While I was visiting England earlier this month, I went to an excellent ‘Sunday Roast’ at The High Flyer, a restaurant named in honor of a horse that was born before my own country! While it’s easy for Americans to marvel at the deep history of places we visit overseas, this made me think of the future rather than the past. High Flyer was a champion racer and ‘leading sire’ (i.e. stud) nearly 250 years ago and the people of Ely are, apparently, still very proud of him. From our present or contemporary history what will be remembered and so honored in another 200 years? What will be our equivalent of High Flyer?
The answer that immediately sprang to mind was from the Duxford Air Show we attended the week before (and I had assumed The High Flyer would be aviation-themed until we walked in and saw the art above). It was a pure joy watching lovingly-maintained, historic aircraft roar overhead. Spitfires and Mustangs are still in the popular imagination as the greatest fighter planes of their era. The Mustang car line was named for the fighter, so clearly the legacy of that thoroughbred will continue for some time. The prevalence of starfighters in space opera is also a legacy of WWI and WWII dogfights and aviator heroics. Any realistic take (i.e. hard sci fi) on space combat should rule out or severely limit the role of small craft in a relativistic, physics-accurate fight, but nostalgia and story-telling opportunities usually outweigh the practical (and thankfully so). Why not put your protagonist in a 23rd century Spitfire fighting aliens around a planet orbiting Sirius Major?
While military vehicles can often trace a lineage and a design history, it’s not that similar to an animal’s bloodline. Perhaps a better parallel to High Flyer would be a computer program? Could you imagine a restaurant in Stockholm named in honor of Minecraft 200 years from now? Wouldn’t surprise me. But a computer game, even one of the greatest ever, doesn’t have the gravitas I’m looking for.
“Welcome to the Midjourney Café, named in honor of the first AI to win an art competition right here at the Colorado State Fair in 2022.” Yes, that really happened. And software is iterative so it’s easy to imagine Midjourney ‘siring’ a new generation of AI art programs and being proudly remembered 200 years hence.
What do you think should or will be honored from our time in the 23rd century? What’s your modern-day High Flyer?
Arthur P. Dutton 