Introduction to Issue 12

We live in a science-fiction world. That is what many say. Perhaps that is true, but being someone who believed that the Apollo Missions would lead us to the space station, moon base and ability to reach Jupiter “quickly” that I saw in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it has been a disappointment. When I volunteered to edit this issue of ETTT I was thinking of a theme for the issue. Having just re-read Diane Ackerman’s The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (a recommended read, by the way), I thought of my disappointment in the space program, and the tone of resignation that I read into the Mundane Manifesto. That Manifesto, attested to by a number of SF writers, including author Geoff Ryman, states that Humankind and the Earth are all we have. There will be no FTL travel, no aliens; only us. So how do we make the best of it? Right now, everything seems turned apocalyptic. Literature and poetry are, for us fans, the best way to figure that out. The grand-tour SF books like Arthur C. Clarke’s Imperial Earth and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 show our future confined to our solar system. What will the poetry be like? This is a small sampling of what that future could be.