-Poul Anderson, The Avatar, XXVII, p. 235.
Here yet again is the stark contrast between infinite space and a metal shell. Travel through the former involves enclosure in the latter. An interstellar spaceship should carry an environment and an ecology with it. However, Chinook is merely an interplanetary spaceship that makes subjectively instantaneous interstellar jumps via T machines. (Technical question: does T machine theory allow for subjectively instantaneous jumps?) The crew expects to make port before running out of food but they are now lost in space.
Surely, in a high tech craft, surrounded by cosmic energy and the universe, the crew can either find or synthesize food some time in the ten years before their existing food supply runs out? Maybe not. The entire universe above the terrestrial atmosphere is an inhospitable place:
"In the raging sea of streams which was the reality of 'empty' space, it was death, not pear-leaves, that whispered every second just outside..."
-James Blish, Welcome To Mars (London, 1978), Chapter 2, p. 26.
This makes a sharp contrast to CS Lewis' unscientific idea that a space traveler would feel a new vitality from the many rays that never penetrate the atmosphere. Lewis' Ransom rightly learns that "Space" is not, as he had thought, a cold, black, dead vacuity but an "...empyrean ocean of radiance..." (The Cosmic Trilogy, p. 26) but he wrongly thinks, and even feels, that life pours into him from it.
"How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the world and all their life had come?" (ibid.)
But the other solar planets are lifeless and terrestrial life can survive only in terrestrial conditions, not anywhere else.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Well, it was the intrigues of their enemies on Earth which forced Dan Brodersen and his companions on "Chinook" to go blundering from T machine to T machine, lost in space. And, even if "Chinook," not designed for extraordinarily long journeys, had "only" ten years worth of food, that still gives some time for trying to get back home. Longer, if the food is rationed.
In GENESIS, we do see a STL spaceship, "Envoy," equipped with the means to synthesize food indefinitely. But that ship was MEANT to travel thousands of light years at relativistic speeds, meaning time passed far more slowly for the crew inside the ship than it was for the external universe.
As for C.S. Lewis' SPACE TRILOGY, I think those books are best understood as theological space fantasies, rather than as theological science fiction. In some ways they have more in common with the impossible space fantasies of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books. ERB makes up for his otherwise intolerable scientific bloopers by the color, verve, drama, and his sheer skill as a writer.
Sean
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