"It was too big, that sun, and too bright, and at the same time too orange; it crept too slowly down a sky too wan a blue." (p. 98)
How many environmental factors are wrong here? The size, brightness, shade and speed of the sun and the shade of the sky: five. And they add up.
However:
"Or so those colonists felt who had been adults on Earth. The new generation, like Svoboda's busload of first-graders, found it merely natural." (p. 99)
But would the new generation not have had an instinctual/ancestral reaction against a planetary environment too different from that of Earth? See Distances And Vastnesses and its combox.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I'm reminded of the beginning of "A Message In Secret," where Flandry commented that Krasna, the sun of Altai, was not TRULY red (which is what "krasna" means), but more an orange/yellow in color. The Betelgeusean he was conversing with replied that the Russo/Mongol settlers who colonized Altai apparently still found the sun of their new home depressingly dark compared Sol, hence it was named Krasna.
And I'm inclined to think the people who came to be born on Rustum would find all the things their parents were not quite comfortable with to be natural, things they were used to and took for granted. Just as the Altaians born on that planet would take similar things for granted.
Sean
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