"How long had men been hunting for some faster-than-light equivalent of radio?" (p. 377)
That sentence could have been written to introduce all of James Blish's future histories.
The Seedling Stars: the FTL ultraphone.
Cities in Flight: ultraphone + instantaneous Dirac communicator.
The Quincunx of Time: ultraphone + Dirac + Dirac "beep" receiving messages from past and future. (A message transmitted in Midsummer Century is received 23,000 years earlier in Quincunx.)
A Case of Conscience: the CircumContinuum (CirCon) radio. (A Jesuit exorcises a planet fifty light-years away.)
The Star Dwellers and Mission to the Heart Stars: "Angels" (energy beings) and the Heart Stars federation communicate instantaneously.
My perennial themes are:
remember Wells;
reread Anderson;
read Blish too;
film the Technic History.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
There's also Duke Edwin's speculations, in A STONE IN HEAVEN, on whether it could be practical to use relays of Technic hyperdrive beacons for transmitting FTL messages.
I might have included Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium stories in your list. And Stirling's five volume Draka timeline.
Ad astra! Sean
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