Editorial
A Traveller From an Antique Land

I started writing this editorial while staring off at the pyramids from the balcony of the Mena House Oberoi Hotel in Cario. Which meant that I really wasn't getting much writing done after all. Because when confronted with the only survivor from the list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it turned out to be impossible to do anything else but ... well ... wonder.

So as I sat in the setting sun and listened as the calls to prayer began, very little writing got done. I couldn't tear my eyes away from the pyramids in order to look down at the notebook in my lap. It had been like that all week. Before capping my trip to Egypt with this magnificent view of the Great Pyramid of Giza, I'd visited many other tombs and temples that had previously existed to me only as magical names—Abu Simbel, Luxor, Karnak, Memphis and more. But oddly, as I toured each of those amazing places, my emotions weren't the ones that I would have predicted.

That's not to say that many of the feelings I had anticipated weren't there. I marveled at the intricate beauty of the statues and heiroglyphics. And I was impressed that the technical knowledge necessary to construct such monumental work had existed thousands of years before. But I was surprised that my overwhelming mood, pushing all the others into the background, turned out to be one of melancholy.

At Abu Simbel, with its colossal carvings of Ramses II (in front of which I stand below), all I could think of was Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous 1818 sonnet "Ozymandias":

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Finding Mars on Earth

Shelly's words kept echoing in my mind as I studied the massive faces above me. Of the ruler who felt the need to trumpet his name like that, I couldn't help but think, "Well, someone thinks an awful lot of himself!"

The urge to build great monuments seemed like a folly of man, fearful people saying to the universe, "Please remember me." That need to puff himself up made the king of Egypt smaller to me, instead of intimidating me as he would have wished. For all flesh is grass, and the urge for self-promotion in the face of eternity seemed rather silly.

Or to put it in modern terms, I looked at Abu Simbel the same way we sometimes do today when someone we know buys a flashy sports car at an advanced age, and we suspect that he must be compensating for something. To use a phrase that would have seemed ridiculous several thousand years ago, it all smacked to me of someone with deep self-esteem issues.

But what does this have to do with science fiction?

As I learned during my trips to China and Cuba, travel to foreign countries is as close as any of us can get to replicating the science-fictional experience of visiting an alien world.

I have always welcomed the disorientation and metaphysical discomfort that come when visiting a place in which language and custom are unfamiliar. And as I attempt to step back from my own prejudices as outlined above, and understand the ancients on their own terms, I am as much an explorer as any fictional spaceman. Visits to Arrakis and Barsoom are impossible, so walking the distant streets of Terra and attempting to understand the things which will always be lost in translation is something to savor, whether those streets are in Cairo or Havana or Chengdu.

I may never be able to visit Mars, but this trip was another reminder that Earth itself still holds alien worlds aplenty.