Going On The Account: What Did I Know…?

I guess I’m in good company now.

H. G. Wells and Ray Bradbury had to contend with evidence that no, there are not advanced civilizations on Mars.  Gene Roddenberry never got the news that 40 Eridani was not found to be able to sustain a planet like Vulcan around it, though I’m not sure how he’d have felt about it.  William Gibson supposedly was very disappointed that after he finished writing Neuromancer, that he got himself a PC to start writing on and realized that he was a bit off-base in how he described the ways people interact with computers.

And when I wrote Red Jenny and the Pirates of Buffalo, I assumed only that there would be less food south of the Forty-Ninth, and that much of the remaining stuff would taste horrible.  Had the latest draft from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change been available back then, revising things down to show not a shift in food growing regions but an overall decline worldwide, about two percent lost per decade (possibly cumulative losses),  would have had a lot of hungrier people.  Hungrier people more likely to get nastier about it, with the observed connections between rising food prices and political instability hitting people even harder than they did in the book.  Hungrier people who might have been a bit more willing to kick the game board even harder, doing away with both countries and their support systems (their dollars and net nodes) on both sides of Lake Erie.

Y’know, you do your best not to be dated.  Charlie Jane Anders had something come true she didn’t consider before she had a piece published, which is a bit better than having something you assume get sunk from under you, but still.

I guess I can live with not having taken all of that up the first go round.  Besides, would the piece have been all that much better if we had it in the shadow of the war between New York and Ontario…?