Coffin's rambling thoughts take him from future windmills to the mills of the gods to the mills of change to Rustum as a millstone grinding the seed of man for the Lord. He correctly reflects that change is not always gradual or imperceptible. Climate altered too rapidly for the dinosaurs and world population exploded faster than the civilizing effects of science and technology. Again I must ask why this was allowed to happen. One cycle is poverty and population growth but another is prosperity and population reduction.
We wind up liking and caring for the characters, even the uptight Coffin. Manipulative Mayor Wolfe has blackmailed Svoboda into becoming a popular hero because that is what the colony needs. Wolfe consoles Svoboda by reminding him that at least he knows that he is rotten and they both laugh.
Descendants of Dan Coffin will be able to descend from High America and spread across Rustum because they will inherit his above average tolerance of high air pressures while, at the same time, there is:
"'...none of this mutant superman nonsense.'" (9, p. 154)
It is as if Wolfe comments on Anderson's Twilight World.
"'Danny's the first real Rustumite.'" (9, p. 155)
At the end of the novel, the Rustumites' story is just beginning. Svoboda:
"...lay for a while, gazing out the window, toward the horizon where the snowpeaks of Hercules upheld the sky." (9, p. 158)
Hercules is humanity.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I'm puzzled by your puzzlement! I EXPECT things like human societies to at least sometimes go bad or fail. Because all human beings are IMPERFECT--so foolishness and folly in human affairs should not be a surprise. What is REALLY surprising is how that is not always the case.
Sean
Technology leaves SF behind -- with the tools we now have for DNA analysis and CRISPR (which has already been used to modify the germline cells of human beings) we could probably identify which of Danny's genes make him able to deal with the higher CO2, and transfer them to every child born.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Now that was fascinating, what you wrote! Meaning even adults and children born only able to tolerate lower levels of CO2 could have the right genes "inserted" into them, enabling them to live even at the sea level of Rustum? If such knowledge had existed when Poul Anderson was writing the Rustum stories, they would have been drastically different, and we would see different problems and conflicts needing to be resolved.
Sean
What we're doing now is "germline modification" affecting offspring but not the parents. That sort of gene therapy is more complex and hasn't had a good record... yet.
However, given that they had plenty of upland territory for the first generation or two, it wouldn't really matter.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That is true. Assuming PA had the knowledge of gene modifications we now have at the time Anderson wrote the Rustum stories, I can imagine him writing that most parents on Rustum were satisfied if their children could live anywhere else on the planet.
Sean
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