Whatever Rachel's intentions when writing it, though, I felt that humanities' wickedness in its mistreatment of the world was being drubbed into me, and it did adversely affect my enjoyment of the story.
I'm feeling lucky that I read
Last And First Men a couple of months ago and have had a bit of schooling in this style of SF with the long historical perspective. Because I didn't get that impression at all.
If you told the history of the last 2,000 years to a citizen of the Roman empire it would be easy for them to see it as a fable of humanity's destructiveness when unmoderated by the Pax Romana. On a 100 year timescale, does it look proportionate for Europe to have wasted
millions of lives in a spat over the killing of
Franz Ferdinand?
In a story that counts time by apocalypses, it seems almost inevitable that there will be an emphasis on the perceived destructiveness of the creatures who trigger each one. The narrator is much less likely to linger on the vast majority of decent, law-abiding humans and Creature-Men when history is shaped by the few who give us all a bad name. And viewed from the perspective of "not being there at the time", war always sounds petty, self-destructive or just plain nuts. This story would have rung false if it had described tens of thousands of years of peaceful progress or had made the violent interludes sound justifiable.
I thought this story was a lot of fun, and every time it seemed to be getting predictable it came up with something I didn't predict.
