Today we walked from Lancaster to Morecambe for a 1940s Revival complete with Winston Churchill lookalike and a man in a Home Guard uniform. En route, I thought of two further posts of which this is the first.
See Cities And Stars.
"Dusk climbed rapidly up the canyons of the city. Occasional lights came to life, tiny at their distance and far apart. The maintainors did not need any, only such humans as were left did. Slowly the sky also drained."
-Poul Anderson, Genesis (New York, 2001), PART ONE, VIII, p. 91.
-op. cit., p. 92.
"They lay back and regarded the stars. More appeared. He knew she was trying to grasp and appreciate, down in her marrow, that intelligences dwelt yonder, that the universe was no longer meaningless.
"Time passed. The city grew blacker than the sky, for more lights glimmered aloft than below.
"'But is it our meaning?' Naia cried." (p. 93)
This is a perfect sf contrast between a darkening future city and the inhumanly populated stars but I did not think of it when I was writing the first "Cities And Stars" post.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I'll take Archopolis and its shining "nightmarish beauty" any day over this dying city inhabited by only a few despairing humans!
Sean
Sean,
I have a liking for endings and particularly like the haiku in that chapter of GENESIS so I think that I would be able to enjoy researching and relaxing with the benefits of all the high tech in that darkening city - but I would also want an escape route. (Time travel would be ideal.)
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Anderson was a poet as well as a great prose writer, so I understand your point about the haiku seen in GENESIS. Examples I've thought of being "Prayer in War," or "The Battle of Brandobar."
And the best escape would be to a world settled by a vigorous HUMAN society, one not dominated or cowed by AIs.
Sean
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