Worlds Without End Blog

The brought to mind Ron Suskind’s now famous discussion with Karl Rove in 2002: Rove "said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality…we’ll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too… We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Hmm, that’s roughly the same time that the New Weird was in full flower. Coincidence? I think not!! 🙂

Engelbrecht, I think you’re on to something there! Just yesterday I was reading an interview with New Weird proponent China Mieville. Asked to describe what "weird" means to him, he says: "The Weird to me is about the sense that reality is always Weird."

I’m in the middle of reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, so this quote is particularly apropo for me at the moment.

The thing about PK Dick is that his work is L O A D E D with prescient stuff like this. Thanks for posting this quote. Another good one comes from The Girl Who Was Plugged In (James Tiptree, Jr): "They’ve got the whole world programmed! Total control of communication. They’ve got everybody’s minds wired in to think what they show them and want what, they give them and they give them what they’re programmed to want – you can’t break in or out of it, you can’t get hold of it anywhere. I don’t think they even have a plan except to keep things going round and round – and God knows what’s happening to the people or the earth or the other planets, maybe. One great big vortex of lies and garbage pouring round and round getting bigger and bigger and nothing can ever change. If people don’t wake up soon we’re through!"