ATD: unanswered questions #2

[Michael Bailey]

 bandwraith  wrote:

> [what] the world might be with a minor adjustment or two.
>  According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction."
>
>
>  -was the nature of the historical "adjustment," that was
>  supposed to have taken place? Despite the Chums flight
>  to grace, it seems that life on the planet is also biz as usual.
>

The handle you're picking up the statement with seems to be different
than the one that sticks out at me.
That's interesting.  I'm not suggesting one of us is more right, in
fact I like the
idea of trying to define what are the minor adjustments.
(more thereon in a bit)

The salient point that spoke to me was that OBA was referring ex cathedra
to the purposes of fiction as they apply to AtD,
 and that one of those purposes is to examine the world
as it would be were "thus-and-such" change(s) made.
Isn't this part of the definition specifically of speculative (ie
"science") fiction?

Interesting side question: who are these "some" according to whom this
is part of ars fictiva?

Another interesting side question:
among the implications here is that fiction (according to some)
has purpose - has, in fact, purposes.  What are the others?

To what useful end does contemplating the world as it is not lead?
To an appreciation of how things are, to a sense of contrast,
to a sense of possibilities (as Jackie Gleason used to say in the
MasterCard ads: "Master the possibilities!")...ability to develop
a rhyme and reason, a line of patter, a set of emotional responses
derived not directly from experience but from an idealized experience;
to allow "thought experiments" with life...

Ok, now that I've tapered off into airy speculation,
what are the "minor adjustment or two" that AtD presents?
The frequent use in AtD of "a couple three" inclines me to think
that "one or two" easily expands into more.  But I will stick with 2.

1) The balloonists are the biggest invention.  Since their story is the
frame-tale, the more realistic occurrences of the Vibe and Traverse family
take place within their story, and therefore at a higher level of abstraction,
further from our "real world" in which we're reading the book.
I think that the classic right-left, rich-poor polarization is set
spinning like a
gyroscope wheel within the framework of the Chums story.  The progress of the
Chums story - homo faber, homo adventurer like Buckminster Fuller's
ship captains,
is kept balanced by the Vibe-Traverse saga,
but its motion is in a different frame of reference, less
predetermined - implicitly
making a point Robert Anton Wilson made explicitly, over and over: technology
holds the potential of altering outcomes of the - what is it, 7? -
traditional stories.

2) Literally, the adjustment given to Jimmy Drop by young Willis Turnstone -
boy do I get incoherent when I try to delineate the significance of that...

associatively let's set Willis Turnstone to the author, or his Muse,
 in the throes of a liberal education
and a wonderful inspiration, doing a little adjustment to the reader
(hypocrite lecteur)
or, to This Sinful World reader and author inhabit,
which - true - enables the reader in continuing his flawed lifestyle
but at no point
does the practitioner enter into anything but a healing relationship
although the edge of Turnstone's medical mission subsides thereafter
into a more profit-oriented practice but still
beneficent (insofar as reasonably conceivable, and not without

sheesh - obviously need a little "perculation" to make any sense of that
not to mention a number of ancillary points not yet hinted at
-- and after the perking, perhaps some eggshells into the brew