How can an sf writer present the passage of cosmic time spans except maybe through the viewpoints of characters experiencing either time dilation, as in Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, or time travel, as in Anderson's "Flight to Forever"? In Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, the mutant immortals live through historical, but not cosmological, time periods. At the very end of this long novel, the small band of immortals agrees to meet again after another million years but Anderson did not write a sequel and how could he have? If those characters survive for another million years, then they will not be those characters. Would they even be able to remember anything from a million years earlier?
Cosmic time spans can be presented only by an omniscient narrator without any individual character continuity, as in Anderson's Genesis. See the above link. Even there, post-organic intelligence has preserved and eventually resurrects two human personalities. However, those personalities are not present when the narrator informs us that Sol orbits around galactic center in just under two hundred million years.
Anderson's "In Memoriam" also covers cosmic time periods. See:
Rats
Cosmic Perspectives
In Memoriam: Summary
Five works by Anderson have been pertinent.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
It's hard, I agree, to see how Hanno and his band of "natural" immortals could live a a million years and still BE the same personalities we at the end of THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS. Also, they all seemed to have gone thru periods of a dementia caused by information or memory overload in their brains. Anderson never really explains how their minds "clarified" and they were again able to think rationally. Wouldn't it not be likely that Hanno and Co. would again suffer bouts of dementia of this kind?
To say nothing, of course, of the nearly dead certainty that accidents or violence would gradually eliminate Hanno and his friends as centuries passed.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
All that is true.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I wish I had made these points, and others, to Anderson in one of my letters to him. He might well have responded that Hanno and Co. were simply proposing a goal to strive for, and agree it was not likely to be achieved.
I first came across the concept of memory overload in Anderson's story "Pact."
Ad astra! Sean
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