A fleet moves through interstellar space. Spacesuited Joshua Coffin, standing in the airlock of his ship, uses a crossbow to fire a magnetic bolt with an unreeling line at the next ship. He tests the security of the line, then pulls himself along it. Reaching the other ship, he loosens the bolt, fires it again and thus pulls himself from ship to ship until he reaches his destination. Is this possible or the best way to do it? They have ferry craft to take them to the surface of the colony planet but maybe it would be too wasteful of fuel to use the ferries for inter-ship travel in interstellar space?
I have not discussed what the spacefarers' and colonists' current problem is - although see here - because I hope that blog readers will read or reread the book. I pause to post on points of interest like Coffin's peculiar form of locomotion.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Ingenious, Joshua Coffin using a crossbow to travel from ship to ship. No, a ferry boat would not be practical because it's actually s small SPACE ship. Far too large and awkward to use like this. But I did wonder if Captain Coffin could have used a jet pack carried on his back.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I've started rereading ORBIT UNLIMITED after I finished SHIELD. And I'm already concluding the former was better than the latter, as SF literature. I'm finding ORBIT more deeply thought out and with more fully rounded characters than in SHIELD. But that should not be understood as meaning I thought SHIELD a bad book. Not at all!
My copy of ORBIT UNLIMITED is the Gregg Press reprint of April, 1978. And it includes an Introduction I'm reasonably sure your copy does not have. At the time Poul Anderson wrote the original parts of ORBIT in 1959 he strove to be as accurate as possible about the science used for that story. However, this bit quoted from it is about how Joshua Coffin traveled between his ships: "Subsequent scientific thought has brought up several matters of which nobody was then aware, as far as I know. For instance, when Joshua Coffin crosses from ship to ship, you must imagine that some kind of force screen protects him and his entire fleet from the effects of collision with gas molecules--otherwise radiation would have killed everybody long before."
Sean
Sean,
My Pyramid Books 1961 edition does not have that Introduction. Thank you for excerpt from it.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I have a fetish about replacing paperback Anderson books with hard backs! That's how I came to eventually get the Gregg Press series of Anderson reprints. Many of them included introductions by Anderson giving some further thoughts about these stories.
I think any COMPLETE COLLECTED WORKS OF POUL ANDERSON should include any prefaces or introductions Anderson came to later write about some of his stories and novels. To omit them risk losing insights and corrections PA thought should be kept in mind by readers.
Sean
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