Editorial – June 2018: Make a wish.
Hello everyone
I don’t usually use my own material for the basis of an editorial but some of the dilemmas from my latest story, ‘The Aladdin Box’, did make me think it would be worth considering here. What if you came across Aladdin’s lamp and you had two wishes, you’ll have to read to see what happened to the third. Yeah, go and have a read first if you haven’t read the story and then come back here.
When I started looking over this story idea I noted a few years back in my ideas file, I thought that it was too close to fantasy but looking at it this month, I thought why not write it with a Science Fiction slant. The Clarke axiom that anything too advanced would look like magic works. Making wishes come true might not necessarily be instantaneous, so the genie is essentially a fixer with just a little more power but no regard to how he does it, so it pays to be precise as to what you wish for.
Beyond that, everything depends on human behaviour of what do you want. As such, we come to you. How you choose your wishes depends on you. Do you do something for yourself first or for other people? If you’re greedy and want more wishes, then you have to think of how to do it, more so if the ‘genie’ doesn’t give you quite what you want the way you want it. Then it’s all in the wording and being told that, you have to think how you phrase it. Would you risk a nuclear holocaust to have peace on Earth? Keeping one wish back to put things back the way they were. You might even want to do something for the genie even if you think it might give you some more wishes. That would be easy if there were three wishes but now you only have two wishes, you might not get that far. Someone once thought to remove the third wish would mean you’d keep getting two wishes except that only meant per person. That should be sending out a warning signal, shouldn’t it?
Would you rush to make those wishes or really think what you want? That really depends on you. It’s a big life-changing decision. The only difference between this and winning the lottery is you know you’re going to win. Well, sort of. Except do you? Like big business, you get there by walking over a lot of people along the way except, by genie, it’s done mostly by proxy. How much you care depends on the type of wish you want. Do you really want to rule a country or world and take on all the stresses that causes when you have to sort out all the problems you’ve just taken on? Whenever you change one thing you have to sort out the consequences that causes. At least you’ve got the second wish ‘get out of that card’. Assuming you haven’t used that wish already waiting around for some complicated wish to be fulfilled.
This is what gave me food for thought with how you select your wishes and the moral responsibility with it. Would someone act like my character, Farday Loma, did? Logistically, if you go through enough people, you’d bound to come across someone like her eventually. The real question is would you act the same way? More so, if you thought all the most unlikely things that shouldn’t have happened meant that other people have been making wishes. After all, the improbable could only happen under certain conditions and you have the very thing in your hand. Would you really want to do the same?
Thank the Illuminatii such things as a magic lamp don’t exist…hopefully. Well if it is and you have the lamp, do some good to the world for all of us. You know it makes sense. Oooh look…a lamp.
Thank you, take care, good night and speak nice to the genie. Welcome to my world.
Geoff Willmetts
editor: www.SFCrowsnest.info
A Zen thought: Travelling into the past means there is no future has happened yet until you create it.
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The Reveal: OK. If you’re reading here then you haven’t had this problem yet. However, it could still hit you or any of your friends who you’re trying to introducing to SFC or, indeed, any open website that you can’t access and simply get an error message. Get the local Google website for the country you’re trying to get into. In our case, its www.google.co.uk and then access the website you want and you should be there. Maybe. If it is, let me know.
Some servers will lock you out of other countries, usually citing copyright issues, but it’s also the way the various terminals are across the world and switching to a different one jumps across them. Let me know where it doesn’t work. It’s a bit worrying that the chief country this happens to is the USA but no one tells you that you don’t always get full access across the world.
The above might not work neither but we are working on it.
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