Stories to help us imagine the future
The Archdruid uses a bunch of old SciFi books from his childhood to try and introduce a new way of thinking about the future via story telling. These are stories to help us make sense of a future after this civilisation has squandered its resources. But they're post-apocalyptic stories without the apocalypse. Somewhat like AD 700 Europe post the Roman Empire, where the artifacts remain but the social organisation is long gone. And done without the diabolus ex machina of a nuclear war or pandemic or whatever to bring civilisation crashing down.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/return-of-space-bats.html

- M. John Harrison - The Pastel City
- Edgar Pangborn - Davy
- Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin - The Masters of Solitude
- Walter M. Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz

This stems from a feeling that we currently only have two stories about the future. Either we have an inability to imagine a future that’s actually different from the present. Or the only alternative is no future at all. What we find difficult is a story of gradual decay of current structures allied to a transformation into something else. This is the danger of thinking that climate change or resource limits or whatever necessarily produce a Hard Stop. That's actually the least likely outcome. Our current institutions won't just stop over night any more than the baker stops baking bread because the government has been overthrown. Even in the local revolutions and wars of the last 50 years, life carries on.

I wonder if this inability to imagine the future is why 5 minutes in the future SciFi is quite common and appealing, as in William Gibson's collapsing present. As I've said before, accelerating exponential growth (reducing doubling times) means we've forgotten the past so it disappears from view quicker and quicker. We don't remember the lessons of the past because they're behind the wall of progress. And we can't see the future because the changes are coming too fast. So we sit in this bubble of the present where both sides are mirrors reflecting our present back at us. And that bubble is now months wide instead of decades. And that's not a good thing like some Buddhist detachment from the world of illusion but rather the madness of a disconnection from reality.
 Return of the Space Bats »
"Some seventeen notable empires rose in the Middle Period of Earth. These were the Afternoon Cultures. All but one are unimportant to this narrative, and there is little need to speak of them save to say that none of them las...

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[ 23-Jan-14 9:04am ]