A Day in the Life by Gardner Duzois

Author:Gardner Duzois
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2012-11-02T15:21:17+00:00

THE HAUNTED FUTURE

Fritz Leiber

* * *

As I pontificate elsewhere in this book, much has been made of the prophetic aspect of SF. Those predictions that are “accurate” (if you wink at them a little) are usually concerned with hardware, or, on a higher level of sophistication, with the broad cultural changes triggered by that hardware. It is a jump from predicting the atomic bomb to predicting atomic submarines or breeder reactors, and it is another jump from there to predicting SAC and the AEC. Few authors have accurately predicted the way the cultural changes will seep inside our everyday lives and alter the experience and quality of it: from SAC to the McCarthy trials. Most SF can predict the car, some SF can predict the drive-in theater, but SF that can predict the changes in teen-age sexual behavior as a result of the drive-in is vanishingly rare.

Fritz Leiber’s “The Haunted Future” is a strongly prophetic story—not in detail, but in feeling and mood, in depicting the Zeitgeist in which we are submerged. Here—shot through with Leiber’s usual silver/black poetry and filtered through his strikingly theatrical eye—is a world of surface serenity and underlying turmoil, of health masquerading as insanity and insanity masquerading as health, of mass depersonalization vs. rampaging individuality, a controlled world where They “put the tranquillity in with a needle,” if They can’t lull and soothe you into it any other way. Crawl into this world and look around. You’ll recognize it. It is you. It is me. It is us. It is now.

G.D.

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