The fall of Rome has obviously been a topic of much interest and discussion. It is, after all, a conversation about the fall of civilization as we knew it.

If you read my blog you are probably aware that I lean toward a thesis of genuine and rapid fall. One of the most revelatory books I’ve read in the past 20 years is Bryan Ward-Perkins’ . Ward-Perkins’ tale is an apocalyptic one. The material basis of Roman civilization the West collapsed. Perhaps the most relevant and evocative fact for me is that pollution due to manufacturing production in England did not match that of the Roman period until the industrial revolution. Though the Roman economy never achieved the industrial revolution’s gains in productivity, it did attain a level of Smithian efficiency and interdependence on the margins of the factors of production.

From a totally different perspective Peter Heather in broadly agrees with Ward-Perkins’ contention. The Roman Empire fell, and it fell fast, and the imperial elites didn’t see it coming. Remember, the Roman Empire was dismembered and disordered during the . Under Diocletian and his successors in the 4th century it came back to health and strength before the distress of the 5th century in the West. But at the time contemporaries did not view the shocks and exigencies of these decades as any more distressing then the events of the 3rd century, and the Eastern Empire around Constantinople was reasonably robust.

Ultimately though 476 was a coup de grace to the Western Empire. The Gothic wars tore apart the fabric of the Italian peninsula in the 6th century, and the substantive reality of the old empire faded away. There was no going back. Of course I’m well aware of the argument that the Roman world evolved, that it did not collapse. And Late Antiquity and its continuities with the Classical world, and how it bridged itself to the Medieval world, are fascinating. But I do not accept that the preservation of Roman motifs and ideals in the courts of barbarian German warlords is evidence that substantively nothing changed.

Much of it depends on how you weight material vs. ideological parameters. The idea of Rome cast a shadow centuries beyond its substantive material integrity. After, the Byzantines called themselves Romans until the conquest of their city-stateless in 1453. But no matter the name, they were not Romans as the Romans were in 400 A.D.

The theoretical context of all this is that it strikes me cultures can go through rapid nonlinear shocks which induce very quick and unexpected changes. In the human past this would often entail collapses and regressions. The “Dark Age” after the chaos of the late Bronze Age is a case in point. In one generation the citadel society of Mycenanean Greece disappeared across much its extant range. The gap between 1966 and 1969 in much of the West was arguably greater than between 1956 and 1966.

The United States today is the most powerful nation in the world. And our cultural centrality and ascendency is such that we don’t challenge our implicit position as the premier power in the world. But I believe that we’ve become a inward looking involuted culture. There’s no point in litigating this, and obviously I may be wrong. But too often we confuse our own petty internecine squabbles with the concerns of the world. The world is passing us by….

In the post below on book recommendations I forgot to mention William H. McNeill and John Robert McNeill’s . It’s arguably been one of the most influential works that has percolated in my mind throughout the years. It’s less than 400 pages, and illustrates in broad sketches that history has been through many random shocks, but that there are broad patterns that one can discern.

The elder McNeill is most famous for and . To a great extent he was Jared Diamond before there ever was Jared Diamond.

Unfortunately I did not notice that McNeill died last summer. From his obituary:

Refuting Francis Fukuyama’s premise in “The End of History and the Last Man” in 1992 that the American model of a liberal, capitalist democracy had become the paradigm for governance, Professor McNeill wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “I do not believe that human nature is uniform and unchanging. Rather, whatever penchants and capabilities we inherit with our genes are so malleable that their expression takes infinitely diverse forms.”

“When Asian models of social and economic efficiency seem to be gaining ground every day, and when millions of Muslims are at pains to sustain the differences, great and small, that distinguish them from Americans,” he continued, “it is hard to believe that all the world is destined to imitate us.”

People often ask me for history books on a very specific topics often, assuming I’ve read something on an issue because I exhibit some fluency discussing something that might seem abstruse or arcane. The thing is that I haven’t always read a monograph on a singular topic even if I know a fair amount on it. It’s just that I’ve read a larger number of history books, so the union of my knowledge set is quite wide and expansive.

