Excerpt from Fredric Brown Cosmolinea B-2, MicroScience Fiction for Everyone 1.7.
IMAGINE
Imagine ghosts, gods, devils. Imagine hells and heavens, cities floating in the air or submerged at the bottom of the seas. Unicorns and centaurs. Witches, gnomes, and werewolves. Angels and harpies, spells and enchantments, spirits of the air and the earth, spirits of fire. Easy to imagine all this stuff. Humanity has been imagining it for thousands of years. Imagine spaceships and future times. Easy to imagine: the future has already begun, and inside it are the spaceships. So is there nothing that is hard to imagine? Of course there is. Imagine a hundred or two hundred pounds of matter, with yourselves inside thinking, and you know that you are there, and you know how to move the matter you’re in: to keep it awake or make it sleep, to make it fall in love, to take it for a walk up a hill. Imagine an universe – infinite or not, your choice – containing millions of billions of trillions of Suns. Imagine a clump of mud swirling and swirling tumultuously around one of these Suns. And imagine yourselves on this clump, spinning too, swirling tumultuously through time and space, towards an unknown destination. Imagine.
Original title: Imagine, 1955 Translation: F.L.