See Confrontation.
Van Rijn's Mercury has caught the Borthudian ship in an unexpectedly powerful combination of tractor and pressor beams and maintains this grip even while changing phase in hyperspace. The Borthudian responds by trying to pull away and also by firing at random:
"She must be shooting wildly, on the one-in-a-billion chance that some missile would be in exactly the right state when it passed through Mercury...or through van Rijn's stomach...no, through the volume of space where these things coexisted with different frequencies...must be precise...." (p. 167)
Van Rijn is EVA with occasional sight of flashes in the direction of the enemy ship when he has these reflections.
As noted here, the coexistence in a single volume of three dimensional space of entire universes vibrating at different frequencies is one rationale for a multiverse which therefore would not require any further dimensions for its universes to occupy. Someone changing his frequency finds himself in an alternative universe. If such universes change to the same frequency, then they mutually annihilate. Maybe both kinds of multiverse could coexist, multi-vibratory and multi-dimensional?
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
The mordant bit about a Borthudian missile going thru Old Nick's capacious stomach was amusing!
And the last paragraph in your piece here gives us some speculative possibilities about how it might be possible to go to OTHER or parallel universes.
Sean
@ Sean: The various Star Trek series have frequently used this as a plot device.
-kh
Kaor, Keith!
But I have never cared for STAR TREK, which I sometimes derisively call STAR DRECK! The written science fiction I read as a boy, by such masters as Anderson, Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein, Norton, etc., has made all TV and filmed science fiction seem so thin, shallow, trite, and superficial.
Sean
Sean, it has been my experience over the years that people's preferences and the institutions that support them tend to form when young, and then to continue to reflect those same preferences throughout the years as that person goes through life. Music fans who prefer to hear aging musicians play their old hits as opposed to their new work (or heaven forbid- NEW artists!), or SF fans and their conventions increasingly age while younger people eschew these and prefer their own types of conventions/venues come to mind, as do other social, religious, and fraternal organizations with elderly/declining membership/attendance.
We are now 2-3 generations past these 1st Generation Masters (Jack Williamson was a professor of mine.), and text-driven SF itself may be in decline in favor of other media: comics,/graphic novels, games, etc. Furthermore I cannot regard movies such as 2001 (51 years old) or Gravity (6 years old) as "thin, shallow, trite, and superficial".
What writers under 60 years of age and what other forms of SF within this same 60-year time-frame do you like?
-kh
Kaor, Keith!
I'm trying to catch up with notes anyone might have addressed to me. Automatic email notifications no longer works here. Hence the delay.
Very well, I accept the POSSIBILITY some "science fiction" films might be worthy and deserving of that name.
As for the decline in science fiction of the "classical" kind, I put that down largely to the disastrous influence of left wing Political Correctness and "Social Justice Warriors" in science fiction. For extended discussions of that issue I recommend going to John Wright's blog and looking up his articles about the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies controversies.
And older science fiction conventions/organizations controlling the Hugo Award who have been taken over by the Politically Correct has been challenged by new ones like the Dragon Award.
I cannot think of any writers under age sixty who write the kind of idea driven, scientifically sound, and with carefully nuanced characters of the kind Poul Anderson and S.M. Stirling have given us. And I hope youngers of that kind will arise!
Sean
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