An sf story, while showing us one option, can mention others. Thus, Herries considers options during the Cold War and one is:
"...you could fight back (thus becoming more and more like what you fought)..." (p. 65)
If you had to spend a lifetime fighting off mad dogs, then you would become more and more like a mad dog.
This is the road that James Blish goes down in They Shall Have Stars. To resist encroachments from the Soviet Union, the United States increases its security measures at the expense of individual and academic freedom until the two systems become indistinguishable and are easily amalgamated by some bureaucratic maneuvers at the top. But, meanwhile, some Colonials have fled from the Solar System. Hence, the title.
Decades ago, I summarized They Shall Have Stars to a guy who argued vehemently that the Soviet Union was far more likely to lose the Cold War and of course he was right about that. However, Blish wrote not a geopolitical prognostication but a novel which followed just one option and also followed alternative options in other works.
We continually compare sf futures. Jerry Pournelle has the CoDominium, a US-USSR merger.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Pournelle's Co-Dominium was not exactly a merger of the US/USSR, which was more an alliance of the two powers. True, the Co-Dominium had a Grand Senate with members from both partners who had the authority to make some decisions binding on both, within certain limits.
Ad astra! Sean
OK.
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