Hyperspace And Telepathy

The Peregrine, CHAPTER VIII.

Withdrawing from comparisons between multiple future history series, we appreciate specific details in a single future history instalment although here again we can find some comparisons. When the Nomad spaceship, the Peregrine, departs from a planetary system, the ship cannot enter hyperspace until the gravitational field is sufficiently weak. That is fairly standard and certainly applies to the different kind of hyperspace in Poul Anderson's later Technic History. In the Peregrine, human bodies experience:

"The indescribable twisting sensation of hyperdrive fields building up..." (p. 57)

I have read that or something like it elsewhere although maybe not in the Technic History?

In the Peregrine, a telepath senses cerebral emissions but cannot interpret characteristic individual patterns and this corresponds exactly to how telepathy operates in the Technic History - excepting only Aycharaych, the universal telepath. Characters in different series cannot know how close they are to each other. Sundered by their alternative histories, they are nevertheless united in their creator's and readers' imaginations.

1930

One advantage of blogging is that, if we forget to include a quote in a particular post, then we can include it in a later one. Yesterday, in a completely different context, I had read a passage that I had thought was highly relevant both to the twentieth century (in which it was written) and to future histories (written in that century). However, the context was so different that I had forgotten the passage when I wrote:

1930, 1950, 1990, 2000

In Italy in 1930, Antonio Gramsci wrote in one of his Prison Notebooks:

"The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born - now is the time of monsters..."

1930 was also the year of publication of Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men. (See the first link above.)

We remember Poul Anderson's "New centuries scream in birth."

Future histories do not have villains as such. However, we remember political "monsters" in Poul Anderson's "Un-Man" and "The Sensitive Man" and in the real twentieth century! (Anderson's Technic History incorporated his Captain Flandry series in which the Merseians appeared as well-written although stereotypical green-skinned space opera villains but Anderson later transformed them into a more well-rounded and plausible alien species.)

In "1930, 1950, 1990, 2000," we mentioned that Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history chronology starts with Neil Armstrong in 1969 and that the CoDominium is formed in 1990. It follows from these data alone that, when this chronology was written, 1969 was past and 1990 was future. Future histories reflect their times.