Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The men who saw the future ..

Pohl and Kornbluth's  magnum opus The Space Merchants is 60 years old this year.A key science fiction text it is extraordinarily prescient with its vision of a world run by corporations ,its culture defined by advertising and its environment wrecked by overpopulation and pollution.When I first read it back in the 1960s when the Cold War was still in existence I was surprised to find no mention of either the Soviet Union or Communism which seemed to have mysteriously disappeared.This seems to have been the most prescient feature of all of the novel   for the softly and silently vanishing away of Soviet Communism, Americas great Cold War bug bear is the most astonishing fact of our times.At the time the novel was written in the early 50s at the time of the Korean War such a demise for Communism would have seemed more far fetched than speculations about space travel.At the time of publication Senator McCarthy was hunting communists ,in The Space Merchants the enemy are not commies but consies ,conservationists the novels term for those we now call  greens.

Philip K Dick, Pohl and Kornbluth , The men who saw the future.

Philip K Dick is Hollywoods favourite science fiction writer the inspiration for films going back thirty years both adaptions of his own novels and also for works using similar themes. His work first appeared in science fiction magazines and in cheap paperback novels in the 50s ,60s and 70s.At the time popular depiction of the future barring the possibility of nuclear war were generally fairly positive. Dicks stagnant ,high tech,alienated,scuzzy , run down future turns out to have been fairly accurate as a prediction.However the future depicted in his books was actually originated by Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth in their novels The Space Merchants and Gladiator At Law.Pohl and Kornbluth are largely forgotten now but in the 1950s and early 1960s they were the cutting edge of science fiction

The Hobbit ,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages Final Part

H G Wells in his 1941 book The Outlook For Homo Sapiens raised some interesting points about a return to medieval conditions.He envisaged a world in which large scale systems such as rail networks,postal systems and international trade might break down but radio broadcasts,simple light aircraft and fire arms would continue to exist.Fire arms are very simple machines and there are plenty in working order that are a century old.Existing supplies of fire arms will last for centuries if well maintained and ammunition can be made in simple work shops as they are in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.Distilled Spirits are another  a fairly simple technology which people in the future would be unlikely to forget.We can already see signs of such a scenario in the combination of crumbling infrastructure and advanced digital technology which exist in parts of the early 21st century world. The probability is that the future will resemble the past rather than the dream of progress dreamt by the 20th century .The reappearance of such evils as slavery and piracy is proof of this.