For example, in reading the author recounts with some tinge of outrage that North Africa, which is had been predominantly Christian since the early 4th century, was conquered by the Muslims in the late 7th century as a prequel to the conquest of the Visigothic kingdom in Iberia (I knew the loss of Carthage occurred between Justinian II’s two reigns thanks for the fine historical novel !). First, the tinge of taking sides is kind of adolescent in my opinion and detracts from the narrative, though that’s a matter of personal taste. Second, North Africa was not majority Christian in the early 4th century.

No, I’ve not read specifically about North Africa Christianity (aside from a few books here and there about St. Augustine, who was North African and a Christian). Rather, I have read , which addresses the religious change in the Roman Empire in the 4th century, as well as works such as , where religious change is a theme if not a central one (I would say that really it is a book with a greater focus on material culture and politics and economics than religion as such). Additionally, it is clear that many people confuse Constantine’s toleration and then later espousal of Christianity under a united Roman Empire in 325 as the point at which Christianity became the official religion of the state. An “official state religion” in a modern sense is an anachronism. It took decades for the customary subsidies to the pre-Christian traditional cults to cease (that really occurred in earnest under Gratian in the 380s), with elite public paganism’s coup de grace occurring under Theodosius in the 390s (paganism persisted as a counter-culture down to the early 6th century, and it seems very likely that some pagan philosophers were still present in Alexandria up to the Arab conquest, while the Syrian city of Haran maintained a pagan religious culture with an appreciation for Hellenic religious values down to the 10th century A.D.).

In any case, what books should you read? It’s useful to read big general surveys because they allow you to frame and interpret narrower monographs. Long-time readers are aware that I am a big fan of Warren Treadgold’s . This survey is expansive. And, it touches upon many of the different peoples who interacted with Byzantium. You should read it.

Next I would recommend Albert Hourani’s . To a great extent this is a history of Islamic civilization. If you want more specificity on early Islam, try Hugh Kennedy’s . For later Islam, . But really should read some survey first before drilling down to a specific epoch or region.

For China it has to be John King Fairbank and his . If you want something more accessible, John Keay’s is where you want to go. Division by periods is important in China though. For a little more specificity, is good. Obviously there are books which cover the later dynasties, but the Qin and Han are really the hinges of Chinese history, and essential supplements to any survey. For a book which explores how China related to the rest of the world with a light theoretical touch I’d suggest Adshead’s .

For India I would recommend Romilla Thapar’s . This recommendation will raise many peoples’ hackles because Thapar is accused of being biased and ideological, and she probably is. But if you keep that in mind usually you will survive. John Keay also has a book on this Asian civilization, . Again, it is really aimed at the general lay reader at a very middle-brow level. But if that’s where you think you need to start, that’s how it goes. If you want a very dramatic narrative focused on biography then does an OK job in relation to Mughal India, which is to a great extent a formative period to understanding modern India.

For Southeast Asia I don’t have any suggestion aside from . This will leave a lacunae for maritime Southeast Asia, which is a pretty big blind spot. I did read about 10 years ago, but that book was strongly biased toward modern periods. Reader suggestions welcome.

At some point we need to loop back to Europe, and Rome before Byzantium. For this is really a good resource for surveys. His is an A-Z review from legendary times to the fall. It’s old and probably out of print, but usually you can find library copies, or paperback used versions somewhere.

Speaking of the fall though, if you haven’t read , please do so. I know many of you have already read this book, but it’s really a major work. I can’t emphasize this enough. It makes history more than just interpretation because of its utilization to material metrics.

When it comes to Greece, I’m in a peculiar position. Much of my reading of ancient Greece was done in my elementary school years. So a lot of it is fuzzy and I don’t recall specific books, though I know enough about the travesty of the Sicilian expedition or the futile resistance against Philip of Macedon to follow broad sketches. Honestly I need to read something about this topic, in fact several books, as a grown ass adult.

I’ll recommend Grant again, with .

For the Hellenistic period that spans the gap between the rise of Rome and the decline of Classical Greece, should do the trick. But that’s a long book, and the same author has more recently published . That’s probably a better bet for many readers.

One book I am somewhat partial to is Robin Lane Fox’s , which is a really broad work which has many topics it doesn’t touch. But Fox is a really great historical writer, so with consideration for its shortcomings (it’s not a straight ahead survey), I think some readers might enjoy it.

Since I’ve hit Athens, what about Jerusalem? Norman Cantor’s is a history of the Jewish people. I read it in 1995, so I don’t know exactly that it’s the most up to date work, but there is surely goodness in it still.

