WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK
"Descending Road and its World" wraps itself around our thirst for justice, hope, and peace. That is a big wrapper. It confronts us with ourselves: Do we engineer deracinated subhumans to serve us? Do we submerge ourselves in the violent temptations of supremacy? Do we enslave and exile and extinguish whole communities to maintain our power? Do we poison our lands and drive out or murder their custodians? Do we conjure and deploy destructive weapons to set communities warring against each other? Do we breed generations of cast-off savages living forgotten at our fringes like vermin?
Yes, we do. We do all these things, here, now, in our own real world; we have done them for a long time; and with science unbridled by moral force we may well continue to do them. The cries of rage and longing and grieving we read and hear every day need more power, more impact, more uplift for us all.
"Descending Road and its World " isn't simply science fiction. It is a sweeping and damning social critique, set in a world removed from our own but all too familiar. It shares this terrain with epic works such as those of George Orwell, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Pynchon, H. G. Wells, Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, and even Dante Alighieri. It’s a feast of cultures, science, romance, war, tragedy, and victory.
As we reach its conclusion, “Descending Road and its World" gives us an emergence of hope, of good potentials, of reconciliation, justice, harmony, grieving, and healing. All of the harrowing tales woven into it move to a full and satisfying completion, just as when Vergil and Dante emerge from the Inferno and see at last the stars.
