Family: Thorkild.
Personal name: Sean.
Rank: Ensign.
Service: Flier pilot and gunner.
He says not, "I am Ensign Sean Thorkild of the Peregrine," but "This one is called Peregrine Thorkild Sean." (The Peregrine, p. 43)
Nomads have not dispensed with the grammatical first person because he also says "my" and "we." Ship, family, rank and service can be read from his outfit.
Sean plays a stringed instrument called a "lorne" (p. 65) but what is it like? His song includes the word "dree," (p. 66) but apparently as an adjective, not as a verb.
In flight, the Nomads maintain their ship with minimal automatic or robotic machinery and make artifacts to trade either internally or externally. Floors are green and soft, not metallic. Walls have murals or carved panels. Apartments have plants. There is a park and three taverns. It does not sound like the inside of a spaceship.
Interstellar trade and travel is a big idea in American sf:
Heinlein's Free Traders;
Asimov's Foundation Traders;
Blish's Okies;
Anderson's Nomads, Kith and Polesotechnic League;
no doubt others.
4 comments:
"Floors are green and soft, not metallic. Walls have murals or carved panels. Apartments have plants. There is a park and three taverns. It does not sound like the inside of a spaceship."
Actually to me it does sound like the inside of a spacecraft that takes more than weeks (maybe months) between places it can resuply.
Any space habitat, if it provides the food & oxygen for the humans in it, is going to be one big greenhouse inside. A *lot* of plants are needed for each human. This will be true whether or not it has some sort of propulsion system to change its trajectory.
This might change given some new technology to replace green plants for making food from CO2, water, etc.
Kaor, Jim!
And the latter is what we in the FTL hyperdrive space ships of the Technic timeline.
ADVANCED technology made it unnecessary to depend on turning spaceships into greenhouses.
Ad astra! Sean
Here is an article about a technology that might work for that.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet
Kaor, Jim!
All the same, advanced tech does not have to mean people in the future won't prefer using "primitive" methods for some things, like cooking and baking.
Ad astra! Sean
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