Mobile Phones
An SF Prediction
Although Dominic Flandry has a pocket phone in "The Warriors from Nowhere," he calls Chives from a public phone booth on Diomedes in A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows.
In conversation with Susette Lagard, Flandry says:
"'No mind can conceive, let alone remember, the planets and races we've discovered in this tiny offside corner of the solitary galaxy we've explored a little.'"
-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 339-606 AT VIII, p. 450.
Although he does not mention the spiral arm (and see here), his phrasing is sufficiently familiar. We inhabit a finite globe and can ignore what is above its atmosphere whereas Terran Imperials cannot ignore the galaxy and galaxies beyond known space.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, the use of descriptive notation for recording chess moves and the regrettable lack of some kind of mobile phones in the Technic Civilization stories are among the few signs of "datedness" to be found in them. Considering how imaginative Anderson was in other ways, I would not criticize him too much for these relatively minor flaws. We STILL don't have air cars, for one thing!
Yes, I PERSONALLY know people who seem to be barely aware of the universe which exists beyond Earth's atmosphere! And, alas, don't care. Yes, I think people belonging to any interstellar civilization would be all too aware of how and insignificant would be the sphere of space it covers compared to the sheer vastness of the galaxy and cosmos. But I would still be delighted to be living in such an interstellar era. Earth alone is now too small and narrow to be satisfactory.
Sean
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