Quotations

[Ghost_Tracker]

My favorite Science Fiction author is Poul Anderson - - - He was the best, i.m.o.
This is a passage written by him which appears in a really fun novel called
"Fire Time," published out of Garden City, NY in 1974 by Doubleday. It's
supposed to take place a few hundred years from now - star travel has taken
off but things aren't so great "back home" on Earth, and there's about to be a war:

"Drab, sleazy, crowded, the Welfare districts of typical megalopolitan regions, where they huddle for whom technological civilization can find no use. Idleness; boredom; frustration; sense of personal worthlessness; drugs in bottles, in pills, in shots, in sprays; 3V screens for everybody, joyhouses or brain stimulators for those who can scrabble together the money; gang fights among the young, criminal empires among the adult, and the honest majority walking in dread - but the police are the enemy, aren't they? Citizen's allowance, social workers, educational channels, sorry, you don't qualify, sorry, you do qualify but we have no opening; yet sometimes at night an opening appears, on the roof of a housing unit tall enough to block off part of the city glare and let a few stars shine through.
The Backworld, whose folk can stay alive after a fashion if they get steady outside help, but no more than alive. Technology is not magic; it cannot operate on resources which no longer exist. Peasants in Dry Africa seek shelter beneath an elevated aqueduct insufficient to keep their farms from blowing away, red upon the wind. At night the streets of Indian cities are paved with sleeping people. A pelagic community off the Greenland coast supports itself by sending boys out to nearly exhausted fisheries at the age of twelve. Nobody starves in the Backworld, as nobody does on Welfare. But aid is a mere stopgap, and still taxpayers feel drained.
All the old panaceas have failed. Education? You can't educate a person - - a person of perfectly normal intelligence - - into special abilities he or she wasn't born with; and the demand for routineers is low and falling. Birth control? You can't ask entire peoples to make themselves extinct. Redistribution of wealth? The conversation laws hold as true in economics as in physics. Return to a simple and natural existence? A precondition is the death of 90 percent of the human race.
But the stars remain. And given an ideal, the capital necessary to make a new beginning will somehow come forth. If a man has no other capital, there are his two hands."