He describes Earth/Manhome:
it is depopulated and quiet;
great forests have returned;
spacemen find enjoyment in the starport towns;
youth from every part of the galaxy attend the educational centres;
arts, science and scholarship flourish;
nothing new is built - the old is preserved;
a spaceman can find his robotically protected property and its surroundings unchanged after five hundred years;
Argens reports to his employers and to the Universarium of Nordamerik;
in Niyork, there is little traffic while ivy and lichen grow on the tall, mostly empty, towers;
to visit Hugh Valland, Argens rents a flying vehicle called a "flitter" and parks it "...on an otherwise deserted carfield..." at a small Maine village (p. 123);
in Maine, there are forests and a peak-roofed, shingle-walled, seaside village of two hundred people, "...those curious, clannish folk who - even more than on places like Landomar - are not interested in worlds out yonder, who use their immortality to sink deeper roots into Earth" (p. 123);
the civil monitor of the village smokes a pipe on a rocking chair on his porch while his one wife prepares dinner;
Argens finds a gravestone inscribed "Mary O'Meara, 2018-2037";
Mary's contemporary, Valland, is nearly three thousand so the novel is set about 5018.
(Mary will be born five years hence in the year of James Blish's They Shall Have Stars/Year 2018!)
4 comments:
Look at this
http://virtual-lancaster.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/lancaster-based-creators-head-for-lakes.html
Hi, Paul!
Your mention of Captain Argens posthumously published memoirs inspires several thoughts. Many people with indefinitely extended life spans would find writing autobiographies a good way of both preserving memories edited from their minds but also to preserve a continuous sense of the "self," of remaining true to one's view of himself, what he considers himself to be. And I think the writing and publishing of autobiographies would be a popular branch of literature in a society which has the antithanatic seen in WORLD WITHOUT STARS.
Sean
Sean, good point.
Who is Anonymous?
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