Escaping History

At a panel at Eastercon— or perhaps it was the interview, I’m not sure– I made a statement that seemed to catch everyone by surprise.

“If we ever succeed in populating other worlds,” I said, “the first thing they’ll do is lose interest in Earth history, because none of it will be relevant.”

Which seemed to shock a lot of history-loving SF fan to the core.  But consider: what if the past is not merely another country, it’s another solar system?  If the nations of Bozniagraphica-Nostra Patersdolf signed a treaty in 1649 with Gallicia-Alte-Markstein, what interest would that be to the doughty immigrants of Epsilon Eridani VII?

Of course I suppose that it’s possible to Learn From History, not that I’m sure anyone does.  But it seems to me that a close study of human psychology would produce the same warnings and truisms without having to anchor the knowledge to a lot of irrelevant data.

This was perhaps more obvious to me because I’m from a country where people go to escape their history.  My grandparents fled their country’s subjection to the Tsar of All the Russias.  Others fled feuds, the military draft, or economic despair.

The point is, if you live in America, you don’t have to hate the people from the next valley anymore.  In fact, you’ll have more in common with them than with practically anyone else.

Of course you can hate them if you want, but it’s a choice.  You don’t have two thousand years of history poisoning your relationship with the next valley, you don’t have all your relatives and neighbors demanding that you hate the next valley with all awful weight of history and expectation.  Here, if you hate your neighbors, it’s because you’re an American, and you choose that hatred freely.

In Genoa they have a saying: “Better a death in the family than a Pisan at the door.”  You don’t find sayings like that in this country.  And you won’t find them on Epsilon Eridani VII, either.

You might find a few oddballs studying Earth history for its richness and strangeness, but the rest will just get on with being Epsilonians, and making their new world.