"Norman Spinrad - He Walked Among Us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

with putting them on the path to the Moon, DUNE and STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND had
created the hippies and the Counterculture, and L. Ron Hubbard had turned an idea for an sf novelette
into a multimillion dollar real-world religious scam.

Dexter had even read a piece by some French intellectual who had opined that science fiction writers
should get together, decide the optimal future for the species, and, by setting all their stories in that future,
call it into being thereby.

Given the difficulty any three science fiction writers had agreeing on how many letters made up a word at
5 cents per or whether to send out for Chinese or Italian, this kind of collaborative messianism did not
seem entirely practical....

However....

Dexter wrestled down the top, looked under the car to see whether the size of the oil puddle demanded
a look at the dipstick, decided it didn't, put the key in the ignition, and heaved the usual sigh of relief,
when, after the usual catch and hesitation, the starter managed to turn the engine over.

However....

The science fiction community did already accept certain truths as self-evident that had yet to penetrate
the obdurate brain-pans of the so-called тАЬmundanes,тАЭ aka the rest of the species.

First and foremost was that the Earth was merely the cradle of a future space-going humanity, and the
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obvious anti-anthropocentric corollary, to wit that in a galaxy containing hundreds of millions of stars
similar to our own, it would be ridiculously arrogant to assume that our evolution was unique.

And given the ordinary nature and average age of our star, the age of ourspecies should lie somewhere
towards the mean of the galactic bell-shaped curve, meaning that advanced space-going civilizations who
had achieved mastery of matter and energy and long-term stability should abound.

No less an intellect than Enrico Fermi had asked the obvious question: If so,where are they ? Why
haven't we detected them? Why haven't they visited us or at least sent a cosmic postcard?

Unless you believed in flying saucers and the maunderings of Erik von Danniken, the answer was a good
deal less than reassuring.

Namely that the natural tendency of sapient species was to do themselves in before evolving to the
long-term stable stage.

After all, it was hard to imagine that any species could develop space travel without unlocking the
Faustian fires of the atom. It was hardly guaranteed that any species would develop clean sources of
power like fusion or space-born solar power before the necessary precursor technologies like fossil fuels
and nuclear fission poisoned the biosphere. And these were only the most obvious means by which our
own species seemed likely to expire. Different fatal strokes for other asshole folks did not seem beyond