There is airship action. I am not giving away anything by saying that. Airships are the way we imagine spaceships, spacious inside. Might airships, like space travel, return, as in Poul Anderson's Orion Shall Rise?
Do the conventions of action-adventure fiction dictate that the continuing villain must survive at least until the end of Volume III of a Trilogy? (I have not quite reached the end of Volume II.)
Stirling's heroine reads Burroughs, Davis and Buchan. Davis? Burrough's Martians have a version of airships but with a nonsense-science propellant. Burroughs has written John Carter and Tarzan by 1916 (B) but his canon might diverge later.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think I've said this before, but real spaceships, once we get past the first crude, primitive models, will NEED to be spacious if crews and passengers are not to go crazy. Unless, of course, some kind of cold sleep/suspended animation is used when traveling STL. In that case only a relative few persons will need to be up and about, doing watches, as we see in ORBIT UNLIMITED.
I like Horst von Duckler, so I hope he survives the BLACK CHAMBER trilogy! And I wonder what kind of fiction HE reads for relaxation? I'm sure there were German writers who also wrote action/adventure stories. Was Horst a fan of them?
Sean
Richard Harding Davis; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Harding_Davis Well-known war correspondent and also writer of adventure and espionage fiction in the early 20th century. His reporting during the Spanish-American War was important to Teddy Roosevelt's career.
Sean: Horst reads Karl May's books at several points in BLACK CHAMBER. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_May
Noted adventure writer, and extremely popular in Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries; his stories were set all over the world, but mainly in the American West, where "Old Shatterhand", a German frontiersman, and his Apache companion Winnetou wander around doing stuff.
He was one of the best-selling German authors of all time; roughly equivalent to Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The "Starship" upper stage of Elon Musk's interplanetary spaceship is going to have room for 100 passengers, with 100 staterooms and public spaces as well. The prototype has just been moved to the launch pad in Texas for the initial "hopper" tests.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4608792/Inside-Elon-Musk-s-Mars-megaship.html
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I was very interested by your comments! I will be looking up Karl May and his works!
After so many disheartening, discouraging years of nothing much being DONE about getting PEOPLE into space, your comments about Elon Musk's interplanetary spaceship really cheered me up! Another thing I will be checking out!
Sean
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I looked up Karl May, and he does seem to have been a very interesting man who wrote books that I might find fun to read. I also noted with interest how, during his tour of the US in 1908, Karl May visited my home town of Lawrence, MA. I wonder how well he might have done writing science fiction?
Sean
Kaor, Mr. Stirling, and others!
Ich erinnere mich daran, dass eine Lehrerin aus Deutschland uber Karl May gesprochen hat. I wrote this after a struggle with autocorrect’s efforts to turn the German words into English. A teacher of German told the class that she had read Karl May’s adventure stories set in the American West, and was disappointed that no one in America had heard of him. Later, I read a little about Karl May in several places, although I have never actually read any of his works.
Best Regards,
Nicholas D. Rosen
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