As you read this, the last US space shuttle mission has ended.
Many pundits have taken this as a sign of failure, loss, an ending…
Most prominently, perhaps, being the editors of the Economist, who have proclaimed on their recent cover that it is, in fact, the end of the Space Age.
I write this from the shores of a continent that was, some 500 years ago, felt to be beyond “the limit of human ambition”. And yet, here I am, communicating with you from that place, which is now integral to the life of the human community. Writing to you in a medium that literally was unimagined even 50 years ago.
It is true that the current fashionable mode is pessimistic, and that “conventional wisdom” sees
The fashion, today, is to say “we can’t.” “Too hard.” “Won’t happen.”
I don’t believe a word of that.
Neither do any of us in the OA community. Our stories, pictures, and poems try to imagine what the future will be like. We won’t get the details right — after all, we write post-Singularity science fiction. But we don’t fantasize. We try to extrapolate, predict, peer into what might be, and imagine it.
The real fantasy is to believe that history has ended.
Our history is just beginning.
And so’s our next contest — the 2011-2012 Short Fiction contest. Come take a look here… and by all means, start writing.