"Benford-TheFarFuture" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

GREGORY BENFORD

THE FAR FUTURE

Little science fiction deals with truly grand perspectives in time. Most stories
and novels envision people much like ourselves, immersed in cultures that quite
resemble ours, and inhabiting worlds which are foreseeable extensions of the
places we now know.

Such landscapes are, of course, easier to envision, more comfortable to the
reader, and simpler for the writer; one can simply mention everyday objects and
let them set the interior stage of the reader's mind.

Yet some of our field's greatest works concern vast perspectives. Most of Olaf
Stapledon's novels (Star Maker, Last And First Men) are set against such immense
backdrops. Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night opens over a billion
years in our future. These works have remained in print many decades, partly
because they are rare attempts to "look long" -- to see ourselves against the
scale of evolution itself.

Indeed, H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine in part as a reaction to the Darwinian
ideas which had swept the intellectual world of comfortable England. He
conflated evolution with a Marxist imagery of racial class separation, notions
that could only play out on the scale of millions of years. His doomed crab
scuttling on a reddened beach was the first great image of the far future.

Similarly, Stapledon and Clarke wrote in the dawn of modern cosmology, shortly
after Hubble's discovery of universal expansion implied a startlingly large age
of the universe. Cosmologists believed this to be about two billion years then.
From better measurements, we now think it to be at least five times that. In any
case, it was so enormous a time that pretensions of human importance seemed
grotesque. We have been around less than a thousandth of the universe's age.
Much has gone before us, and even more will follow.

In recent decades there have been conspicuously few attempts to approach such
perspectives in literature. This is curious, for such dimensions afford sweeping
vistas, genuine awe. Probably most writers find the severe demands too daunting.
One must understand biological evolution, the physical sciences, and much else
-- all the while shaping a moving human story, which may not even involve humans
as we now know them. Yet there is a continuing audience for such towering
perspectives.

"Thinking long" means "thinking big." Fiction typically focuses on the local and
personal, gaining its power by unities of time and setting. Fashioning intense
stories against huge backdrops is difficult. And humans are special and
idiosyncratic, while the sweep of time is broad, general and uncaring.

We are tied to time, immense stretches of it. Our DNA differs from that of