If you want to focus on the cultural tension between Jew and gentile, then might be of interest. It’s probably too narrow focus for what I’m recommending here…but it’s a good book so I thought I had to mention it.

In regards to post-Rome but the proto-West,  is good. Chris Wickham’s is a bit too focused on the author’s materialist hobby-horses in my opinion for the naive reader (e.g., not enough about the Cluniac Reforms).

A little earlier than that, I think Peter Heather’s work is probably sufficient. First, , and then the .  is easily the better book if you had to pick one.

Perhaps you want to jump back to the edge of history, is pretty good. Then there is the , highly recommended. For later in the Bronze Age covers a lot of the states and the several centuries before the collapse.

Japan is pretty important in many ways to understanding the evolution of civilizations and cultural exchange. I would recommend by Mason and Caiger. But those who want a somewhat more contemporary skew might want to check out .

And as long as we’re going to talk about islands, readers know I’m a fan of . Norman Davies does not give short shrift to the Celtic fringe.

Moving back to the heart of Eurasia, Grousset’s is old, but I think it’s a decent survey.

is probably a little too in the weeds for many readers, but if you are interested in the topic I recommend it. Like Thapar this is an author with a perspective…just keep that in mind. Where Empires of the Silk Road is panoramic, takes a narrower focus, following a particular thread over seven hundred years.

Taking a 50,000 foot view again, is definitely worth your time. I read it twice.

We’re now venturing in territory where there is less history conventionally defined. That is, based on writing. But some parts of the world don’t really have that, but you should probably know something about them.

is not a survey like some of the ones above, but it does reflect what I think is the new orthodoxy (which is being subject to its own revisionism). I’m broadly persuaded that the revisionists-turned-mainstream viewpoint that is presented by Charles C. Man in has a lot going for it (ancient DNA adds broadly the likelihood in my opinion, perhaps more on that in some other post). Our knowledge of peoples like the Aztecs and Inca are to a great extent happenstance; they flourished when Europeans arrived. We don’t know the history of the peoples who came before. But we do know the history of the Maya because of the decipherment their hieroglyphs. In you’ll read about warlords like 18-Rabbit (a name I’ll never forget).

For Oceania all I’ve really only read is Richard Broome’s . I don’t know of any primer, as such, about the history of Austronesians, though someone should write one. After all, these are a people who settled from Madagascar, off the coast of Mozambique, to Eastern Island to the west of Chile.

There are two nations which occupy roles in history which are somehow both liminal and central which like Japan, India, and China, deserve their own treatments. Russia is one. Gregory L. Freeze’s is pretty good. A history of Russia is essential because it is weird to see prominent pundits (I will not name, but it shocked me) not understand that Russia’s identification as a Western nation is substantively problematic.

There’s a whole historiography that covers the tension between Westernizers and Slavophiles (or their prototypes). Strangely this is another case where Western liberals and white nationalists are well aligned, they only see race, as the Russians are white, therefore they are Western (and another alignment, this racial essentialism to Western identity disappears for Southeast European Muslims like Albanians, Pomaks and Bonsiaks, who are often treated like “people of color”). is a short little book which outlines just now non-Western, and oppositional to the West, in many ways Russia has been.

Then we have . The conceit of the subtitle is a little annoying, but it reflects the role of Persian culture as hegemonic from Istanbul to Delhi to Samarkand. And, as you know if you read this weblog, a huge disproportionate number of scholars and intellectuals during the “Arab Islamic” intellectual Golden Age were ethno-linguistically of Iranian background (although many hailed from Turan, the Central Asian Iranian regions, and many of the non-Persians, like Thabit ibn Qurra, were non-Muslims).

Excuse my Eurocentrism, but Europe did conquer the world recently. So . It’s a page turner (and you see how Russia reintegrated itself into Europe, at least its elites).  by Diarmaid MacCulloch is still the best sweeping history on the topic I’ve ever read (I’ve read probably a dozen big tomes on this period and subject?). . We’ll miss the author, Lisa Jardine. At least I will.

As we move into the 19th and 20th century there is so much out there. Books like are useful and very interesting, but there are so many on these sorts of topics, and we’re all more familiar with the era, so I’ll forgo giving you recommendations aside from one: . It’s close enough to many thinks people talk about that it’s useful. For the rest, you can find documentaries.

