When the narrator lands his interplanetary space boat on Harbor:
"...long grass rustled in the wind, gardens and wild groves, sunlight streaming out of a high blue sky. When I stepped from the boat, the fresh vivid scent of the land leaped to meet me. I could hear the sea growling beyond the horizon." (p. 256)
We notice:
grass, not psuedograss;
three senses;
a high blue sky. (High is heaven and holy.)
The few public posts are spare-time occupations for whoever wants them and machinery is "...owned in common." (ibid.) Let us hope that this will be the model for future extra-planetary colonies. Harbor is idyllic and, of course, will prove to be too idyllic for some Andersonian characters.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And in later stories Anderson was careful to avoid using strictly Earth words like "grass" for analogous plants on other planets. He preferred to put some thought into inventing plausible alternatives to our grass.
And the situation you see on Harbor will not last as time passes and the population grows, because it can't. As the population grows it will become necessary to more strictly define public offices and how they are attained.
And that will also be the case with machinery and the economy in general. Best, of course, would be a free enterprise system moderated by tort laws penalizing theft, fraud, embezzlement, etc. The system you would prefer IS too idyllic, because nothing like it has ever lasted longer than the short before increasing complexity made what you prefer hopelessly impractical.
A huge reason why any society HAS to get more complex as numbers increase will be the need to control and penalize plain old CRIME. Unfortunately, there WILL be crimes of force and violence: such as murder, rape, robbery, etc. That inevitably necessitates a system for adjudicating and penalizing such offenses.
And this "complexifying" of any society will happen under whatever political form arises. It does not matter what shape that political structure takes as long as it is believed to be legitimate by its people. And does not govern too terribly badly.
Ad astra! Sean
Nor is it inevitable that there will be some equivalent of grass -- before we evolved grass, ground-cover was much more patchy and less continuous, especially in non-forested environments.
This is a force of geophysical scale. It made a major difference in the speed and extent of erosion.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
A good point! In Anderson's Technic stories, Altai and Nike comes to mind as planets which did not have equivalents of "grass" (see "A Message in Secret" and "A Tragedy of Errors." And the planet we see in "The Sharing of Flesh." So Anderson was aware of such issues as this.
Ad astra! Sean
Altai was in the midst of an ecological upheaval as its ancient sun swelled and warmed it, abruptly deglaciating it after aeons of pole-to-pole freezing. That was an interesting concept — as was terrestrial grass sweeping over the whole of the equatorial and temperate zones, being -better- suited to the environment than native life-forms trying to rea-adapt.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Exactly, that was why I thought of Altai. And Nike was another ancient planet which had only "recently" (despite vast age) gained an oxynitrogen sufficient to allow life to evolve. But those life forms were still so primitive that plants introduced there from Earth swept the board on Nike.
Ad astra! Sean
Similar things have happened on Earth. In most of New Zealand apart from some forested mountains, if you stand in a field 75% or more of the living things you see are introductions - trees, grass, crops, weeds, wildflowers, birds, animals.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That I had not known, except to the extent I had known that Australia and New Zealand had preserved life forms, prior to its settling by humans, of life forms not to be found elsewhere on Earth. And of the problem Australia has from rabbits, an introduced species.
Ad astra! Sean
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