Re: Oldest SF not necessarily most dated?

On Tue, 13 May 2008 06:11:02 -0700 (PDT), ilya2@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:

>> SF tends not to deal with sudden reversals or paradigm ****fts like
this.
>>   First, they're unpredictable.  Second, writing stories about a major
>> quantum jump doesn't serve the author's purpose:  During the Cold War,
>> the point of writing stories about a future global thermonuclear war
was
>> to sound an antiwar theme.  What would have been the point of writing a
>> story in which the Soviet Union just collapses peacefully?

>I remember one short story from early 80's (by Keith Laumer?) which
>takes place some centuries or millenia from now. A star****p's captain
>comments on the "first contact" situation the characters are in by
>mentioning how old Soviet Union just collapsed from its economic
>inefficiency. But that was just a throwaway line.

>> It would
>> have been dismissed as unrealistic and pointless--during the Cold War,
>> we couldn't just sit around and hope for the Soviet Union to collapse,
>> any more than we could have just hoped for a meteorite to hit the
>> Kremlin from outer space.

>Yet "sit around and hope for the Soviet Union to collapse" was the
>whole point of "containment" strategy. For 40 years NATO policy was to
>maintain sufficient deterrent force to keep USSR from starting
>expansionist wars, and wait for its unsustainable economy to... well..
>cease sustaining. And it WORKED.


I think there's a partial misunderstanding here.  I don't think anyone,
from the early '80s on at least, was terribly surprised to see the Soviet
economy collapse.  Commmunism's early luster faded pretty fast, and once
e.g. the Russians had to come begging for American grain, it was pretty
clear which economic system wasn't working.

What surprised most everyone, including myself, is that the Soviet economy
collapsed *peacefully*.  There's an obvious solution for anyone who is
facing a quick descent into poverty, who has a big gun and a bunch of rich
neighbors.  And, from the point of view of the people at the top, there 
was much to gain and little to lose from giving it a try.

Well, OK, the people one step below the top.  Gorbachev managed to find
a comfortable retirement and an honorable place in history.  But the folks
who had to implement his policies, well, I seem to recall an attempted 
coup as they pondered *their* future in the post-Soviet era.


The general expectation was that, sooner or later, the Soviets were going
to have to prop up their own economy by looting some rich, neighboring
territories.  Containment could minimize the damage when that happened,
but it was a surprise to find that containment could *prevent* that from
happening.


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