Tuesday, 21 April 2020

A Blue Sky And Hurrying From Star To Star

The Peregrine, CHAPTER II.

"The sky was utterly blue overhead; sunlight spilled on the wide green sweep of land; wind brought him the faint crystal laughter of a bellbird. No doubt of it, man wasn't built to sit in a metal shell and hurry from star to star. It wasn't strange that so many dropped out of Nomad life." (p. 5)

Three senses:

blue, light and green are seen;
wind is felt;
birds are heard.

Here again is the old emphasis on "metal shell." People with the technology to traverse space faster than light should also be able to make their mobile environments both spacious and pleasant to live in. But I understood that Nomadism began precisely because a sufficient number of people did prefer interstellar hurrying to blue skies, felt winds and bird songs.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And I still argue that, granted a FTL drive, there was simply no practical need for anything like the Nomad culture. I think that kind of thing is far more plausible if only STL space ships were available, as we see in Anderson's Kith stories.

Ad astra! Sean