Agreed! I'm testing a hypothesis here through the dialectic, not asserting one! There are definitely visionaries and prophets and doom-seers in each society; w

Agreed! I'm testing a hypothesis here through the dialectic, not asserting one! There are definitely visionaries and prophets and doom-seers in each society; when I talk about societal consensus I'm talking about averages. Though I'd hesitate to agree that vision === imagination of successors. To my mind, there's a difference between improving the extant, and having a new one. Maybe you can get to the latter by way of the former over time, and that way you get into "Gentle Seduction"[0] territory. But that also kind of amounts to a lack of imagination, and a rejection of endings. > Where is Ursula Le Guin? Where indeed! Though I haven't given enough of the newer generations of sci fi authors a chance myself, to be fair. --- [0] http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html