Five Books Featuring World-Changing Visionaries

[james_davis_nicoll]

Characters hell-bent on reshaping the world, for better or worse...

Five Books Featuring World-Changing Visionaries

Comments

[patrick_morris_miller]

Luthen Rael, terrorist and hero:

I've given up all chance at inner peace. I've made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there's only one conclusion: I'm damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my, my eagerness to fight, they've set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down... there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my sacrifice? I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? EVERYTHING!

Hari Seldon is an edge case: his world is going to be reshaped one way or another, he just wants to determine how it gets reshaped.

[scott_sanford]

I'm reminded of Samsara by Scott Alexander, a short story about the last human who has not reached enlightenment.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Hacker News News' finest moment was when it called that website 'an empathy removal training camp'.

[scott_sanford]

Ouch!

[(Anonymous)]

In Stephen King’s The End of the Whole Mess (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_Whole_Mess), Bobby Fornoy’s vision of a world at peace comes true

[(Anonymous)]

So, over on Reactor, it seems to be fine for our illustrious columnist to allude to real world politics, while commenters are discouraged from responding to those allusions.

Am I wrong?
Or is a SFF website not an appropriate venue for incoherent political rants?

[oh6]

Adrian Veidt pursues a plan to save the world with single-minded determination in Watchmen, and an array of mundane to insanely powerful superheroes are unable to stop him. Whether it actually worked is left as an exercise for the reader.

Severian the Lame, to use his most homely title, embarks on a voyage to save the world if he can in The Urth of the New Sun. His mission is a success, even if it's considerably more disruptive than the end of any of the ages of Middle Earth. How much agency he has in any of this is open to question, but he fulfills his role with his eyes open.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Whether it actually worked

If you accept the HBO series as in continuity... well, there is an HBO series, which sorta answers the question right there.