Conversation Above A Bookshop

 

"The Saturn Game," the opening instalment of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, is set around 2055 and describes the exploration of the outer Solar System. Is that where we are going to be thirty years hence?

I trust Andrea's judgement up to a point so - provisional predictions from this afternoon's conversation:

Civil war in the US and the UK in 2028?

We have passed some ecological tipping points so - a billion dead in thirty years?

The species will survive but will have to rebuild?

Our Chaos will last longer than that of the Technic History?

In 1960's sf, most futures had spaceships in the twenty-first century, a few had post-nuclear-war survival. Anderson, of course, had both and also combined them. Maybe our future, later in this century, is post-ecological-catastrophe survival? I am glad to have a daughter and granddaughter now but wonder what they will have to endure.

"'Oh, God, the young, the poor young!'"

-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), p. 6.

"'The tough and lucky will survive...'" (ibid.)

Poul Anderson and his fictional relative, Robert Anderson, discuss:

"...the probable shape of the future..." (ibid.)

We remember HG Wells' title: The Shape Of Things To Come. That is always on our minds both in sf and in reality.