One of my favorite science fiction stories of all time, unfortunately I can't remember the name or the author, even.
It's something like "And I Alone Am Left To Tell the Tale," by maybe James Tiptree Jr. or Ursula K. Leguin.
The premise is that a group of Vikings attacks an Irish monastery during the Middle Ages, and rapes, plunders and kills everybody and everything.
But before he dies, a monk grabs hold of one of the Vikings, and through some mystical power, forces him to see himself objectively, as a pathetic barbarian grubbing in the rubble of the Dark Ages, reeking, illiterate, unbathed during his entire lifetime, eating almost rotten meat, never having sex with a woman who desires him voluntarily, dressed in poorly tanned furs, unable to read or write, surrounded by people who cannot read or write, who would kill him in a heartbeat for no reason at all, with no way out.
What would that man give to be one of the poorest of the poor in our own culture today? With a bathroom with an indoor toilet and a shower bath, and a TV, and compulsory education, and access to the Internet, and a laundromat down the street, and refrigerated food, and a woman who takes the Pill, and the right to vote, and free access to libraries and museums, and all the other things we take for granted, like the Bill of Rights and the Constitution?
Magic, or not?
(No prizes, by the way, for figuring out that it's not about "then" but "now." That's the way science fiction works.) |
