Sunday 29 March 2020

Leyburg

Poul Anderson, "The Saturn Game" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 1-73.

This is the first of forty-three installments in a future history series, many of them full length novels. Information about life on Earth is indirectly provided on p. 1 because the short introduction to the story is signed by:

"Francis L. Minamoto, Death Under Saturn: A Dissenting View (Apollo University Communications, Leyburg, Luna, 2057)"

"...Under Saturn..." means not "beneath the Saturnian surface" but "on a Saturnian moon with the ringed planet overhead."

There is a city or town with a University on the Moon in 2057. This alone must have an enormous impact on Earth. How many people have left Earth to live and work on the Moon? How many people travel between them? A University must have many students and visiting academics coming and going. There must be regular communication between Apollo University and Terrestrial schools, universities, governments and news media. Above all, anyone on Earth will look up at the Moon and know that it is now inhabited. The extract also tells us that the outer Solar System is being explored.

Even for those who never leave Earth, their horizons are expanded by the knowledge that human beings live on the Moon and have traveled as far as one of the Saturnian moons.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

For merely a college, never mind a UNIVERSITY, to exist on the Moon by AD 2057 implies many things. One being the existence of a community on the Moon large and rich enough to support such institutions of higher learning.

Elon Musk can't found his hoped for colony on Mars fast enough to please me! It should have been done on both Mars and the Moon DECADES ago.

Ad astra! Sean