"One of the hardest lessons he had had to learn, when first recruited into the Time Patrol, was that every important task does not require a vast organization. That was the characteristic twentieth-century approach; but earlier cultures, like Athenian Hellas and Kamakura Japan - and later civilizations too, here and there in history - had concentrated on the development of individual excellence. A single graduate of the Patrol Academy (equipped to be sure, with tools and weapons of the future) could be the equivalent of a brigade." (1, p. 130)
An "Army of One"?
My suggestion for a sequel to The Time Machine (see here) was based on the premise that an individual nineteenth century inventor was able to do something that the whole of twentieth century science subsequently failed to do.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I'm reminded of Anderson's "The Light," where American astronauts discovered to their shock that LEONARDO had somehow manged to travel to the Moon centuries before they had. WHAT did Leonardo discover or invent, all by himself, that the massive laboratories and regiments of scientists working in them had failed to find?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Frankenstein is another fictional individual inventor.
Paul.
Usually it's a help to know what's impossible. Occasionally it's a handicap.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: Perhaps a better example, and a real one, would be Tesla. He too, like Leonardo, was a genius and inventor. And they both never quite achieved what they potentially could have done. Stirling suggested Tesla needed a patron who would give all the funding he needed and remove from him all the tedious legal and administrative stuff. And that probably applied to Leonardo as well.
Mr. Stirling: And one of my favorite examples of what I HOPE will not be an impossibility would be some way of getting around the FTL barrier to interstellar travel. I would love it if a modern day Leonardo or Tesla invented a real hyperdrive of the kind seen in Anderson's Technic stories. Or the Alderson drive of Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium timeline.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
So the fictionalized Tesla becomes an equivalent of the fictional inventors.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Meaning the Tesla of Stirling's BLACK CHAMBER books, where Theodore Roosevelt acted as the kind of patron he needed? Yes, that Tesla (along with Ciara) was analogous to our Leonardo and Tesla.
Ad astra! Sean
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