Download Guthrie does not reach the Solar System until Chapter 17. Intervening chapters feature a viewpoint character called Fenn in the Solar System. Fenn wants to get out into space and the reader also might have preferred if the narrative had taken us back to the extra-solar colonies.
Guthrie sees:
"Stars crowded sable clarity, the Milky Way girdled heaven with its crooked winter road, nebulae glimmered, the Andromeda galaxy lay huge, wan and mysterious: sights he had seen at two other suns and in between, very little changed by his crossing a mere few light-years. Only Sol marked this region out, and at almost six hundred astronomical units' distance, it was only the chief among the stars..." (pp. 210-211)
Guthrie's three decade crossing from Beta Hydri to Alpha Centauti A had been in the small fast ship Yeager whereas his thirty five year crossing to Sol is in a Lunarian cruiser that he renames Dagny. The field drive, exploiting interactions between the quantum states of matter and of the vacuum, has made jets redundant.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
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My chief thought here was wondering, if STL means are used for reaching or traveling between stars, was whether generation ships could play a role. That is, a ship large enough to hold several hundred or thousand people not in suspended animation. Rather like what we see in STARFARERS.
Sean
Sean,
In STARFARERS?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, STL means of traveling between the stars are used in that book. Also, I was thinking of the Kith tales, at least one of which was revised and incorporated into that novel. Every Kith ship was in effect a generation ship carrying several hundred people.
Sean
Sean,
But I thought that they traveled so fast and that their destinations were so close that generations did not elapse on journeys.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
You might be right. If my memory is correct, relativistic Einsteinian effects made time pass more "slowly" inside Kith ships than it would to people on planets. That would be esp. so the closer such ship came to the speed of light.
Sean
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