A flying being needs wings and, presumably, legs. An intelligent being needs equivalents of hands and legs. So how many limbs should a flying intelligent being have? We imagine angels and demons with wings, arms and legs. Poul Anderson designed his Diomedeans on this model, which meant that their evolutionary ancestors had been hexapodal. But how might a quadruped become an intelligent flyer? Anderson found that a Terrestrial species of bird has claws on its wings when young and designed his Ythrians on this model after John W Campbell had suggested the super-charger that would enable a being heavy enough for intelligence to fly under terrestroid conditions. The Ythrians are credible characters and were created by this intellectual process.
Hard sf divides in into hard
science fiction, about increases in scientific knowledge, and hard technological fiction, about future applications of knowledge. Anderson cites Wells' "The Star" and "The Land Ironclads" as examples respectively of these two kinds of hard sf. It is good to see diverse works by Wells still taken into account in discussions of science fiction.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Your comment about H.G. Wells reminded me of how he is often classified as having written "soft" SF. With Jules Verne considered the father of "hard" SF. However, the mention of Wells "The Star" and "The Land Ironclads" warns us to avoid too rigidly pigeonholing such writers. Their works can often jump from one branch of the same genre to another.
Btw, Sir Arthur Clarke also wrote a story called "The Star," which was his speculative view of the Star of Bethlehem.
Sean
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