Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dmreedy 1133 days ago
Agreed! I'm testing a hypothesis here through the dialectic, not asserting one!

There are definitely visionaries and prophets and doom-seers in each society; when I talk about societal consensus I'm talking about averages.

Though I'd hesitate to agree that vision === imagination of successors. To my mind, there's a difference between improving the extant, and having a new one. Maybe you can get to the latter by way of the former over time, and that way you get into "Gentle Seduction"[0] territory. But that also kind of amounts to a lack of imagination, and a rejection of endings.

> Where is Ursula Le Guin?

Where indeed! Though I haven't given enough of the newer generations of sci fi authors a chance myself, to be fair.

---

[0] http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html