Conversation

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I finally understood what PKD was all about when I read his early novel CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST which was his not very good attempt to write realist fiction, set in a tedious suburban Marin County in the 1950s
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That’s a better way to think of PKD and most social science fiction. Space as a convenient allegory for talking about eart. Foundation saga was basically fall of Rome with 1950s Cold War bureaucracy thrown in. The robot stories were really about bureaucracies, not robots.
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So I guess my point is you can draw no useful conclusions about the future of space exploration from these kinds of works, since they really just use space lazily to talk about unrelated things.
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Even the Antarctica story is not over. It’s just too expensive to go live there *now* but costs can change. I’m she’s in 4000 BC the idea of cities far from major rivers seemed impossible the way Antarctic or undersea colonies seem impossible today.