Views from Crestmont Drive

• Silverberg on reality vs. fantasy;
• It wasn’t a landslide, thus not a mandate;
• OnlySky: why is fascism rising?
• OnlySky: how knowledge endures or disappears.

Here’s a passage from a key science fiction story that addresses the nature of reality, in a metafictional way, that also addresses the dreams of science fiction versus the likely reality that most of those dreams will never come true. This is Robert Silverberg’s “Schwartz Between the Galaxies,” published in 1974, opening:

This much is reality: Schwartz sits comfortably cocooned — passive, suspended — in a first-class passenger rack aboard a Japan Air Lines rocket, nine kilometers above the Coral Sea. And this much is fantasy: the same Schwartz has passage on a shining starship gliding silkily through the interstellar depths, en route at nine times the velocity of light from Betelgeuse IX to Rigel XXI, or maybe from Andromeda to the Lesser Magellanic.

(Of course there’s an irony that even the “reality” of this passage, about passenger rockets arcing over the Earth faster than our current jet airliners, will also likely never happen.)

The story goes on:

There are no starships. Probably there never will be any. Here we are, a dozen decades after the flight of Apollo 11, and no human being goes anywhere except back and forth across the face of the little O, the Earth, for the planets are barren and the stars are beyond reach. …

Beginning in the 1960s and usually labeled the “New Wave,” a subset of science fiction began expressing doubts about the bright optimistic interstellar futures of earlier science fiction. Fantasy giving way to reality.

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It wasn’t a landslide. Many votes come in late every year, and shift the initial outcome. It’s happened before, even as Trump rages about fraud and stolen elections.

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