It’s 4:50 am. My interior alarm awakes me in a sweat. At this time of the day, the world always
appears extremely dark (unless you live at the North Pole during the winter
solstice). I’m a worrier. Always have been. Proof of that fact is the
fact that I’m 76 and worrying over a future—over a fictional tale about reality
in my brain—that will have no real power to affect me but that really affects
me as I worry about it.
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In another 50 years—I tell myself—the bookless and
newspaper-less world as I know it will be so different, I truly can’t imagine
it, but I’ve got a few favorite dystopian ideas. I see a world returned to the
Dark Ages. Lots of information at humanity’s fingertips, but each man jack of
us, at his or her starship computer station, will be tuned solely to their
favorite world views. Like a villager at the mythological time of Jesus, we
won’t know what’s going on in the next village except the hottest gossip and
most frightening and disgusting news as distorted by world leaders whose best interests are served by the distortions. Charlatanism will
be the order of the day and all sorts of fake systems of knowledge (like clairvoyance
or telekinesis or theology) will have new power in the stories that people tell
themselves about their personal realities. Meanwhile the zillionaire rulers of
Planet Earth, flitting here and there to secret meetings on yachts all over the
globe, will be uncontrollably dishonest, beyond punishment, as they accumulate
more and more of the world’s wealth, leaving the rest of us to
take the hindmost. No longer will there exist a fourth estate with the money
and reach to watch over the plutocrats and sound the alarm.
Then, again … the sun also rises and the sky lightens, and I return to the hopeful business of writing a futuristic novel about a worldwide
plague as if the bookless dark age ahead will have any place for my fantastic
novel.
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