Map to the Past & Future -"The Last Mimsy"
According to the myth of Pandora's Box, Pandora opened the lid releasing all the evils of mankind—greed, vanity, slander, envy, pining—leaving only hope inside once she had closed it again. In another version of the myth, hope is considered the worst of the potential evils, because it is equated with terrifying foreknowledge. By preventing hope from escaping the jar, Pandora in a sense saves the world from the worst damage.
The Last Mimzy is a modern retelling of the Pandora myth with hope being the great gift the magical box offers. The "last mimsy" is a nanobyte robot sent from the future to gather DNA to replace the humanity lost by the people in the future.
A young-adults story? Yes, but it's a cross-over sci-fi film with a strong adult appeal that's an ET on steroids, with more intriguing science based on the 1943 short story written during the anguish of WW 11 by forgotten SF novelist, Henry Kuttner. Kuttner died at age 42 on Feb. 4, 1958, four months to the day after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik to ignite the space race.
The Last Mimsy asks the question how will humans evolve? Will we be profoundly different from the creatures we are now? Should we try to control or rise above natural physical and intellectual evolution -into a post-human world of transhumanism? We know from our knowledge of the origins of our species that our ability to think and imagine about the future is a function of our frontal lobe -a fairly recent evolutionary development.
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