Missing Lawrence Miles Interview

Thank you so much! That's exactly what I was looking for. Makes me wonder what the too confrontational questions were. Also makes me miss new Lawrence Miles work...

For posterity, there were three missing questions. One was essentially 'How do you know that you don't have mean world syndrome?' - which he deleted without replying to, and which I regret asking.

The others were responses to the Reality Check interview, specifically the parts where he discusses his sense that we lack a vision of the future and where he gives a reason for not writing a specific thing that various books have inspired massively awful events and that he's so allergic to amassing social capital because he '[doesn't] want to be a cult leader even by accident'. To which my paragraph-length questions were, roughly, 'What about these dozen areas in which people are actively trying to make the world better?' and 'Arguably I wouldn't be nearly so interested in you if your writing hadn't been hidden away, and if it's influencing someone on another continent enough to bother you like this then you seem doomed to develop implausible cultists even in your silence, so why not make things anyway?'

His responses, again roughly, being 'I don't think that we have a collective idea of what the future looks like, so our progress may well lead us off of a cliff,' and 'I don't remember what I said that you're responding to and I have no idea what I deleted that was so important to you,' followed by a repetition of his explanation that he sees his online presence as a garden and deleting things is more a custodial/curatorial act for him than anything.

Hey! Nice to see you here, we should talk more.

I agree that a unified view of the future isn't sufficient, given there are many that are essentially mirages or dead ends. I think what LM's talking about, though, is that historically culture itself - at least, good and worthwhile culture - has been marked by a particular orientation towards the future.

I take Christmas on a Rational Planet as very much about the deconstruction of a simple teleological account of history, the point in the history of ideas where people freed themselves from the slave-ship of history and attempted to seize the helm and steer somewhere else. Elsewhere he remarks upon the fact that people in the 1960s simply found thinking of the future to be a worthwhile and important endeavor - something he echoes in the Reality Check interview when he speaks both about his own childhood and historical England as being periods that were awful but that people genuinely believed would improve. I think the best summary of this strain of his thought (if I'm not just conflating a lot of things) is when he argues that everything meaningful comes out of a sense that "in some small, knock-on way" it tries to make a better world possible.

I think that's one of the reasons he was so fond of the City of the Saved and let it into his setting, even though it's far more unambiguously cozy, safe and utopian than anything else. Even in the universe where we're mostly dystopian victims of the War's jetsam and spend the lifetime of the sun doing nothing of importance, we still have something like a happy ending.