A feature common to Robert Heinlein's Future History and Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, the latter modeled on the former, is stories included in the earliest version of the time chart but excluded later. There is a period when the history is taking shape.
The Wiki article on Anderson's "Entity" (see here) suggests that Anderson had placed this story late in the time chart because the technology discovered in the story does not affect the history. This is the same reason why I suggested here that it makes sense to place "Symmetry" late in the time chart. However, "Entity" still contains that discordant statement that interstellar travel is only a few decades old.
"He felt again the weariness of his years on the long hunt. Civilization could not expand blindly into the stars. Someone had to go ahead of even the explorers and give a vague idea of what to expect. Only Earth's finest, the most ultimately sane of all mankind, could endure being cooped in a metal bubble floating through darkness and void for years on end, and even they sometimes broke."
-Poul Anderson, "Entity" IN Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 3, pp. 167-181 AT p. 171.
(Merseians and kzinti conceptualize their galactic endeavor as a hunt.)
Here again is the contrast between infinite space and constricting metal, expressed as a very sharp dichotomy. Sometimes space is seen merely as a dark void to be traversed in order to reach other worlds but it can alternatively be seen as a vast environment full of stars and other sources of energy.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I admit to finding this line puzzling: "Someone had to go ahead of even the explorers and give a vague idea of what to expect." Logically, such men are also being explorers!
I don't think we see many more of such slightly jarring statements after Anderson had definitively entered his middle phase as a writer. Because he had learned how to avoid making them.
Sean
Sean,
Just as you cannot predict that a particular discovery will be made because merely to name the discovery will not be to predict its content whereas to describe that content will be to make the discovery.
Paul.
Paul:
A quibble to your last comment. From Wikipedia:
"When Dmitri Mendeleev proposed his periodic table, he noted gaps in the table and predicted that as-then-unknown elements existed with properties appropriate to fill those gaps...." [His predictions] "proved to be good predictors of the properties of scandium, gallium, technetium and germanium...."
He didn't discover scandium, gallium, technetium, and germanium, but he was able to describe what some of their qualities would likely be.
Kaor, Paul and DAVID!
I agree with Paul as corrected and modified by David's comments.
Sean
David, wow!
Though I quoted Wikipedia, it was one of Isaac Asimov's science essays that first made me aware of this. He thought it was an awesome bit of scientific deduction ... and he convinced me as well, obviously.
Kaor, DAVID!
It was, what Mendeleev did! And I think Isaac Asimov was better at writing about science than most of his SF novels.
Sean
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