Saturday 9 June 2018

The Further Future

In James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time, members of a government/intelligence service known only as "the Service" receive messages from a future intergalactic civilization but cannot understand any of the messages that are from too far ahead.

In Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), members of a time travel organization called "the Eyrie," opposed to the Maurai Federation, explore the period after the Federation but cannot understand it. There are "...huge silent devices and energies...and...crystalline air...." (VIII, p. 89)

Is that further future good or bad and will it exist because of the Eyrie or in spite of them?

Spying on the Federation, Jack Havig, currently with the Eyrie, reads a secret document that corresponds to one of Poul Anderson's Maurai stories, describing how the Federation has suppressed a Hindurajan hydrogen-fusion generator.

"...Ingliss was an official second language of the Federation and spelling had changed less than pronunciation." (p. 88)

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And the remote future glimpsed in THERE WILL BE TIME arose partly because of Wallis and the Eyrie. Jack Havig himself thought of Wallis as being a great man, after all.

So I was right to think English survived in the Maurai Federation as "Ingliss."

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
Yes but as a second language after the lingua franca.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Yes, but I don't recall that lingua franca being described, including which other languages it descended from. I get the impression that most people in the Federation used Ingliss for every day life.

Sean