Some questions have arisen as to whether Poul Anderson is consistent in his description of the level and application of technology in the Terran Empire period of his Technic History. We will approach this issue by carefully rereading two relevant earlier passages about the technological basis of the Polesotechnic League which preceded the Empire. There is an omniscient narrator's reflective passage in "Margin of Profit," which is repeated as an introduction to "Territory," and there is also the introduction to the second David Falkayn story, "A Sun Invisible." I just need some time to meditate, to retrieve two volumes from a bookshelf upstairs and to reread the appropriate passages! I expect to be back here shortly. Meanwhile, anyone who beats me to it might want to comment on this post concerning the passages in question?
8 comments:
I did comment about how anti-gravity might not make water & ground transport uneconomic if hovering by anti-gravity takes enough power, after the post https://poulandersonappreciation.blogspot.com/2023/10/on-vixen.html
Since you mention "A Sun Invisible" I will note that, IIRC in both that story & "Hunters of the Sky Cave" a crucial advantage of the invaders was that the location home star was unknown to the League or the Empire. So finding the location was a crucial part of defeating the invaders.
There's also the minor point that useful fissionables are not as common in terrestrial geology as useful fossil fuels. On some worlds, if a customer gets there, presumably it may just be cheaper/easier/simpler to refine petroleum (or hydrogen, or methane, or what have you) to a useful level than mine uranium (or thorium), create plutonium, etc.
The Technic civilization uses fusion reactors. They don't need Uranium.
Also if they were using fission, since nuclear reactions produce a few million times as much energy per gram as combustion, most planets will have much more energy available from fissionable atoms as from fossi fuel.
Note: one oddity about the geochemistry of uranium is that the more oxidized form of uranium disolves in water but then precipitates out if the water flows through reducing material like buried dead plant matter.
So the richest deposits of uranium formed after cyanobacteria released O2 into the air & also made deposits of dead plant matter for disolved uranium to precipitate into. Planets with life to form fossil fuels will also tend to have rich uranium deposits.
With current technology combustion engines can be scaled down small enough to run cars but fission reactors cannot & are unlikely to become scalable that far down. It might turn out that fusion reactors are inherently bigger than the small end of fission reactors. So we end up with fusion for really large scale stuff, combustion for small scale & fission for in-between
Since nobody - even Anderson - has managed to come up with a useable fuel and design for a fusion reactor, imagining such is sort of a self-licking ice cream cone, isn't it?
Bottom line, even in an imagined universe where something approximating FTL travel is possible, the fact Anderson didn't spell out what the economic and policy reasons of his equally imagined human-colonized world of Vixen were as to why gasoline and wheeled trucks on paved roads made more sense than aircraft for moving freight from Point A to Point B is hardly enough to set aside suspension of disbelief. Maybe the alien occupiers had banned aircraft.
The fact it was a novella and is probably enough, as well. ;)
DS: this is science -fiction-, not science.
You're allowed to assume future discoveries in both technology and science. You don't have to 'prove' them, because again, it's -fiction-.
But then you should work through the -implications- of them, and be consistent about it.
Nobody does this perfectly, though it's easier than imagining social changes.
Eg., Heinlein's future history anticipated flying cars and acceptance of public nudity -- but the nude housewives came out to greet commuter husbands parking the flying car in the driveway.(*)
The impossibility of -actually- getting the future right is why whenever I do near-future SF, I embed a few clues that this is actually an -alternate- history.
Eg., the character named "Rolfe" in CONQUISTADOR is an indicator that in this history, unlike ours, the male like of the Rolfe/Pocahontas marriage survived and became members of the FFV's.
(The female line did, and became part of the background of most of the Virginia gentry by the end of the 18th century.)
In that book, it doesn't make much of a difference... until the 20th century.
(*) incidentally nudity is unsanitary, which is why we wear underwear. Better the underwear than the sofa.
Likewise, when you're setting SF stories in the past (time travel, etc.), you have to rely on current research... which gets upended now and then.
Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of prehistoric migrations over the last decade and a bit, for example.
Both Poul and I have been caught out by this.
In CORRIDORS OF TIME, Poul has the proto-Indo-European speakers arriving in Denmark in 1827 BCE, and I had them getting to Britain a little later in the ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME trilogy.
But research in ancient DNA by Reich and others has pushed that back a -long- way.
The Scandinavian branch of the Corded Ware/Battle Axe culture (now generally agreed to have been Proto-Indo-European speakers were all over Scandinavia by 2800 BCE
And their relatives moved from the Netherlands into the British Isles around 2500 BCE and completely supplanted the Neolithic locals over the next few centuries -- 93%+ genetic turnover.
So my book set in 1250 BCE would have to be pushed back a thousand years, and so would CORRIDORS OF TIME.
This would have other implications -- for example, Poul has the Battle Axe people using chariots, but those were invented by their relatives far to the east, the Sintashta culture, in the centuries around 2000 BCE in what's now Chelyabinsk Oblast.
They'd certainly be using/riding horses, though.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Fascinating comments! My only real caveat being that you can use a real world setting for your near future science fiction. I know, your story won't match up with real history as it inevitably diverges from your story. But I see nothing wrong with that--it merely means your story becomes an alternative history.
Ad astra! Sean
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