I will shortly reread Seed Of Light by Edmund Cooper and find out for myself. According to Damon Knight:
the plot is fatuous;
all British politicians are presented as heroic idealists whereas all the Americans are presented as clownish demagogues;
after WWIII, glass-roofed cities build spaceships inside their domes so that takeoff will kill those left behind;
the voyage of one starship is a rewrite of Heinlein's "Universe";
about p. 130, a beautiful Stapledonian sweep emerges.
The Politicians
Poul Anderson showed politicians as rounded characters and presented sympathetic treatments of those that he disagreed with.
The Cities
Anderson's characters would not have built spaceships that would kill those left behind. Why did Cooper's? And why did I not see that this was "asinine" (Knight's word)? Young and not technically inclined, I assumed that there was some off-stage technical reason why it had to be done that way. Also, I probably thought that there was a mythical Mors ianua vitae, "Death is the door to life," significance to the arrangement.
Rewriting "Universe"?
"Universe" presents not only the generation ship (multi-generation, slower-than-light, interstellar spaceship) idea but also a later generation, unable to see outside the ship, who think that it is the universe. Poul Anderson, Brian Aldiss, Clifford Simak and Edmund Cooper reworked the generation ship idea. Aldiss' and Simak's crews cannot see outside their ship but Anderson's and Cooper's can.
3 comments:
Paul:
Perhaps those building the spaceship considered those they were leaving behind to be "THE ENEMY," and wanted to be sure the boogeymen wouldn't follow them to destroy whatever society they hoped to build on another world. I have little sympathy for mass murder as a way of avoiding future pursuit, but there's a certain sick logic to it. (The thought of leaving the Draka behind on Earth keeps me from saying "no sympathy.")
I've read one book by Cooper, the vastly-more optimistic technological-renaissance story The Cloud Walker. I found it flawed in that humanity worldwide had smacked itself down to a medieval level — TWICE — but the epilogue indicates that most or all of the nations and big cities of the 20th Century ("the First Men") still existed under the same names in the feudal future of the Third Men.
The rapidity with which technology came back once the "Church" — not Catholic or any form of Christian, but Luddite — was overthrown ... that, too, struck me as unrealistic in the extreme. In the beginning of the story, even hand-thrown gliders are forbidden, and the protagonist barely avoids being burned alive for his experiments. By the epilogue, only seventy years later ... airships are flying regular routes all over the world. Yeah, right.
(It'd be slightly more believable if the Church had been like the one in Keith Roberts' Pavane, suppressing technology while secretly preparing, all along, to support it.)
David,
Unfortunately, the cities were cooperating with the building of the spaceships, knowing the consequences. It really does not make sense.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
One politician I recall Poul Anderson treating sympathetically and as a well rounded character, not a boogeyman from a Jack Chick comic book, was Cardinal Richelieu, whom we see in the chapter called "The Kitten and the Cardinal" in THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS. Plainly, Anderson had studied Richelieu's life and career in such depth that he came to like the Cardinal. Richelieu was immensely able and intelligent, hard when he had to be, but not cruel. And, in his own way, the Cardinal was a devout man.
Sean
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