"...he eased the throttle of his sandcat..."
-Poul Anderson, "Un-Man" IN Anderson, The Psychotechnic League (New York, 1981), pp. 31-129 AT p. 39.
On Venus:
"A descending ramp brought them to a garage where the tanks were stored. These looked not unlike the sandcats of Mars, but were built lower and heavier, with a refrigerating tube above and a grapple in the nose."
-Anderson, "The Big Rain" IN The Psychotechnic League, pp. 201-280 AT pp.210-211.
This is a future historical detail. Earlier stories provide background material for later stories. Having introduced "sandcats" in "Un-Man," Anderson refers to them later in "The Big Rain."
In James Blish's Haertel Scholium, "dune cats," another future historical detail, are not vehicles but Martians.
In future histories, we have also learned to look out for details of how lifespans might be extended. Simon Hollister, immigrant to Venus, has a chronological age of thirty-eight Earth-years but a physiological age of about twenty five thanks to "biomedics." (p. 203) A dead-end form of immortality will be developed later in this future history. Again, comparisons are possible with several other future histories and futuristic novels or stories. See here.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And the flying cars and use of what we would now call cloning to repair and replace parts of the body lost due to war wounds in ENSIGN FLANDRY were among the earliest "future historical details" I noticed in Anderson's works nearly HALF a century ago.
Sean
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