Somebody Will, again
I'm having one of those everything-is-deeply-intertwingled moments.
On the way home, Ada Palmer's haunting and lovely and sad-yet-hopeful song “Somebody Will” came on in my iTunes rotation. (Link is to Sassafrass's Bandcamp site, where you can listen to the song for free or purchase the whole album for $5.) It made me cry, as usual. (Thanks again to Sumana for introducing me to it.) It's about not getting to live in the future we want, but still doing the everyday work that needs to be done to get there. Quote:
But I’ll teach the student
Who’ll manage the fact’ry
That tempers the steel that makes colonies strong.
And I’ll write the program that runs the computer
That charts out the stars where our rockets belong.
It will never get easy to wake from my dream
When the future I dream of is so far away.
But I am willing to sacrifice
Something I don’t have
For something I won’t have
But somebody will someday.
(Btw, it was great to get to meet Ada Palmer and Lauren, of Sassafrass, at last year's WorldCon, and to watch them perform with Jo Walton. I never did get around to writing up that con report.)
When I got home, I got curious about one of the lines of the chorus, so I Googled it. And that led me to a LiveJournal post from five years ago from rushthatspeaks (who I have people in common with, but whom I don't think I've ever met in person), that's in part a review of a graphic novel called Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, by Brian Fies.
And that book is about, as rushthatspeaks puts it, “the evolution of the dream, especially the dream of space, and how what we got is not what anybody dreamed, though what we got is wondrous.” It starts out with the dreams of the future from the World's Fair in 1939. In their review, rushthatspeaks notes that in a variety of ways, our society got better for a lot of people in later decades, even if we didn't get jetpacks and moon colonies: “the dreams of the past didn't have much space for me in them, did they?”
Which seems to me to resonate interestingly with the movie Tomorrowland, which I watched the other day, and which also features a World's Fair and is partly about the future of the past—and also doesn't quite address the issue of underrepresentation in that utopian future.
And Fies, the author of that graphic novel, is also the author of the excellent webcomic The Last Mechanical Monster, which I read in its entirety the other day.
And rushthatspeaks has become closely tied to Strange Horizons.
And my plan for tonight is to finish editing my long-delayed article about the history of online prozines.
...And there are more or less explanations for a bunch of these apparently coincidental connections; the worlds of sf publishing and fandom are relatively small. But even so; everything is feeling particularly intertwingled this evening.
