"'Have you curbed the Pleiades?'"
-see here.
After that, the novel ends by peering into the further future. Building holontic time communicators will mean not only the future talking to the past but also calling across the universe and making it one although mastering such mighty forces will take many lifetimes. The characters will never become God but can have fun trying. Stars appear as the wind goes cold.
The history of the Maurai Federation is incorporated into a much longer history, both before and after, in There Will Be Time. The narrator of that novel, knowing that, in the further future beyond the end of the novel, time travel will merge with interstellar travel, ends his narrative by telling us that:
"I walk beyond town, many of these nights, to stand under the high autumnal stars, look upward and wonder."
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), XVI, p. 176.
Brian Aldiss tells us that the sf writer:
"...sees the future glancing back mockingly at him dithering by the cross-roads - and he attempts a retaliatory stare."
-Brian Aldiss, Space, Time And Nathaniel (London, 1966), INTRODUCTION, p. 11.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
The later parts of STARFARERS, dealing as it does with holontic communications, was hard for me to grok! It's one of those books I have to read more than once to adequately grasp. And I mean that as a compliment to Anderson, not a criticism. He does not want his readers to rest too comfortably in their narrow boxes and ruts.
And one of the things we have discussed about Anderson's Maurai stories was the error he made in "The Sky People," "Progress," and "Windmill" in hypothesizing that metals would be very rare and costly in the post-Judgement world. Whereas, of course, as Stirling pointed out plenty of metals could be mined from untold millions of abandoned appliances, cars, skyscrapers, etc.
Ad astra! Sean
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