Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 189-453, CHAPTER EIGHT, pp. 275-284.
"Interstellar war bears no more resemblance to interplanetary than the latter does to planetside combat." (p. 280)
Poul Anderson convincingly writes as if he knew.
"Shuttling in and out of quantum multi-space at thousands or even millions of time a second, a ship under hyperdrive is essentially untouchable by an ordinary weapon." (pp. 280-281)
Often, in sf, a spaceship:
leaves relativistic space where faster-than-light (FTL) is impossible;
enters hyperspace where FTL is possible;
crosses an interstellar space FTL in hyperspace;
re-enters relativistic space at its destination.
However, in Anderson's Technic History, a ship on hyperdrive does not leave relativistic space but makes many instantaneous quantum jumps between points in that space. Because it does not traverse the space between the points, it is not bound by the relativistic light-speed limit. But does it also move "...in and out of quantum multi-space..." and, if so, what is that?
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Will future theoreticians of war a la Clausewitz and Sun Tzu use Poul Anderson's descriptions of futuristic war into account as they try to think rationally about war in space? I hope so because Anderson gives us very carefully worked out speculations on this matter.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I agree that the "thus" part of the seventh point is a non-sequitur. Physicists tend to disapprove of mystics and, shall we say, people in other fields drawing non-scientific conclusions from their (sometimes erroneous) ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics.
Best Regards,
Nicholas D. Rosen
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