Space is one frightening place: vast and completely uninhabitable. One way to try to make "Space, the final frontier..." seem emotionally acceptable and manageable is to compare it to a sea, or maybe, because of its undeniable vastness, to an ocean, that intelligent beings can sail across. In fact, what could sound safer than the following?
"Malcolm Stuart, captain of the space freighter Highland Lass, was worried about his only son." (p. 10)
Stuart, with his reliably Scottish name, traverses the hostile vacuum of space. However, he does this in a space freighter called Highland Lass of which he is the captain and his biggest problem is not the dangerous cosmos surrounding him on every side but the rift between him and his son!
It all sounds as safe as sailing from the Firth of Forth to Skye, doesn't it?
(In my childhood, I though that "Over the sea to Skye..." meant "...to a place in the sky.")
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
My understanding was that there was not exactly a "rift" between Captain Stuart and his son. Rather, there was a kind of "distance" between father and son. And which they both regretted but did not quite know how to bridge.
Sean
The sea is an environment which will quickly kill you if you don't have fairly elaborate technology and know how to use it.
Mr Stirling,
The sea is indeed dangerous, like space, but, I think, seems homely by comparison.
Sea and space have in common that both contain origins of life even though both are hostile to our kind of life.
Paul.
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