I began to draft a post on peaceful cooperation between diverse intelligent species in Poul Anderson's works as against his (also very good) military sf. It occurred to me that perhaps the highest form of cooperation was conversion to each other's religions. Although we know that members of the Galilean Order converted Axor to Jerusalem Catholicism on Woden, I think that Adzel, also a Wodenite, was converted to Mahayana Buddhism while studying on Earth. However, I began to reread "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" in order to confirm whether Adzel was or was not already Buddhist before coming to Earth. Instead, I found a previously unnoticed reference to the Golden Gate:
"The Riefenstahl's apartment overlooked the Golden Gate. I saw lights twinkle and flare, heard distant clangor and hissing, where crews worked around the clock to replicate an ancient bridge."
-Poul Anderson, "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 175-197 AT p. 184.
Robert Heinlein's Future History was praised for giving the future a daily life. Some passages in Anderson's Technic History convey a sense of what it might be like to live in the Solar Commonwealth or the later Terran Empire.
2 comments:
No pictures really do the Golden Gate justice, by the way. It's engineering poetry, perfectly fitting a magnificent setting.
Kaor, Paul!
Hmmmm, meaning there was a time when the Golden Gate Bridge as we now have it no longer existed? That it had, possibly, been replaced by a more humdrum looking bridge? That it was being rebuilt according to the original designs would fit in with the text you quoted.
Sean
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