There is an old saying that goes: "The greatest lie the devil ever told was convincing the world he didn't exist." The Present
Author will paraphrase that to fit our topic: The
Greatest Lie Russia Ever Told Was That The Cold War Is Over. Oh, we thought so! We had our Reagan / Gorbachev moment, with all that mushy perestroika and glasnost and goodwill getting gooey all over each other. Anybody remember the
feel-good wave we all had as the Berlin Wall came down? Jesus Jones launched us into the '90s with "Right Here, Right Now" bursting with naive Generation X optimism, and David Hasselhoff showed up in a glowing piano jacket and sang a song about how we were all free from our problems forever. You expected them to conjure John Lennon back from the dead to declare this the Lord's Millennium of peace. Yeah, that was all bullshit. Despite the fact that Russia
signed a new constitution in 1993, including some remarkably western-like ideas like article
29, which guaranteed freedom of ideas…
Your
humble author grew up reading science fiction; it was my first passion and continues to be an enduring comfort. I was also born within the ranks of Generation X, so I came along at the right time for the cyberpunk wave in science fiction. I do write for a living now (oh… you noticed?), but as a teen I tried scribbling some sci-fi stories of my own. That turned out to be a bad idea, but you have to find these things out the hard way. And let me tell you:
Had I come up with the ridiculous plot which I am about to lay out
here, I would have ripped the paper out of the typewriter (we still
used those then), crumpled it up and dunked it in the trashcan, and
taken the rest of the day off in self-discipline, because clearly I
would have needed a rest. Had I read the plot of the COVID-19 virus
in any novel at the time, said novel would be digesting in the guts
of the nearest trashcan before long. If I may borrow a
turn of phrase from the late Kurt Vonnegut: this story is a crock…
Score: 1.27
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