Something I noticed re-reading Roger Zelazny's "Doorways in the Sand"

I recently re-read Roger Zelazny’s “Doorways in the Sand,” which I last read when I was a teen-ager. I loved it as much today as I did then. One of my favorite Zelazny books, which makes it one of my favorite books.

In that novel, a character in his 60s is looking back on his life and says that the world goes through one massive change after another—but they happen one at a time, spaced out at long intervals, and after each change life goes back to pretty much what it was before, so you can convince yourself nothing has changed.

Then you look back over the course of 40+ years and the world is completely different from when you were 20 years old.

I glided over that passage when reading it first as a teen, but re-reading it again over the past few months it hit me hard.

In my adult lifetime, we’ve seen the emergence of he Internet, smartphones, the rise of China, the end of the Cold War, Covid, Donald Trump, the fall of the USSR—after each of these events, we could say, “That was a big deal but still our day-to-day lives are not much different than they were before” And yet you put it all together and the world is very, very different than it was in 1981.

This rule does not apply if you or someone close to you is personally affected by any of these global changes. And these changes can affect hundreds of millions of people — that’s what makes them global. But billions of people are not directly affected by these changes. For them, each individual change is a jolt and then life goes on mostly as it has done before.

I started reading Chasing the Dime by Michael Connelly 📚 He’s always reliable.

My 15 minutes of badass literary scholarship

In another online community, somebody asked for the title and author of a story about humans encountering another race that seemes to live a simple agrarian life. When asked how they generate electricity, or other questions about advanced technology, the agrarian person responds that they don’t know. 

Later, it becomes clear this other race is far advanced of humans, with great psychic powers. Asking them about electricity and such is like asking us about the best kind of wood to rub together to start a fire—something our distant ancestors knew but almost nobody today does. 

Other people on the community had their guesses, even asking ChatGPT. But I said to myself, “That sounds like a story I read when I was a kid. The author was John Campbell.” And I did about 15 minutes of Googling and replied thus:

Sounds like “Forgetfulness” by John W. Campbell, writing as Don A. Stuart, in Astounding Stories, June 1937 https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v19n04_1937-06_-ibcbc_fiche-paper

I am feeling hugely badass about this successful act of Internet research. 

The original questioner misremembered at least one key detail: The star travelers aren’t humans—they are aliens from a civilization in the distant future. They land on a planet called “Rhth” (get it?) and believe the simple agrarian folk to be the degenerate descendants of a once mighty high tech empire. They pity the simple agrarian folk, but then learn better. 

The above link is worth following for the ads alone. The magazine has a gajillion small ads, and they are all like this: