I drew the above diagram in my notebook last November, a double allusion. The first is the epigram, "Work as if you live in…

I drew the above diagram in my notebook last November, a double allusion. The first is the epigram, “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation,” which is generally attributed to the Scottish writer and artist, Alasdair Gray. On digging a little deeper into its provenance, I was startled to learn that the line is borrowed from a poet—and not just any poet, but the much-beloved poet laureate of my Canadian childhood, Dennis Lee, author of Alligator Pie and Garbage Delight. The quotation is from Lee’s poem “Civil Elegies”, and the second pleasant surprise was the wording in the original, which I much prefer [the emphasis here is mine]: “…the early days of a better civilization.”

The second allusion is to William Gibson’s concept of ’the jackpot’, introduced in his 2014 novel The Peripheral and which continues as the backdrop in his 2020 novel, Agency. It’s a multi-causal, distributed, decentralized apocalypse, comprising climate change, pollution, the emergence of drug-resistance diseases and, of course, pandemics. It’s not clear we’re in its early days—in Gibson’s conception, we are a century into a multi-century event. It’s just that it’s taken us this long to realize it.

So. Greetings from the jackpot, and the early days of a better civilization.

(via Deb Chachra, in Metafoundry 73 )