The Struggle For Empire - A Story of the Year 2236
Forgotten Futures 12 was to have been based on The Struggle For Empire - A Story of the Year 2236 (1900), a short novel by Robert William Cole that appears to be the first example of military SF actually set in space. For a lot of reasons that never happened. I originally intended to put the book and some of the other material I'd prepared for this ( Read more... )
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Sorry for the delay responding - one of the reasons the Forgotten Futures supplement didn't happen was that I couldn't find any redeeming features of the Empire to write about - while I did try to write some "history" to explain how it came about it was largely conquests and attempts to e.g. wipe out the French language and culture which were rather unpleasant.
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One of the things I have thought for a while about science fiction is that if we are to envision people in the future, we must suppose that they will look back in horror and incomprehension at our time: not just at the things we ourselves are ashamed of or uneasy about, but at things that we are proud of and think show us at our best. Kipling made this point, for example, in "As Easy as A.B.C.," when his narrator listened to an orator talk about democracy and could only think that he displayed "the awful lucidity of the insane." Science fiction need not be about moral issues, but if it is, it can't simply assume that the future will share our morality.
On one hand, this book seems to be an early example of that kind of mistake. But on the other, it seems to be a case where we look back at someone's expression of the moral assumptions common in his time, and can only wonder how he could have thought such things.
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