I’ve focused on surveys which zoom in on a region and skim over a time period purposely. Traditional histories if you will. But I’ll finish out with some more unconventional stuff that I think would be useful. covers all the bases. has a narrower time frame. is self-explanatory, but Niall Ferguson is a great writer for all his faults.

Yes, read . Not so much for the detailed assertions of fact, but for the way to think about historical processes and the forces that shape them. Reach Peter Turchin’s because it gives you a framework for decomposing patterns (some of the models in  I have actually applied to books I read years before it, as I still have the “data” in my head).

Finally, read books like . Social history is important, though many of the books above actually cover society and culture in great depth. There are so many “daily life in….” that you can take your pick. But remember that for most of history most people were peasants, and peasants had a lot in common in their daily life, with differences being relatively trivial (e.g., gruel of barely vs. gruel of wheat or a porridge of rice).

The list above is not exhaustive. It is limited by the fact that I read on some periods of history (e.g., Classical Greece) as far back as the 1980s, so I’m not up to date on the latest survey books. Reader suggestions are welcome.

What is my goal with providing you this list? I want you to be able to iterate through historical assertions people in the media and politics make against your internal data set. See if they are full of shit. They often are.

There are two classes of bullshit. The first class are the nakedly mendacious. This is more common in the political class, where lying is a form of art. The second class are just ignorant and don’t know any better. This is more common in the pundit class.

One trick that the pundit class pulls sincerely because they are often ignorant is that they cite a historian to buttress an assertion, even getting a quote from that historian. But quite often the historian is clearly misleading the audience…the historian may not utter a lie, but in their presentation they allow the reader to have a takeaway that aligns with the normative bias of the pundit, and the historian that has prostituted themselves to some cause. Obviously you will never master a specific area of history like an academic with a command of another language, but if you know enough you can easily smell bullshit when it’s being injected into the information stream.

As I have noted before one of the most interesting aspects of ancient Greek history is that in many ways the socio-political identities and outlook of the Hellenic people before and after the Bronze Age were probably as distinct as that between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. That is, the citadel culture of the Mycenaeans was constructed out of recognizable elements. Take one dollop Near Eastern autocracy, add a dash of semi-civilized barbarian warlord, and finish off with the tincture of brutalist post-Minoan aesthetic, and you have the pirate kings of Achaea, who so plagued the kings of the Hittites and later transformed themselves into the “Sea Peoples.”

The story of what happened after the end of the Bronze Age is somewhat well known to us, because the roots of our civilizations are clear in the ideas which emerged in the period between 1000 BCE and 0 CE. The basis of the institutional religions which we see around us date to the Axial Age. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and arguably Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, either arose or ripened in the one thousand years after the birth of Christ, but from a naturalistic perspective the bases of these traditions are present in the early Iron Age. To be concrete about what I’m getting at, Judaism over its history truly takes shape in the centuries leading up to, and subsequent to, the compilation of the Babylonian Talmud. But the disparate threads of Rabbinical Judaism were already there in the centuries before Christ; they were simply synthesized and extended later on.

Much the same can be said about science. On the one hand, a narrow view of science is that it is the cultural product of a group of individuals who began collectively exploring aspects of the natural world in the 17th century. Eventually this contingent cultural enterprise spread across the whole world. But the roots of the scientific enterprise can also be seen in the Pre-Socratic philosophies. It was already there 2,500 years ago. But the victory of Platonism, and later the rise of Hellenistic ethical systems, and finally the ideological uniformity imposed by Christianity, dampened the efflorescence of heterodox speculations which flourished for the few centuries around 450 BCE. The steam went out of the scientific enterprise, and it never truly became science as we understand it in the modern world. But pieces of it that came together later on were familiar to us of old.

And then there are the political innovations. The Greeks gave us all their different varieties; democracy, oligarchy, the mixed monarchy-oligarchy of Sparta. The Romans had their republic, and even during the imperial period rejected the institution of ‘kinship,’ though all the powers of a king were eventually accrued to the emperors.

But political debate existed outside of Greece and Rome. In China political and ethical philosophy were intertwined, the tension between Legalism and Confucianism would continue down through the ages after the official ascendancy of the latter during the Former Han. In India there was a variety of forms of governance characterized by differing levels of centrality before the conquest of the Mauryas set the horizons and template for much of the rest of South Asian history.

