Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not.
Lest any of us get to feeling smug from the cozy “couldn’t happen here” cope, may I remind you that, for the last five-six decades at least, the FUSA has tended to lag no more than five to ten years behind the Mother Country in such matters. As Bracken says, this is but the force-assembly phase of a thousand-year campaign of civilizational conquest and subjugation the decadent West can’t be arsed to concern itself about nowadays, much less prevent, still less reverse.
In the course of re-skimming through some of my favorite speculative-fiction works over lo, the past year or thereabouts—Peter Hamilton in particular, although there are others—I’ve noticed a thing that amuses me greatly. Namely, the unfounded assumption that Once-Great Britain will somehow project the cultural dominance it enjoyed several hundred years ago across the spacefaring worlds of the 30th-31st-32nd Century and beyond. Offhand references to obscure London neighborhoods, linguistic tics, architectural styles, even such prosaic artifacts as steak and kidney pie, bangers & mash, and baked beans for breakfast (?!?) get tossed around liberally, betraying the quaint, vanity-inspired notion that anybody in the far-distant future will even know what those things are…or, y’know, were.
For the matter of it, many of them are barely even remembered in present-day Londonistan, let alone Proxima Centauri in 3426; already, they are no longer traditions to be cherished and preserved, but irrelevant antiquities to be discarded. Will cookies still be known far and wide as “biscuits”? Will a yobbo still be a yobbo, a wog still a wog, a Frenchman still a Frog?
More to the point: will a Moslem-overrun England be capable of engineering and developing a wormhole drive, FTL communications, colony arkships, artificial-gravity generators? Will the Abdul-Abdel-Abdullahs, Saddiqs, and Achmeds in charge of the New British Caliphate be at all interested in undertaking such ambitious, multi-generational projects?
Not bloody likely, mate.
Not to beat up too much on Hamilton and his confreres, mind. Hey, nobody gets everything right every time; foresighted as he was, even Heinlein never saw touch screens coming, and his futuristic computer gizmos printed their output on actual paper, ferchrissakes—a long, laborious process which usually took not just hours but days. Also, Heinlein’s transtellar-flight helmsmen operated their ships’ version of “warp drive” via clunky levers, knobs, and pushbuttons; his navigators (astrogators?) plotted their course not with a holographic projection or main-viewscreen star chart, but boring old No 2 pencil and paper.
No energy weapons; no personal force-fields; no magnetized grav-boots for use in micro-gee environments or EVA. No antimatter propulsion; no mass-to-energy converters; no inertial dampeners; no starships capable of atmospheric flight and/or landing. No malmetal, glassteel, or plascrete. Heinlein and his fellow visionaries came up with lots of cool stuff in their day, sure, but their vision didn’t extend quite that far.
Rule of thumb which ought to be remembered but is too often forgotten: just because even our finest minds can’t see it on the horizon doesn’t mean it ain’t coming all the same.
(Via WRSA)
- Entries
“Lest any of us get to feeling smug from the cozy “couldn’t happen here” cope, may I remind you that,”
The reminder is – don’t give up your weapons. That separates us from the fools in the British Isles.
There hasn’t been an England since the late 1980s, and what there was wasn’t much since about 1915.
It’s doubtful it’s ever returning, unless they start loading ships’ holds as if they were Polish boxcars, and marking their invaders “Return To Sender”.
I doubt there are even 50 Brits from Land’s End to Hadrian’s Wall with the balls for that, at this point.
Wave goodbye, unless someone blows up Parliament, and then starts slaughtering Royals and rounding up the WOGs.