Re: Romula - the news

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Dennis Paul Himes wrote:
> >     In the future history in which my fiction is set the Modern Age, or
> > Modern Era, is the time we are living in now, roughly between the first and
> > third world wars.
>
> Interesting.  What, then, do they call their own era?
That's kinda what I was getting at in my other posts -- the term "Modern Era"
is only used for the present period of history because we're too close to the
events in history to understand the full impact certain processes will have on
the future.  Certainly, some changes now occurring (the rapid development
of telecommunications technologies, for example) are changing so many different
aspects of life that we are fairly assured we are correct in giving them an era
name ("the Information Age", for example).   But this may not be the case with
everything.  The New York Times just the other day had an article indicating that
certain religious movements (or quasireligious movements) like Communism
and New-Ageism may have less of a lasting effect on the next millennium than
the major shifts going on in the more traditional great religious traditions like
Pentecostalism within Christianity or some of the newer incarnations of Islam
being developed.   At this point in history, Communism certainly seems to be
a very important sociopolitical movement, but a thousand years hence it may
have been relegated to the status of Zoroastrianism or Shamanism in Subsaharan
Africa (which is not to make any value judgments on these, only to say they have
been more or less pushed out of the limelight).

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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