It kinda blows my mind to think that our president will be named Mitt, Newt, or Barack. Over 200 years of Georges, Williams and Johns, then apparently in 2012 we finally got fed up with all that WASPy shit and pulled a hard 180.
Because that's how fantasy universes generally work. Look at a Song of Ice and Fire, for example, which has a history going back millenia, with little technological advancement in the meantime.
If you want to justify it, I suppose you could say that science just doesn't take off the same way in a universe where magic is real. For most of human history, disciplines like science, philosophy and theology were not distinct, but bound up in a big sticky ball of scholarship. So you'd have someone like Isaac Newton, who on the one hand invented calculus and developed the laws of motion, but was also an alchemist and was determined to discover the Ark of the Covenant.
The scientific revolution and the increasingly rapid pace of technological development essentially arose from the growing realization that empiricism and the scientific method were far more effective tools for discerning truth, and it became a separate collection of disciplines. Would science have jumped out so far ahead in a universe like Star Wars where magic is real, and mastery of it can be just as effective, if not more so, than developing technology?
Winnowing down a top 5 is a bit too taxing on my brain at 1:45 am, but my favorite album is Born to Run. The songs are great, and the way they play off each other thematically and tonally over the course of the album is just masterful.
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