History’s Actors
26 Sep, 2024
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Among my many review categories, I have a category for SFF from the 1980s and one for SFF from the 1990s. It seems unfair I don’t have one for the 2000s. So here one is.
The category takes its name from a famous declaration from an unnamed official in the George W. Bush administration1:
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’
I think 2000 to 2009 proved you can transform the world with sufficient will and a complete indifference to the facts, although perhaps not in the manner intended. In any case, it seems an apt quotation for the speculative fiction of the 2000s.
1: I couldn’t think of a snappy title that included the term “water-boarding”.