This week's
Long & Short Reviews blog challenge asks which of the things reviewers have read about in fiction we'd like to see in the real world.
Of course, some of these things exist in the real world already, in a less perfect form...
1. The wise and occasionally magical grandfather/chieftain, like Ralph in Priscilla Bird's Book of Ralph and (so far) two sequels. Ralph is the leader of a peaceful and enlightened group of Sasquatch. As such he's hailed as the king of a forest community that includes cave-dwelling Neanderthal-like humans, talking ravens, unusually clever and social pumas, various other wild creatures, and quite a few normal modern humans from town who find their way to the forest and learn from the forest dwellers. Each story from their enchanted forest has something to teach humans about solving our real problems.
I had the relative I've referred to as Great-Uncle Vito at this web site. Some of us had our own grandfathers or great-uncles, or family friends, or even our own parents were the wise elders of a little close-knit community.
2. Accommodation Spells, as in Piers Anthony's Xanth series. The writer known as Piers Anthony liked porn and liked annoying people. Although the Xanth novels keep sex off the scene, Accommodation Spells are sold mostly to allow magical creatures of different sizes to crossbreed. In practice you know they'd be sold to allow creatures of different sizes and shapes to use tools and devices, too. "I typed so much more efficiently on the smaller keyboard of the Original or Practically Perfect Toshiba Satellite," a character like me might observe, and use the Accommodation Spell to shrink the keyboard of the computer the character was using.
In the real world, unfortunately we have to do the work of building accommodations. Still, progress is being made. A few years ago I lamented that the Mexican restaurant in my town, being sold because its owners couldn't afford to restore the building after storm damage, was taking with it the cutest little movable wheelchair ramp you ever saw. Today when I was downtown I saw that another store had bought the little ramp, and meanwhile on each block of the downhill side of West Jackson Street a big, permanent wheelchair ramp has been built in to help visitors deal with the steep steps between sidewalk and parking space.
3. The ability to fly by simply learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss, as in Douglas Adams' So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. No more expensive, wasteful jet fuel!
Actually, the real world would be more fun if it only had Douglas Adams in it.
4. A book boyfriend for everybody who really wanted one, as in thousands if not millions of romance novels. Granted, most women don't actually like the heroes of most romance novels, but this is as it should be. We shouldn't like other people's men very much. Who cares how unappealing everyone else's book boyfriend is when her own book boyfriend is, if not already married to her, probably angling for a second chance to meet her now. Men could either evolve into book boyfriends, or settle for their own kind of fantasy girlfriends, many of which would continue to be inflatable plastic objects.
In practice it's probably best if women become our own book boyfriends. Book boyfriends do not exist in the real world and men who can be good husbands like women who take care of ourselves. Meanwhile the main obstacle to women's success and the main source of women's emotional problems is the way women rush into relationships with men who waste our energy and time.
5. The Chasti-tree, as in a Xanth novel I'm glad Piers Anthony did not write for me about 1990. The early Xanth novels annoyed women by including rape-terrorism. The Chasti-tree was a magic tree whose wood, if even a sliver of it was aimed at a male, neutralized all interest in sex for a day or two at a time. Once Xanth females discovered this tree, every home had one, every female carried a twig in her pocket, and further novels would be less annoying. In the Xanth novels as they were written, females achieved liberation in a sillier, funnier way, by discovering panty magic. The sight of panties turned out to be enough to stun Xanth males.
In real life, the Bobbitt case had a salutary effect on my generation of men. We may need a similar case, though, to enlighten younger men. Especially if we want to allow men from Muslim countries to live in the English-speaking countries, it needs to be impressed on their minds that touching a woman in any way to which she objects can be more than their lives are worth. The punishment needs to be done by women, on the spot, and vigorously supported by men as well as women.
6. Fully reliable election results, as in so many political speeches in this era when every election seems to be followed by a demand for a recount.
In real life, after several generations of voting machines were invented to address the possibilities for confusion and cheating with paper ballots, paper ballots may still be the most reliable voting technology on Earth. It would be helpful if there were ways to keep people like Lyndon Johnson from mysteriously discovering boxes of ballots, marked in their favor, when the real popular vote seemed to be going against them. It would be helpful if there were ways to keep people like Lyndon Johnson out of the population altogether.
7. Odor-free biomass burners, as in the mind of Bill Gates and many other technological dreamers and science fiction writers.
I would like to live in a world where instead of feeling guilty if we flush the nastiest forms of biomass into rivers, or try to bury modern toilet outputs under rosebushes, we all sold biomass as fuel. All living things on Earth contain carbon. As we all should have learned in fifth grade science, that carbon can be purified by heating and compaction, forming the sort of cheap peaty stuff Europeans buy as "brown coal" while you watch in the classroom, and can, if you can afford the heating and compaction processes for several days, be further refined into your choice of soft coal, hard coal, or synthetic diamonds. Nearly all garbage--paper, plastic, banana peels, garden weeds, tissue paper and all it is used to wipe off--can go into a biomass burner. Biomass will burn well at the peaty stage, typically reached in 24 hours in a modern toilet, 48 hours in very humid weather. But it's not a perfect solution to everything because, as we already knew, even hard coal produces a lot of nasty smoke, soot, and ash, and the softer and less pure carbon is, the nastier. At the stage when biomass is ready to burn, the smoke makes it easy to tell exactly what went into the biomass burner. Nobody wants to cook food over a biomass fire. A bus that runs on biomass needs to have a lot of filters cleaned and/or replaced between runs.
8. Reliable Resistance computer networks, as in a forgettable apocalypse novel by Pat Robertson.
Robertson imagined that persecuted Christians would have a strong, worldwide, unhackable computer network so they could go on using their Internet. Ha. Ha. Ha. Though, seriously, someone who wanted to get rich could build a network of computers that didn't try to defy global tyranny, but merely tied into the Internet while running as durably and reliably as Windows Millennium Edition.
9. The island of Lilliput, as in Gulliver's Travels.
Swift's Lilliputians didn't sound as if they had enough sense to live very long if they had existed. But Lilliput sounded so cute!
10. Big businesses that stay wholesome, as in The Way Things Ought to Be.
It's happened so many times in the real world: J.C. Penney or Sam Walton or Jeff Bezos thinks of a way to make a store stand out, adds that to a mix whose main ingredient is incredible customer service, and builds one small-town store into a global empire of wealth. It's heartwarming to watch his business grow. His contemporaries love this man, or sometimes woman. His younger contemporaries, however, note that after his retirement his business "embraces change," whose main component is reducing the fabulosity of customer service. In a mere fifty years the business's trajectory can go from pushcart to mall shop to corporate empire to manifestation of cosmic evil. There ought to be a way to preserve the ethical purity of big businesses or organizations. I don't know that there is one.
