Dagny Beynac on her dead husband, Edmond:
"'...he's become like a dream I had long ago.'
"'We live by our dreams, do we not?' [Lars] replied as softly.'" (p. 370)
Manse Everard reflecting on "Veleda's power":
"('How many divisions does the Pope have?' Stalin would jibe. His successors would find it had never mattered. In the long run, humans live mainly by their dreams, and die by them.)"
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 8, p. 541.
(Ironically, Veleda influences the imagery of the Virgin Mary through the "Star of the Sea.")
Dagny can activate an animated picture of Edmond but no longer does this often because she knows the picture so well. In one of Bob Shaw's "slow glass" stories, a guy lives alone in an extremely untidy cottage but at any time can look through the "slow glass" of its front window and see his wife and their children in a tidy, comfortable room. (Light moves slowly through "slow glass.")
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I had to check a bit, but your comments about Bob Shaw's "slow glass" stories (which I've not read) reminded me of Asimov's "The Dead Past." About efforts to find a technological means of LOOKING into the past with a kind of TV. And such a device might have very serious DELETERIOUS consequences!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
The conclusion of "The Dead Past" is that the past is not dead. By looking just a billionth of a second into the past, the users of the "kind of TV" would be able to see what is happening right now.
In Arthur C. Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END, human beings ask the Overlords (aliens) the truth about religion so the Overlords give them a kind of TV that shows past events, including the founding events of every religion.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Iow, the device we see in "The Dead Past" means the end of any kind of security, privacy, or secrecy. We would get a nightmare world! One of Asimov's better and more interesting stories.
I think we have some idea of the founding events of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam. But not, I believe, of Zoroastrianism.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But the Overlords' device shows them as they really were.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
IF there were such beings as the Overlords and their "TV" able to look into the past.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Indeed.
Paul.
(The term, I think coined by CS Lewis, is "chronoscope." A whole heap less implausible than a time machine.)
Kaor, Paul!
But a device able to look into or scan the past is just as unlikely!
Ad astra! Sean
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