Re: Oldest SF not necessarily most dated?

Matthias Warkus <Warkus@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in
news:g0fpks$alh$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 

> John Schilling schrieb:
>> 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*.
 
> To me, the surprise is rather that it managed to hold out that
> long. (OK, but then, I was born in 1981, so ...) I recall a long
> and pointed article from 1963 (IIRC) detailing how the Soviet
> economy worked in spite of central planning rather than because
> of it. Hard to believe they muddled along for nearly 30 more
> years. 

Not just muddled along, but expanded their global reach through much 
of the period.  (There were a lot more Soviet allies in Asia, Africa, 
and the Americas in 1983 than in 1963.)  Thus their poverty was taken 
to some extent as evidence of their focus on larger goals as 
contrasted with the West's consumerism-- and if central planning (or, 
as was often presumed, diversion of resources comparable to ours in 
different directions) made their civilian population poor, it didn't 
obviously impair building up their nuclear and conventional forces.  
(Obviously to outside observers prior to Afghanistan, anyway.)

It also just wasn't generally recognized just how poor Russians were 
till glasnost.  E.g., economist Paul Samuelson's famous 1976 quote 
""It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe 
are miserable," and his estimate that the Soviet GNP was between half 
and three-quarters that of the US, while predicting a faster future 
growth rate for them.  (Probably helped along by the fact that in the 
mid-70s, the US economy was in the middle of its years of 
stagflation.)

Look at the futures of SF in the 70s and early 80s to get a sense of 
conventional wisdom-- either we'd be coexisting in a detente-turned-
convergence (oddly, both Clarke and Pournelle, albeit from different 
angles), we'd teeter along in Cold War indefinitely (or tip over into 
a civilization-destroying hot one-- the TV movie "The Day After" was 
the cause of a lot of talk at my high school), or the superpowers 
would both wind up marginalized in some way (Gibson-- though in 
_Neuromancer_ IIRC the USSR was still a going concern and the US 
wasn't).

Mike

-- 
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
mschiffe@[EMAIL PROTECTED]