"Your car is perfectly safe, provided it was built later than 3100 A.D."
-Larry Niven, "Safe at Any Speed" IN Niven, Tales Of Known Space (New York, 1975), pp. 217-220 AT p. 217.
The point: home is where we live wherever that is. Three examples -
On a planet, soon to be called New Earth, in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, John Amalfi says:
"'We're all Earthmen, Karst. Earth is more than just one little planet, buried in another galaxy than this. Earth is much more important than that.
"'Earth isn't a place. It's an idea.'"
-James Blish, Earthman, Come Home IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 235-465 AT CHAPTER NINE: HOME, p. 465.
"'When the Long Night comes for Terra, somebody will have to carry on. It might as well be you.'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Game of Glory" IN Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 303-339 AT VIII, p. 339.
Sandra Miesel writes a coda to Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History:
"To Earth there's no returning. She vanished with the childhood of our race. Yet as a poet once said, 'No matter how far we range, the salt and rhythm of her tides will always be in our blood.' One chapter has ended. Humankind's saga flows on."
-Sandra Miesel IN Poul Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 3 (Riverdale, NY, 2018), p. 216.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I will have to check to see if I have that Niven collection. An intriguing title, "Safe At ANY Speed."
And Flandry said something similar to Kit in WE CLAIM THESE STARS, to the effect that her people, most of them, would survive when Terra fell.
And I remember how the beginning of A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS has Terra being described as a planet man had made Oedipally his own.
Ad astra! Sean
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