In Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever," Martin Saunders, traveling futureward in the time projector, is, in 4100 A.D., given a psychophone which receives emissions from the speech centers of the brain, and beams the corresponding thoughts, greatly amplified, to the listener's brain where they are interpreted in terms of the listener's language. Thus, no communication problems in any subsequent periods.
The Doctor's TARDIS somehow enables its passengers to speak in the appropriate language anywhere or anywhen. It must function as a psychophone.
I want to address issues other than languages but realized that I had omitted these two cases and meanwhile have called back home for an even rusheder lunch. Time travel remains an inexhaustible topic.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Published as it was in 1950, "Flight to Forever" is one of the earliest stories of Poul Anderson, and it shows it. That is, that story shows Anderson handling ideas and themes in ways that he would not by the time he entered his "middle phase." In later works he would not use something like the "psychophone" to enable characters to learn languages QUITE so easily and simplistically.
Yes, the "mentator" we see in THE DANCER FROM ATLANTIS comes close to looking like a psychophone, but we see people REACTING to it in realistic ways we don't see in "Flight." It made sense for the dying Sahir, pressed as he was for time, to focus on Duncan Reid, because he came from the most technologically eras of the four persons unwittingly stranded in the past.
Sean
Poul mentions at one point that the Patrol immunization, which doesn't involve the vaccine principle, allows agents to travel without coming down with various diseases all the time.
This is a very good point. Travel before the modern era was always very dangerous. Every time you moved into a new watershed you got hit by a new set of stomach bugs, with consequences that could range from unpleasant to lethal. Ditto lots of other diseases.
And if you go back more than a century, traveling (which usually involves trade centers, ie., cities) will be even more dangerous because it will involve a lot of time spent in urban areas, and those were monsters that devoured people. Even the very best-managed preindustrial cities (Tokugawa-era Edo, for instance) were very dangerous.
And if you went into a really different disease environment, it was even worse. Europeans traveling to West Africa had a 50% chance of dying in the first year, and a lower but still substantial risk every year thereafter -- Falciparium Malaria (in many different sub-varieties), yellow fever, river-blindness.
People did travel, but a lot of them died.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Again, you made very interesting points. I did know, from other reading, of how dangerous west Africa could be for Europeans. And, of course we both know of how introduced diseases like smallpox, measles, the common cold, etc., devastated the long isolated Indians of the Americas.
But your comments about the dangers of TRAVELING brought home such risks to me in a different way. Now, I'm wondering, did the Time Patrol's life extending treatment include as well this kind of universal preventative protecting agents from diseases?
Sean
Paul.
I heard that the British had a high mortality rate in India.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I thought of that too, when I recalled Kipling mentioning in his Indian stories of how, during the Raj, many of the English would move to the cooler foothills of the Himalayas during the hot season. Esp. women and children, to the city of Simla.
Sean
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