Diomedes is about a hundred light-years from Sol;
a secondary-drive spaceship's pseudo-speed is measured in parsecs per week;
Wace and his companions are stranded in the Diomedean ocean ten thousand kilometers from the human trading post;
the horizon is twice as far away as on Earth.
Not the light-years, the parsecs or the kilometers but the visible horizon terrifies Wace.
Nike has a close horizon whereas Daedalus has no horizon, just the planetary surface receding to invisibility and, at night, the sun as a luminous ring not enclosing the landscape but illuminating infinity.
CS Lewis had a similar experience in a different context as a character and the first person narrator in one of his own works:
"I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extent of the green plain wider than they could be on this little ball of earth. I had got 'out' in some sense which made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair. It gave me a feeling of freedom, but also of exposure, possibly of danger, which continued to accompany me through all that followed. It is the impossibility of communicating that feeling, or even of inducing you to remember it as I proceed, which makes me despair of conveying the real quality of what I saw and heard."
-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), p. 26.
I think it is time for a comparison between Anderson and Lewis.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I would have liked to have visited planets as different from each other as Diomedes, Daedalus, and Nike.
Very nice, the bit you quoted from Lewis. It makes me wonder if Lewis ever read any of the works of Anderson. But, he must have, because Lewis read and wrote about SF. But we don't know if he ever wrote about any of Anderson's stories.
We also know JRR Tolkien liked to read science fiction, but felt unable to write any himself. And he did write some notes about Anderson's "The Valor of Cappen Varra." I'm sorry to say he was fairly critical of that story. Mostly, I think, for linguistic reasons.
Sean
The horizon frightening Wade makes sense. Interstellar distances aren't "real" to our perceptions; we know them intellectually.
The distance to the horizon is real at a visceral level, since our ancestors always knew it. For it to be wrong would make the entire world look distorted.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree! The horizon of Diomedes would FEEL more real to Wace, far more so than something as vast but abstract and remote as a light year.
Sean
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