"'...that every oxygen-breathing species ever encountered is in no state of grace, but prone to sin, error, and death.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 189-453 AT CHAPTER ONE, p. 209.
Did all Fall independently or was there some single galactic Original Sin?
Lewis' Elwin Ransom confronts a demonically possessed evil scientist on Venus. Brian Aldiss' Joe Bodeland confronts both Frankenstein and his monster when nuclear war disrupts time itself. In Anderson's Genesis, an extra-solar intelligence confronts the Terrestrial intelligence which has deliberately re-created "'...the ancient ape...'" (p. 245)
Three very different imaginative representations of crucial issues about the future of science and mankind.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I am inclined to think individual intelligent races fall or not fall independently of one another. That seems to make sense because I don't think all intelligent species will evolve to where they will get tested at the same time.
Ad astra! Sean
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