You know, I've been thinking for years -- well, let me first remind you that I am one of the people who argues that the US has become an empire -- I've been thinking for years that it's interesting that the good guys in Star Wars have been fighting against an evil empire for 25 years, even as the US has become more and more of an empire.
I don't argue that we're an evil empire, although if we elect Hillary I may change my mind. ;^)
I got interested in the history of empires at about the same time I started thinking that the US was an empire, and one of the most interesting things about the history of empires is that historians living in nascent empires become fascinated by the history of earlier empires, e.g., Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was written at the beginning of the English empire.
Similarly, right about the time of the 2000 Tech Wreck a lot of people were studying the history of the Great Depression, but that's gone out of style again.
Fiction is a way of expressing one's thoughts about the real world, and science fiction, even more so. Science fiction is always about the present, and always has been. |