Democracy and republics faded. Republican governments eventually made periodic revivals. During the period of the American Revolution many were skeptical of the idea of such a geographically expansive state such as the United States being able to maintain a republican form of governance. The shift toward a more democratic self-identity in the early 19th century with the rise of Jacksonian populism was even more shocking, because for much of history democracy was seen as a failed Greek experiment which often devolved into illiberal mob rule.

I recall 15 years ago Steven Pinker observing that one reason philosophy has made little progress is that what one could not make progress in was consigned to philosophy, while the natural and social sciences waxed in their ability to model and explain the world around us. This is uncharitable to philosophy in many ways, but it gets at something real: we haven’t pushed much further beyond the Greeks on foundational questions. Similarly, Islam is the last major religion to have emerged, and the theology of Christian churches and the metaphysics of Buddhism and Hinduism are all one to two thousand years old. Instead of progress we’ve seen shifts back and forth in fashion. Reworking of templates, not the creation of new things.

Over the past few centuries we have witnessed something different than this. The birth of the modern. The explosion of democracy and liberalism, and economic well being through massive gains to welfare and well being to the non-elites. Between 1800 and 1970 the wage gap between the skilled and unskilled in Western societies shrank. Seen from the first half of the 1960s the future was shiny, infectious disease was going to be unknown, and robots would allow us a life of leisure.

Though we do have iPhones and other shiny devices, and nerds like me can consume lots information on the web, things have not quite worked out in exactly the way predicted. Yes, China and much of the developing world has improved in terms of vital statistics. And it looks like space commerce may finally arrive in the next decade. But we do not have a Mars colony in 2017, let alone a Moon colony.

Economic productivity combined with a demographic transition mean that extreme deprivation is slowly being strangled. But inequality flourishes, and the wage gap between the skilled and unskilled began to increase after 1970 in the developed world. Whereas at one point the Whiggish perception that history was progressive, and that it would end in some quasi-utopian terminus, was self-evident, today many are not as certain. The unipolar geopolitics of the 1990s has given way to a new farcical world of the “Great Game,” while secular Arab nationalism has faded to irrelevance in the face of a resurgence Islamic identity.

History does not move in cycles where the future reenacts the past. But much of the modular furniture of existence seems to be 2,000 years old. The Salafi movements the world over are fundamentally products of modernity, or the reaction to various elements of European modernity. Their roots pre-date the 20th century, and go back to revivals in the Arabian peninsula in the 18th century which parallel a reconstruction of self conscious orthodox Islam in India as the Mughal order was collapsing. But ultimately they are refurbishing the furniture put together by Ibn Hanbal in the 9th century, who himself might have been comfortable among Judaean Zealots. The Taliban are simply the Maccabees of our age.

From an American perspective the reality, the necessity, of the spread of democracy and the expansion of liberalism seem self-evident. Inevitable. Along with technology and science, it all seemed to hang together. In the 1990s the future was arriving as scheduled.

In 2017 the Russian experiment with Western democratic forms has not turned out how we wanted. Though China is economically liberal, it is not democratic. The global capitalist elite were as surprised as everyone else by 2008, and in the wake of that shock they have persuaded themselves that there is no need for a fundamental rethink of the institutions that they’ve developed over the past 70 years since the Bretton Woods Agreement.

As the Western economic elite continues to persist in denial, the cultural elite has been making a broad push to sweep post-1960s social liberalism throughout the world. This, all the while that Western societies have been demographically stagnant, and Western economic power has been declining in relative terms.

We are in the late stages of the long 20th century. The institutions and mores of the post-World War II are still with us, like Zeitgeist zombies. But the combination of global capitalism, individualism, democratic values always constrained by oligarchic preferences, and the universal acid of Critical Theory infused identity politics, does not hang together in a robust fashion. In most of the world if people have to pick between their ‘sexual identity’ and their ‘religious identity’, I think it will be the latter (assuming they concede that a sexual identity is a thing). In the early 20th century Marxists had to confront the fact that internationalism was not capable of overcoming nationalism. In the 21st century the identity politics of individual self-actualization and self-definition will likely confront 2,000 year old identities.

