Perspectives

Poul Anderson, New America, "Passing The Love Of Woman."

"Earth took one-point-seven years to complete a circuit around Sol, but spun on its axis in a mere twenty-four hours." (p. 61)

What is this? One year is the period of Earth's circuit around Sol. Twenty-four hours is the period of Earth's spin on its axis.

However, our viewpoint character is Dan Coffin who has lived all his life on Rustum in another planetary system. There are many differences:

"The sun was smaller in Earth's sky though somewhat more intense, its light more yellowish than orangy... There was a single moon, gigantic but sufficiently far off that it showed half the disc that Raksh did and took about eleven days (about thirty Earth-days) for a cycle of phases. Dan Coffin, who weighed a hundred kilos here, would weigh eighty on Earth. The basic biologies of the two worlds were similar but not identical, for instance, leaves yonder were pure green, no blue tinge in their color, and never brown or yellow except when dying..." (ibid.)

Pure green leaves! That "...single moon..." is the heavenly body that we call "the Moon."

In the previous installment, Dan had wondered why people could not:

"...learn to stay active for forty hours, then sleep for twenty." (p. 31)

Living on another planet will change people physically, psychologically and unpredictably. In the concluding installment of Anderson's Technic History, remote descendants of human beings are no longer human.