The Stormseekers

We are united by humanity but divided by conflicting interests and ideas. Even someone suspected of genocide has a right to a trial, not to torture or to summary execution.

Sometimes common humanity is recognized across the divisions. My daughter, Aileen, encountered some British National Party leafleters and informed them in no uncertain terms that her mother and paternal grandmother were from the two parts of Ireland. Later, when I ran into the same BNPers, one of them told me, "She's grand, that Irish lass!"

I was reminded of this when, in Poul Anderson's Genesis, PART ONE, V, Laurinda Ashcroft, a human-AI interface, was attracted to a Stormseeker. Terra Central proposes ways to counteract the imminent Ice Age. A Stormseeker, addressing a gathering of banner-waving misfits, misanthropes, technophobes, romantics and irrationalists, as Laurinda calls them, says:

"'...let the Ice come..." (p. 43);
in the Pleistocene, life was rich and vigorous and man was creative and free;
when the glaciers bury Terra Central, then men will remake their destinies.

"And...young, blond, tall, broad-shouldered, totally male, how beautiful the speaker was!" (ibid.)

See Issues In Laurinda's Period.