Ronald Wright 2

I haven’t written yet about Ronald Wright. His talk was more well-attended than I would have predicted. We didn’t get there early enough to get “good” seats, but we weren’t up in the balcony. He started his talk with a little movie clip that showed a map of the world and a white dot on the map for every 1 million people. The movie started in early in AD and continued to the 2020s (if I recall correctly; I didn’t take notes or anything). It started slowly and for a long time nothing changed on the screen. You could tell a lot of the audience were making WTF?-faces at each other and rethinking their decision to come. Then the dots came alive and you could clearly see the effects of wars, plagues, and modern medicine on the earth. It was surreal to see the dots take over continents like Africa. Canada, however, remained practically untouched north of, say, Toronto. We were a vast, dot-less landscape. Yea for us.

He talked a lot about things from his book, A Short History of Progress. He also talked a bit about utopian and dystopian fiction. He mentioned some specific books, many of which I’ve read, but he mentioned others that I haven’t heard of and I wish I’d brought something to write with because I’ve forgotten them now. He said that authors of dystopias run the risk of having their fantastic imaginings come true. How awful that must be, to write a book about what you consider to be an impossibly bad fate for humanity to suffer, only to see it realized 20 years later.

The thing I love about Ronald Wright, the thing that attracted me to his writing, is what an obviously intelligent man he is. He’s so well-read and remembers the things he’s read. He takes ideas from different people, different cultures and times and synthesizes them. He doesn’t necessarily have new ideas, but he’s got a great way of looking at the old ones from a new angle.

He signed books afterwards. I got my copy of A Short History of Progress signed. He didn’t really remember me, but he remembered my mom, or at least he was polite and said he did. What a nice man.