HG Wells did not include space travel in The Shape Of Things To Come but did add it to Things To Come, the film. An escape velocity rocket fuel is about to be produced at the end of the fourth story in Robert Heinlein's Future History. The opening story of Anderson's Psychotechnic History covers only the recovery from World War III. Space travel is absent from Anderson's short Maurai future history although it occurs in the connected volumes, There Will Be Time and Orion Shall Rise. SM Stirling's Emberverse series is an alternative future history where a low tech society has no possibility of space travel.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I've reread lately "The Sky People" and have now started on "Progress." Considering how the Maurai and the other successor nations were still struggling to recover from the War of Judgment, it's no surprise we don't see space travel in the three Maurai short stories.
One of the things that bothered me about Stirling's Emberverse series was how even the older survivors who were at least 18 at the time of the Change in the alternate 1998 don't seem troubled by the loss of any capacity of getting off this planet. If Alien Space Bats (to use a name coined by some fans) caused the Change, then it would obviously be dangerous for mankind to stay only on Earth!
I even wished some of the post-Change survivors had been shown puzzling over pre-Change science fiction like Anderson's ENSIGN FLANDRY and Niven/Pournelle's THE MOTE IN GOD's EYE and coming to realize how MUCH they had potentially lost. Of how narrow and limited their horizons now were and of what it was possible for them to do or hope to do.
We do see mention of Sir Bela of Eastmarch's book THE BROKEN SWORD! And we know what that was!
Ad astra! Sean
In the Emberverse books, those who thought too much about what they'd lost tended not to be among the survivors, who couldn't spare the time or energy or the emotional friction of the frustration it produces.
Sort of a psychological survival screening process.
Realizing what's happened, that it isn't going to change back, and that it's world-wide, is an initial threshold. Those who grasp all these things quickly have an enormous advantage, which means that those who are "marginal", less committed to consensus reality, do better.
Later, those who can transfer themselves mentally to the new reality and not brood have a similar leg-up. Hence the conscious archaisms of many of the survivor societies, which is a coping mechanism.
And the subsequent generations tend to regard the period just below the Change as a weird episode of deep strangeness. Rockets and dinosaurs on islands and superheroes and so forth.
What's described in the Bible -- or Tolkien, or the stories of Conan -- is much more real to them. It's visibly related to their own lives.
I wonder what kind of times we are moving into now. The "normal" seems to have gone.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I can't disagree with your comments here. Yes, those who were able to adjust to the post-Change would be far more likely to survive, long term, than those who brooded over what they had lost. And I can see how some, like Astrid Larssen, who had felt out of place in the pre-Change world, would do esp. well in a "new world" at a technological level much what is seen in Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
I would have thought SOME, forty years or so after the Change, might have reflected more deeply about the pre-Change world, esp. if they were trying to get some idea of how our science used to work. Including reading some of that science fiction I mentioned. And of thus coming to have a deeper understanding of how much had been lost.
At least the post-Change survivors have plenty of metals, at first from reusing the abandoned machines and artifacts of the pre-Change world!
Ad astra! Sean
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