Earth is dead but the Sun, Moon and stars are unchanged and Donnan reflects:
"...how little difference Ragnarok had made." (p. 13)
The terms, "Doomsday" and "Ragnarok," are used but only by analogy. Those Biblical and Eddaic climaxes had been imagined as cosmic, not just terrestrial, events. And sf certainly offers its cosmic equivalents, e.g.:
the end of the universe in Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever" and Tau Zero;
a cosmic collision in James Blish's The Triumph Of Time and a literal Armageddon in Blish's Black Easter.
(Black Easter is fantasy although I think of it as "hard fantasy," scarcely distinguishable from the same author's sf.)
It is to be hoped that, if life on Earth is ever destroyed, then some human beings will have got off Earth first. Sf offers hopes for the future.
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteI sound like a broken record, but it's not only SF which offers hope for the future but also people at firms such as SpaceX doing actual making those hopes real.
Ad astra! Sean
And sf inspires some of them.
ReplyDeletePaul: Yup. Look at the names of SpaceX's drone-ships for picking up Falcon 9 boosters -- they're all science fiction book titles.
ReplyDeleteSomething has to be imagined before it can become reality.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
ReplyDeleteBoth: Absolutely! SF inspired dreamers and entrepreneurs to actually try to make real what their favorite authors could only imagine.
Mr. Stirling: That really interests me, SpaceX/Elion Musk using the titles of SF books for their drone-ships (something to look up).
I'm so used to most people just waving away SF or sneering at what SF writers and fans dream of that it still seems strange some people take such things seriously.
Ad astra! Sean
Like many highly accomplished people, Musk is "on the spectrum" -- partial autism.
ReplyDeleteKaor, Mr, Stirling!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad Musk is so high functioning that's he able to accomplish things, without succumbing to non-functionality.
Is it possible you said somewhere that a great man like Churchill was also "on the spectrum"? One of your Shadowspawn books said WSC had a fairly high proportion of Shadowspawn genes. But he was certainly not a monster like Adrienne Breze!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yeah, that was a joke in a fantasy novel. Being mildly on the spectrum is an advantage in some respects (though a painful problem in others) because you have to consciously figure out the clues of social interaction most people just do instinctually. That's an advantage for a writer, for example. Mind you, that means you have to combine mild autism with high IQ.
ReplyDeleteKaor, Mr. Stirling!
ReplyDeleteI can see how "being on the spectrum" can be an advantage to highly intelligent people able to overcome its disadvantages. Churchill was more than intelligent enough to do that!
Your Shadowspawn books were all too alarmingly realistic as well as being fantasies. They were your take on the ever-popular conspiracy theories so endemic among us. An esp. laughable one being the wild fantasy that the Jesuits plotted the assassination of Pres. Lincoln.
Ad astra! Sean