Re: short story reference

From: Paul Dillon (dillonph@northcoast.com)
Date: Mon Jan 31 2000 - 11:50:30 PST


Dear all,

the last post was somehow popped out of the sent messages folder into the
Outbox and sent unintentionally when I checked my email. My whole system
had a crisis that I still haven't figured out. Unfortunately I think I lost
the messages I was working on in response to Eva's boundaries and kathie's
dualisms as well as nate's "history as ZPD" . I have been totally absorbed
in working on a screen play about a 16th century andean prince, Waman Puma,
with a peruvian friend. What an eye opener concerning genre and context as
we have watched the characters spring to life when we begin to flesh out the
concrete elements of the initially abstract scenes into which they were
placed. Sometimes working with historical problems one has the feeling of
solving puzzle where you don't have initially have the big picture (it
didn't come in a box that had a picture on the outside) but once you do have
it, all of the little pieces seem to order themselves, to spring roots or
synapses that further inform and order the behavior of the individual parts.
Quite fascinating!

But anyway please disregard the message about short story reference.

Paul H. Dillon

----- Original Message -----
From: Paul Dillon <dillonph@northcoast.com>
To: XMCA <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Friday, December 10, 1999 7:39 AM
Subject: short story reference

> I remember seeing the collective xmca memory spring into action once
before
> to produce the reference for a sci-fi story and i'd like to tap that if
> possible. The story for which i'm seeking a reference concerns a fanciful
> third world war between the us. and the ussr. Each side develops weapons
> appropriate to their ideologies as envisioned by the author. The U.S.
> develops neutron bombs that kill all the people and spare all the material
> infrastructure (capital) while the USSR develops bombs that disintegrate
all
> the products of human labor (from tooth brushes and clothes to cars,
> airplanes, and bridges) but spare all human life. As a result there are
> many survivors in the US but none in the USSR. Some of these survivors
> manage to walk/travel all the way to Russia where they find a basically
> intact material infrastructure which they begin to use. The story ends
with
> a description of the protagonist survivors who have clearly become Russian
> in terms of their psychology/personality even to the point of speaking
> Russian.
>
> The internalization metaphor is cute and I wonder if any sci-fi fans out
> there in xmca land have ever run across this story and have a ref for it.
>
> Paul H. Dillon
>



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