Jan 26, 2009

Kunstlerism, The Future and Losing My Hat

I've now finished my crash course in Kunstlerism. Back in 2005 Kim Stanley Robinson led a panel on 'Living Through The Next Fifty Years' at Worldcon which profoundly influenced me. A writer quoted repeatedly was James Howard Kunstler, who has written several seminal works on the way we live and its likely outcome, one of which I've already mentioned. On Sunday night I finished The Long Emergency, in which Kunstler tackles several onrushing apocalypses; the exhaustion of our world's oil reserves, climate change, and the resurgance of diseases recently thought extinct.

He's so persuasive that it's easy to over-quote him, and I wondered whether in some retrograded future there'll be a religion in which he's venerated as the prophet, if his ideas of a more localized world where our descendants have regained lost crafts comes to pass.

I urge anyone who has a real interest in our future to seek out his works and read them, even if you disagree with him. I found myself buying in completely into his conclusions as I was reading, but then as I put the book down and mulled over each chapter, would think hang on a minute...

My differences from him may arise from living in a more geographically compact country than the US, and that the book is edited in such a way that it gives the impression of a world rushing over a precipice. It won't feel like that of course, which is the perspective I'm studying it from.

On a lighter note, the Bristol SF Group had its sort-of-monthly meeting last night. I left early, physically exhausted from shunting about fifteen thousand files around the eye hospital (no exaggeration, either) but despite being much sober than most months, still managed to lose my hat on the bus. It's annoying because --as I discovered walking home from my stop-- it's too cold not to have a hat, and secondly, it was a present, and I hate losing or in any way having to dispose of presents, which is perhaps more revealing than I'd like.

Until next time.

Colin