Wednesday, 22 March 2023

Three Confrontations

If Earth alone were Fallen, in the theological sense, then the summit of scientific achievement, space travel, would be a way to spread Terrestrial evil to sinless worlds! CS Lewis believed precisely that whereas Poul Anderson's Fr. Axor finds:

"'...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.
at

1 comment:

  1. Sean M. Brooks22 March 2023 at 17:21

    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

    ReplyDelete