The only certainty about the future is that it will not be the way anyone imagines it. We imagined:
regular interplanetary travel in the 21st century, not the virtual abandonment of manned spaceflight after Apollo;
the discovery of complex organisms on other planets, not the gradual disclosure of the possibility of unicellular organisms in the past.
Thus, Poul Anderson gets this right. The two chrononauts see a town in AD 2500 but:
"Somehow, it didn't look the way Saunders had visualized communities of the future. It had an oddly stunted appearance, despite the high buildings and - sinister? He couldn't say." (p. 219)
Human societies can certainly regress. Saunders and Hull have arrived in the period of the Fanatics, whose welcoming act is to send a flying black ovoid, an airjet, that shoots and kills Hull. In a future history, the earliest episodes are a transition between the world as we know it and the more exotic eons of the further future. The Fanatics will soon be overthrown and, eventually, mankind will be extinct but Saunders will go on.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Anderson's "No Truce With Kings"s shows us a North America you would probably consider to have regressed. After wars and civil wars had destroyed the old US and plunged the continent into chaos and anarchy, order was restored in California by the rise of a feudal system by barons called "Bossmen." The Republic of California was a very decentralized state where most power was held by the bossmen. The "progressives" wanted a centralized, unitary expanding to reunite the old territories of the US. Anderson gives us arguments in that story for why feudalism is to be preferred.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Sean!
In “No Truce With Kings,” the old U.S. had been destroyed in a nuclear war; I don’t recall any mention of civil wars. The country where the action takes place is the Pacific States of America, not the Republic of California; it includes (more or less) California, Oregon, Washington, and at least part of Idaho, and perhaps parts of other states. I don’t recall whether the country includes Hawaii, or just trades with Hawaii, but I believe the centralist faction was getting supplies from Hawaii, and the o5er side captured a convoy.
Yours in Andersonian Pedantry,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
Ha! I was going by memory, what I recalled of things from "No Truce With Kings." I don'gt mind being corrected. I THOUGHT, besides a nuclear war, that the old US had been torn apart by civil wars. So, the Pacific States of America was bigger than I thought? And I think Hawaii was more likely to have again become independent.
And, of course the "hidden subplot" of "No Truce" shows us meddlesome aliens presumptuously trying to remold human society according to what their "science of history" told them was "best" for us.
Keep on being an Andersonian pedant!
Regards! Sean
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