"...the galaxy was too vast. Even this fragment of its outer reaches that humans and their fellow spacefarers had some slight knowledge of was." (XIII, p. 79)
A recurrent reflection. See here.
An earlier sentence:
"The galaxy's so huge, so various, and always so mysterious." (I, p. 13)
- had suggested that explorers had by now traversed the entire galaxy rather than just a fragment of it. This ambiguity - are we dealing with the whole galaxy or just with a much smaller volume of space? - is present in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History (see Coordinators) and in James Blish's Cities In Flight (see Earthman, Come Home).
"Forward and everywhere around, night glittered with stars, the Milky Way was a white torrent of them, nebulae glowed or reared dark across brilliance, sister galaxies beckoned from across gulfs that imagination itself could not bridge." (XIV, p. 82)
Three regular themes:
a description of the Milky Way;
objects, in this case nebulae, seen across the Milky Way;
unreachable sister galaxies.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Even with long life spans and a FTL drive, it seems reasonable to think humans had explored or colonized only a relatively small part of a galaxy containing at least two hundred billion stars within a thousand years.
Sean
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