Thursday, March 16, 2017

Of this secret, one must be silent

The photographs were taken on February 21st.

I thought today about Iain M. Banks' science fiction novels about the Culture, which is an interstellar utopian society. In some of the novels the Culture encounters less advanced civilisations, and gets involved in rather tricky situations in which there is no straightforward answer on how to proceed.

What is happening in the United States feels almost like a plot of a Culture novel, in which an alien civilisation tries to manipulate the political situation to fit their interests. However, there is a difference in that the aims of the aliens don't seem to be well-intentioned, or in fact intentioned at all. Perhaps what is happening with Trump is a reality-tv series of the aliens, and they are trying to maximise the number of viewers with all the strange plot turns, and all the stupidity of the protagonists.

(Posting title is from the poem No Promissory Notes by Ish Klein.)

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