Where To Next?

Blog-wise, we have passed from Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History to other future histories to what I call "future historical writing" and this has brought us back to Anderson's After Doomsday which will be our next blog rereading title although, here at Blog Central, other activities intervene such as gym this afternoon, Zen this evening and the monthly visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop for a long afternoon tomorrow.

Also, in other reading, Somerset Maugham's World War I secret agent, Avenden, has just been sent to:

"X...the capital of an important belligerent state; but a state divided against itself; there was a large party antagonistic to the war and revolution was possible if not imminent. Ashenden was instructed to see what under the circumstances could be done..."

-Ashenden, 11, p. 214.

Appreciating the distance afforded by fiction, we pretend not to know exactly where X might be.

The problems of Avenden and of X are nothing compared to those of the returned spaceship crew at the beginning of After Doomsday. Sf writers know where we all have been - of course - and take us further.

"(New centuries scream in birth)"

-Poul Anderson, After Doomsday (New York, 1962), 13, p. 104.

Adversity and resistance.