In his latest Message from Dan, author Dan Simmons comments on his recent Time Traveler piece and the threat posed by radical Islam:
Why did our fictional Time Traveler return to New Year’s Eve 2005? The paradoxical answer might be that it was the last real time of peace he knew of in the 21st Century.“Forgetfulness overcomes every successful civilization,” writes Lee Harris. That forgetfulness is this: in each era, just when trade and peace and reason and moderation seem most likely to prevail, the opportunity for the zealots to succeed through ruthlessness is at its greatest.
“The result is an unsettling paradox: the more the spirit of commerce triumphs, the closer mankind comes to dispensing with war, the nearer we approach the end of history, the greater are the rewards to those who decide to return to the path of war, and the easier it will be for them to conquer. There is nothing that can be done to change this fact; it is built into the structure of our world.”