Four Anti-Space Cultures

Poul Anderson, New America, "To Promote the General Welfare."

Dan Coffin tells a younger man born on Rustum:

"'The Earth government...were phasing out space travel when your ancestors left. Too costly, given a bloated population pressing on resources worn thin. Not quite in their world-view, either. The culture was turning more and more from science and technology to mysticism and ceremony.'" (pp.137-138)

I think that we need science, technology, mysticism and ceremony but, by "mysticism," I mean meditation, not mystification.

This passage reminded me of a sentence in James Blish's Cities In Flight which I compared here to Brann's dialogue in Anderson's The Corridors Of Time and here to the Ai Chun in Anderson's World Without Stars.

Also relevant is this paragraph in Cities In Flight:

"The ban on thinking about space flight extended even to the speculations of physicists. The omnipresent thought police were instructed in the formulae of ballistics and other disciplines of astronautics, and could detect such work - Unearthly Activities, it was called - long before it might have reached the proving-stand stage."
-James Blish, Earthman, Come Home IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 235-465 AT PROLOGUE, p. 238.

Blish's world dictatorship, nuclear-powered and Bureaucratic, is inadervertently overthrown by pure mathematicians rediscovering anti-gravity whereas Anderson's Earth government, cynically promoting mysticism and ceremonial, is obliged to resume a space program when messages from Rustum inspire other dissenters.

Anderson has the colonized plateau of High America in a collection called New America whereas Blish has the colonized planet of New Earth first visited in a collection called Earthman, Come Home.