![]() It's a common enough trick in SF and elsewhere bring in an outsider to give perspective on what is ordinarily so familiar as to be beneath notice. Haldeman spends a great deal of time in a fairly short novel describing the Earth his protagonist sees. ![]() As part of the academic program she goes on a world tour. Starting there, we follow the protagonist to Earth where she starts doing post-graduate studies at New York University and gets caught up in radical politics. Instead Haldeman has set up a group of orbiting "Worlds" ranging from hollowed asteroids to tin cans, each with a variant culture, form of government and economy. This is the case with Haldeman's Worlds which was published in 1950, predicting the Vietnam war in surprisingly accurate detail - apart from the bit where the Communists are defeated, of course. SF books written about the near future have a habit of retrospectively turning into alternative histories. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |