Silver Spring

When I worked as a Careers Adviser, I helped clients to formulate an action plan by completing a form with headings like Where Am I?, Where Do I Want To Be? and How Can I Get There?

Where is humanity, where does it want to be and how can it get there? We have different answers. One answer to where do we want to be is ad astra, to the stars.

Poul Anderson gives us one set of answers in Tales Of The Flying Mountains (New York, 1984). (Isn't it good to have "1984" as the year of publication instead of the title? No offense to Orwell but we are glad to have got past that year without suffering Big Brother en route.)

Anderson's answers:

Junius Harleman, chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, a neighborhood kept quiet by armored patrol cars, and worries that his budget will be cut even further;

a crank calls to his door...;

the rest is future history.