‘The world is too small for the kind of localism that leads to wars. We can have special pride in our country, our language, and our literature, our customs and culture and tradition, but it has to be the abstract pride we have in our baseball team or our college – a pride that cannot and must not be backed by force of arms.’
I read a ton of science fiction as a teenager and continued well into my twenties. My father seemed to be reading almost nothing else, though he also introduced me to Neville Shute and lots of WWII memoirs. SF was fully normalised in our home and I took years to understand how rare it was for households to be looking into possible futures. I am so grateful, with hindsight, that ‘what if’ was the mantra rather than ‘once upon a time’.
