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FUTURE_VISTAS

                                             December 30, 2010


            Charles Stross comments that he
            likes to work with the premise that          ETERNAL_HUMAN
            human nature is maleable, and hence
            can be engineered...  but he also
            has a habit of insisting that his
            primary job is to entertain.

                        Myself, I'm inclined
                        to insist that               TAKEN_LIGHTLY
                        fiction can do more
                        than just entertain.           It may be that Stross
                                                       regards it as politic
                        I might suggest that it        to pose as a "mere
                        can be used to engineer        entertainer".
                        human nature.
                                                           Fictions
                                                           about fiction.
       To remake the world,                                      
       To transform humanity...                                DRAMATIC_FICTION

       Now that's a job for
       Science Fiction.          Walt Whitman wrote an essay
                                 called "Democratic Vistas"
                                 where he called for a new      http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/Whitman/vistas/vistas.html
                                 literature that would bind
                                 the US together after the         (1871
                                 close of the Civil War, a          or so)
                                 literature that would enable
                                 the fufillment of the promise
                                 of American democracy.

                                   "... ahead, though dimly yet, we see,
                                   in vistas, a copious, sane, gigantic
                                   offspring."


                                   Whitman called for:

                                   "literatures, far different, far higher
                                   in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal,
                                   modern, fit to cope with our occasions,
                                   lands, permeating the whole mass of
                                   American mentality, taste, belief,
                                   breathing into it a new breath of life,
                                   giving it decision, affecting politics
                                   far more than the popular superficial
                                   suffrage, with results inside and
                                   underneath the elections of Presidents
                                   or Congresses ..."

                                   "Few are aware how the great literature
                                   penetrates all, gives hue to all, shapes
                                   aggregates and individuals, and, after
                                   subtle ways, with irresistible power,
                                   constructs, sustains, demolishes at will"

                                   ...

                                   "I proceed with my speculations, Vistas."



                       Whitman obsesses with a need for
                       a poetry of the modern, but conceedes
                       that there are other writings, such
                       as journalism, that are already there.

                       It is possible that I obsess with
                       "science fiction" (and fiction in
                       general) in a way that's out of date.

                       It may be that what we really needed
                       is a new *form* of literature.

                          beyond fiction,
                          beyond journalism...

                                                 (I wonder about the
                                                 next internet genre,
                                                 the successor to the
                                                 blog, wiki, and
                                                 "discussion group"...).


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