Ari Ara’s novels will live longer than any of us. What a thought! Just like we’re still reading Tolkien, exploring Narnia, and traveling to Never Never Land with Peter Pan, imagine readers of the future enjoying Ari Ara’s adventures 70, 90, or 110 years from now! What will people think in 2134?
Imagine the children of the 2100s seeing Ari Ara as a cultural icon like Peter Pan and Wendy, Lucy and Edmond, or Frodo and Sam. Instead of fighting pirates, witches, or orcs, though, the children of the future will be playacting nonviolent struggles and embarking on imagined quests in peacebuilding.
A literature scholar in 2100 might write something like this: “Living as we are now, in a time of unprecedented peace, it is hard to comprehend the significance of these books. To us, the adventures of Ari Ara are common sense – they are the tried-and-true methods of how we deal with conflicts today. But in the 2010s and 2020s when author Rivera Sun wrote these books, they were a sharp departure from the standard fantasy literature of her times. Appallingly (and perhaps unsurprisingly), the genre was still addicted to sword-slinging heroes, bloody assassins, and grotesquely graphic battle scenes.”
That scholar might go on and write: “We must also remember that Rivera Sun wrote these books in a time of rampant militarism in a nation with the largest war budget in human history. They were an act of protest and a profound use of the radical imagination. The impact of these novels on a generation of peace activists cannot be overstated. From Ari Ara, the readers of her time, young and old, learned that peace is possible, and what’s more, they learned how it can be achieved. We may look at these narratives as common sense, but in the early part of the 21st century, they were a breath of fresh air and shockingly different from anything else published at the time.”
While adding a cautionary note about how much further peace work had progressed in 100 years, the scholar would mention that: “Sun’s stories took the best practices from peacebuilding, nonviolent action, conflict resolution, violence de-escalation, and more, and wove them into stories so compelling that they became a catalyst for the peace movement of the 2030s and 2040s. It is not an exaggeration to say that the peace we enjoy today is connected to the igniting of young readers’ minds in those decades.”
And our scholar of the 2100s would have something to say about the Community Publishers who made the books possible: “Even more remarkably, the novels, which stood in stark contrast to the action heroes and teenage warriors of the day, were published by a group of visionary readers. When their world had lost sight of the power and importance of peace literature, they lit the spark that illuminated the path toward the world of peace that future generations would inhabit.”
The horizon line of change sometimes stretches beyond us. The problems of today can seem invincible and the abusive powers unbeatable. But if we look back at 1924, we can see how far we’ve come. While there is so much more work to do, we must also remember how many of us are taking action right now. By 2100, the fruits of our labors will have been harvested by the elders who are being born this week.
Thank you all for having the passion and the vision to bring the Ari Ara Series into existence. May our descendants benefit from our dedication in these times … and look back kindly on us as ancestors who helped change the course of our world.
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