Maybe we're disillusioned. A century of science doesn't seem to have made us happy. All its predictions of leisure and fulfilment and wonder seem to have turned into untold wealth for a few and unending drudgery for most.

Personally, I think the high entertainment value of the LOTR movies has more to do with their popularity than their blatant anti-technology bias. The Potter books, similarly, are finely-crafted kids stories whose flair for character and plot complexity are more salient than their reliance on magic.

But there probably is something to Spider's complaints, and it's something that he is somehow completely failing to grasp. He casually equates not wanting to go to mars with a fashion of ignorance. I would say that given a world of limited resources and a huge host of problems that we are seemingly unable to solve, rocketing to space at the cost of trillions of dollars is the ignorant course of action. He seems unable to see that striving for greatness, intellectual acheivement, and the natural, human urge to create can mean more than just bigger, better machines.

It's amusing (in a black way) that he says that he still has hope for SF because it has outlasted the fish in the ocean (?), without any notion that the rapacious growth of technology without a comparable expansion of our collective sense of responsiblity in using it is exactly what has caused the destruction of fish stocks. In this next passage, however, he really nails the problem without the slightest clue that he has done so.

quote:

---

Inconceivable wealth and limitless energy lie right over our heads, within easy reach, and we're too dumb to go get them -- using perfectly good rockets to kill each other, instead.

---

Well, that's just it, isn't it Spider? Technological advancement all by itself doesn't make things better. It makes things worse. What's needed is a spiritual advancement (by which I mean wisdom, not religion) that keeps pace with, if not precedes, our technological capacity.

I don't think that people have lost faith in technology at all. I think they've realised that it has outstripped our ability to use it maturely, and hence we need to pull back slightly and concentrate on an entirely different sort of progress. We've dramatically expanded our choices, now we need to learn to make good ones. This is the genesis of the recent rise of spacey new-agism which I regard as one of the more positive developments in the world today. Once we have acheived this, culturally, we will no doubt have another period of gung-ho technologicalism that will require another bout of introspection to bring it under control, and so on.

This refocusing on the internal instead of the external may have manifested itself in the fiction we like to digest, turning it towards questions of virtue and morality, rather than elaborations on the consequences of what we can build out of the material world. This favours fantasy, as well as myth, as both these forms are very deeply rooted in jungian archetypal soul-searching. But it doesn't exclude SF, except where SF excludes it.

"Science has set itself up as the religion to solve all the problems that it created in the first place".

Spider has his heart at the right place but I don't think he thought it through this time.

This was a long way of saying that I completely agree with nonesuch and Jacob Two-Two.

[ 11 September 2003: Message edited by: Francis Mont ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Francis Mont:
I have once seen a documentary on TV, describing a 6-year old's accident with a made-for-children ATV. There is such a thing as giving a child a dangerous toy. Edward Teller should have died before he sired the H-Bomb. We should have never 'evolved' beyond bows and arrows and the horse-drawn carriage. We would still be killing each other with gusto, but the whale would breath easier and the ozone layer would still be intact.

"Science has set itself up as the religion to solve all the problems that it created in the first place".

Spider has his heart at the right place but I don't think he thought it through this time.

This was a long way of saying that I completely agree with nonesuch and Jacob Two-Two.

[ 11 September 2003: Message edited by: Francis Mont ]

---

quote:

---

what would happen to the physically and mentally challenged?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by nonesuch:
PS (But why, for heaven's sake, Dibbler? Why not Carrot or Lord Vetinary?)

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by nonesuch:
PS I also think Terry Pratchett builds a pretty good bridge between worlds.
(But why, for heaven's sake, Dibbler? Why not Carrot or Lord Vetinary?)

---

It was the first name that popped into my head. Besides, I'm not as handsome as Carrot or as tough as Vimes. I don't have Vetinary's intelligence or Rinswind's luck. I'm just an ordinary fellow attempting to get by in what is rapidly becoming an uber capitalist one party dictatorship ruled by that emotionally stunted weed in the White House!
I think there is a little Dibbler in all of us.

I hope this answers your question.