Monday 27 July 2020

Belters And Lunarians

"The Children's Hour."

Larry Niven's Belters, like Poul Anderson's Lunarians, spend their entire lives permanently protected from vacuum. They wear spacesuits, travel in small spacecraft and inhabit enclosed artificial environments which, however, can be both spacious and colorful. Belters have Mohawk hairstyles to keep their hair out of the machinery. They do not straighten their backs but crouch alertly. The difference is that Lunarians have been genetically modified to be healthy in Lunar gravity.

One aspect of Known Space technology and cosmology recalls Anderson's Tau Zero and "Flight to Forever":

"...the stasis field would probably survive the re-contraction of the primal monobloc and its explosion into a new cosmic cycle..."
-Chapter I, p. 149.

So are there any survivors from previous universes?

Starting with a blank page or computer screen, every writer creates new characters ex nihilo even when contributing to an already established series. General Buford Early strikes me as a mildly comic character. When Early asks our viewpoint character, Captain Jonah Matthieson, a Belter, whether he notices anything about current war data and Matthieson replies, "'We're losing,":

"'Fucking brilliant, Captain!' The general was short, black, and balding, and carried a mass of muscle that was almost obscene to someone raised in low gravity. He looked to be in early middle age, which depending on how much he cared about appearances, might mean anything up to a century and a half these days. 'Yeah, we're losing...'" (p. 137)

So the short, balding, muscled, swearing general might be 150 but might not care about appearances! And, more importantly, he agrees that the interstellar war is being lost.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

We do see mention as well, in A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS, that Emperor Hans did not much care about HIS some what rough appearance. There are men like that who are indifferent to such matters.

And there would be others, of course, who did care, enough to even have futuristic versions of cosmetic surgery done for them. Such as Dominic Flandry.

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,

Cromwell told his portrait artist to show warts and all.

Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I remember that too! And the Spanish painter Diego Velazquez also created honest portraits.

Ad astra! Sean