Cosmic Technology

Might superior technology affect stellar events or cosmic processes? In Poul Anderson's The Avatar, human explorers meet an advanced race that manipulates a new monobloc, thus influencing a future universe. In James Blish's The Triumph Of Time, Hevians and New Earthmen occupy the metagalactic center where they become new monoblocs after the mutual annihilation of the matter and antimatter universes while the Web of Hercules, controlling matter-antimatter interactions, leaves a record for the inhabitants of the new universes. By contrast, Fred Hoyle's and Geoffrey Hoyle's characters merely infer the existence and activities of superior intelligences, e.g., one character hypothesizes a natural conflict between the highest order intelligences of biological and nuclear life.

In fact, a quasar used to fire a laser beam into the Milky Way is counterattacked by a relativistic spaceship used as a projectile but can war be waged across thousands of millions of light-years at sub-light speeds? The human ship, swept along in the alien's magnetic field, is not destroyed as an irritant by either side but merely shunted into the inverse universe, its crew never learning either the cause or the outcome of the galaxy-quasar conflict. Why does the intelligence associated with the quasar maintain the spaceship's phase relationships through a black hole-white hole transition?

Sf narratives by Anderson and others usually culminate in their characters' comprehensive comprehension of whatever has happened to them whereas it is far more likely that much that they would want to know would remain unknown to them:

"We did not have time to learn everything that we wanted to know."
-James Blish, The Triumph Of Time IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 466-596 AT CHAPTER EIGHT, p. 596.