3.20.2008

Radicals in Space

"I may agree with Shelley that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but he didn't mean they really get many laws enacted, and I guess I didn't ever really look for definable, practical results of anything I wrote. My utopias are not blueprints. In fact, I distrust utopias that pretend to be blueprints. Fiction is not a good medium for preaching or for planning. It is really good, though, for what we used to call conscious-raising."
-Ursula K. LeGuin, on anarchy and writing, interviewed by the Infoshop News


This is a pretty wonderful statement, considering that one of her utopias was the novel "The Dispossessed," in which the anarchists are given the moon. Though this may not be such a feasible blueprint, it certainly raised my consciousness up above earthly concerns when I was a young anarchist.

While we are on the topic of interviews and the radicalizing of space, here is the final interview with Arthur C. Clarke before his death, in which it is revealed that he probably didn't get his last wish, which was for aliens to finally reveal themselves on earth. But certainly he did his part to make Earth a much more welcoming place for them.

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