{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/557",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 557,
    "subject": "Retroactive Futures",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-05-04T13:45:43+00:00",
    "last": "1998-05-04T13:45:43+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0010-0082@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Michael Straight",
        "address": "straight at email.unc.edu"
      },
      "date": "1998-05-04T13:45:43+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Retroactive Futures",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "On Sat, 2 May 1998 m.driussi at genie.geis.com wrote:\nThis \"effect of the future upon the present,\" while a paradoxical\nmirroring of the effect of the past upon the present, is a point that\nWolfe brings up about the Urth Cycle in the text itself as well as in\nmany interviews and articles.  Time and again he says that Earth may\nhave received wonders from Urth; not in the sense that Urth is located\nin our past, thus restoring the \"natural\" cause/effect sense of \"the\npast shaping the present,\" but in this paradoxical sense of seemingly\ngoing against the timeflow.  (The shadow of Baldanders has caused Mary\nShelley to write FRANKENSTEIN rather than Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN\ninspiring/causing Baldanders to recreate himself as a giant monster;\netc.)\n\nHere, to put it in another way, prosaic and mundane: let's say that\nwhat Wolfe is talking about, the future altering the present, is\nreally just this--people get the future they have in mind, the goal\nthey are working toward.  Just to crank this idea up and give enough\ncontrast to make it clear, I'll cast it into a starkly religious mode\nthat Wolfe never uses: If people have God in hearts and mind,\nthen they are heading towards the future of rebirth by the timeline\nwarping behavior they exhibit; If people do not have God in hearts\nand mind, then they are heading towards the future of final death via\nthe timeline shifting behavior they exhibit (killing Dodos, raping\nthe Earth, etc.)."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "This sounds very much like how C.S. Lewis describes the situation in _The\nGreat Divorce_.  He claims that the redeemed in Heaven will look back on\ntheir earthly life and see that they have always been in Heaven (or at\nleast since baptism), that the joys of life were actual tastes of Heaven\nand that the pains were merely purgatorial purification.  Whereas the\ndamned will look back and see that their pains were the first tortures of\nHell and their pleasures unheeded invitations to abandon self for God. \n\n-Rostrum"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}