On pp. 161-164, Simon Hollister and Captain Karsov converse. Both are described in the third person. We guess, rightly as it turns out, that Hollister is destined to become our central character since he is present, initially alone, from the opening paragraph and because it is he that is newly arrived on Venus where Karsov is in the Guardian Corps. After their conversation but still within this opening section, the omniscient narrator describes:
"...New America, chief city of Venus in 2051 A.D." (p. 164)
This is one of the few dates (the only date?) in the Psychotechnic History texts. We remember the plateau of High America on the colonized planet, Rustum, in Anderson's Orbit Unlimited and New America. (Another confusing title.) There is trouble on Venus both in Heinlein's Future History and in Anderson's Psychotechnic History but a different kind of trouble and a different kind of Venus.
After a double space between paragraphs has terminated the opening section:
"Hollister didn't enjoy his meal." (p. 164)
As anticipated, Hollister has become the viewpoint character. The narrative proper begins and I stop blogging for this evening.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
"The Big Rain" is of interest to me because it gives us some speculations by Anderson on how he apparently thought Venus could be terraformed back in the 1950's. Something we should have been doing by now!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean:
You & I have oddly different views on the difficulties of various technical developments.
I think it will be much easier to synthesize reasonably tasty food than you do.
I think terraforming Venus is a *very* long term project, millennia at a minimum. It would be almost a side effect of general solar system development.
The steps we would be taking on that is first a moon base & a mass driver or lunar space elevator to bring material off the moon for making rotating space habitats. Such habitats can then be moved to anywhere in the solar system to be bases for development of planets & asteroids.
BTW the food synthesis will be a big help for making such habitats self sufficient.
In the case of Venus, move such a habitat to orbit around Venus, use it as a base for learning more about conditions there & for setting down balloon habitats in the upper atmosphere, which will give much more detail on the conditions.
After at *least* a few decades of such research, and major industrial development elsewhere in the solar system, we can build lots of solar sails to formation fly between the sun & Venus to cut the sunlight at Venus to about what Earth gets.
Then the *really* time consuming part is importing enough water or hydrogen to Venus to make decent size seas (Maybe about 1/10th as much water as Earth has). My BOTE calculations indicate millennia for that.
Kaor, Jim!
I am not disagreeing that the terraforming of Venus would be a long term project. What I meant was we should have at least started it decades ago, by building an O'Neill habitat orbiting it, for the necessary preliminary research.
Most of what I read about the real world terraforming of Venus came from reading Jerry Pournelle's article "The Big Rain" (title taken from Anderson's story), in A STEP FARTHER OUT (1980). And that was so long ago that what Pournelle suggested might well need updating.
And I'm still skeptical about ersatz meat ever being tasty! (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
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