Ideologues dream of final victories. Of ideologies sweep through the world, from sea to sea. Global Communism. A world-wide capitalist order defined by free trade and free movement of peoples. China and India converting to Christianity and finally ending the civilizational conflict between Christendom and Islam, as Muslim MENA is constricted between Christian Europe, Africa, and Asia.

But pluralism has defined the last few thousand years. The final victory has been elusive. The old ideologies and religions do not die, they evolve, they reinvent, they repurpose. The stories are different in each age, but they live in a shared universe of characters who also repeat similar plot elements.

The second century BC was a strange time for the Roman republic. It was an empire in all but name. The ancient enemy Carthage was no more. But destitution was also coming to some of the Roman people. This resulted in reformers attempting to right the ship of state. The brothers Gracchi attempted to help the plight of the Roman poor with redistribution.  Marcus Livius Drusus expanded the franchise to non-Roman Italians. Political redistribution if you will. Gaius Marius began as a necessary general, but ended as a chaotic autocrat. The social cohesion of the Roman republic was breaking down. Faction began to dominate all of public life.

Into situation stepped Sulla. Sulla is not a contingent man. Sulla is a type. A reaction, usually a vain and futile attempt to hold the past together, and push it into the future, by brutal means. Sulla arises when social elites lose faith in the present, and attempt to recreate institutions from an idealized past.

Sulla is efficient. Cruel, but certain in his rightness. Sulla is not a clown. He is not narcissistic, for Sulla does have ideals, even if you hold that those ideals are cruel or callous. Sulla is a piece of furniture, found in many places at many times. The United States of America has not seen Sulla yet. I believe it will.

In 1793 the Macartney Mission went to China to open up the country for the British. The overall evaluation is that it failed. The Chinese under the Qing dynasty were in the last throes of the Indian summer of a great demographic expansion dating back three hundred years, capped off by an era of peace which had lasted more than 100 years. The Qianlong Emperor was in the 57th year of his reign. And he firmly rejected all British entreaties. China was the Middle Kingdom. It did not have European wares. It did not need European wares. It could easily dismiss European concerns and sensitivities.

Or so Qianlong and his court believed. Within 50 years the British would defeat the Chinese on their home turf, and impose a humiliating peace upon them. Over the next few decades European powers would begin to dissect the rotting carcass of late Qing China, which was also being eaten alive from the inside by convulsions such as the Taiping rebellion.

Though it was difficult for people at the time to perceive, and in particular the Chinese, the signs were already present in 1793 that the British star would ascend, while that of the Chinese would dim in comparison. The Chinese economic system was at its Malthusian carrying capacity, and had squeezed all it could out of the margins of Adam Smith’s classical factors of production, land, labor, and capital. In contrast, the British were in the midst of a revolution in economic production driven by innovation would would explode the underlying parameter of growth, all the while restructuring their social conditions so as to undergo demographic transition.

The British were inventing the modern economy. The Chinese were nursing along the classical agricultural stationary state as best as they could.

Aspects of this were already evident to the British implicitly. McCartney refused to kowtow to the Chinese Emperor, maintaining dignity, whereas previous factors would likely have abased themselves. The period around 1800 in India also saw the shift away from the traditional accommodationism of the East India Company with native cultural forms and practices, toward exporting elite British folkways in toto to overseas administrative posts.

In general people living in an age of transition don’t perceive the transition themselves, and continue to fixate on earlier assumptions and truths. The period between the Berlin Conference in 1884 and the outbreak of World War I saw the high tide of European colonialism and hegemony, but the seeds of its relative decline were already there. The United States of America became the largest economy early in the 20th century. British, French, and German intellectuals may have had their disputes and contributions in those first decades, but the future was already going to be across the Atlantic.

Today I feel that many Americans are living in the past, and not admitting and acknowledging that the present is pointing to the future. The world is becoming genuinely multipolar. There is more than one sun in the sky. Though there are nearly 1 billion people speaking English on the internet (often second language speakers), there are 750 million Chinese speakers. As the year 2020 approaches we’re living in a genuinely multipolar and multicultural world, but a lot of the discussion I see on my part of the internet is about white colonialist males. As if those are the only bright white suns in the sky. Men like McCartney. But the fixation of cultural elites is often a reflection of the last war, and past priorities, just as science fiction futures reflect the present. Change is in the air, even if we don’t realize it….