea on God's green earth how I survived that one.)
It sounds like some people don't need fiction!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
As you said, I owned my quiet peaceful life to CIRCUMSTANCES. I am very glad you survived being clubbed and nearly drowned!
And I remember you talking about that heroic kinsman and Anglican minister who gave away all his food to the starving. Memory eternal!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: thank you. What's always impressed me most about him was that the made every effort to keep people from knowing what hie did; he swore the children to secrecy about it.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And people only found out about your kinsman's self sacrificing heroism AFTER he died.
Ad astra! Sean
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