The Humanists have come and gone. We return to Earth, to another automatic bar and to another newly unemployed man getting drunk. The message is that none of the upheavals have solved the underlying problems that periodically cause the upheavals. However, the drunk's drinking companion is neither another drunk nor a hero who will preserve freedom but a journalist whose investigations will uncover another problem unresolved at the end of this story and never mentioned again in this series. Sometimes future histories leave dangling loose ends.
Have we mentioned this title when discussing Poul Anderson's uses of the Bible? Maybe we have. I am not going to check right now. In any case, the title is an eminently appropriate use of a Biblical quotation. Someone gains an indefinitely prolonged lifespan at the expense of anything that makes life living.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
It's a realistic touch for a fictional "future history" to have such untidy, dangling loose ends! I don't believe such stories myself, but I only need to recall the decades long and persistent rumors that Adolf Hitler survived WW II. Absurd, but there were such rumors.
Ad astra! Sean
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