Friday 25 February 2022

Jets

Jack Havig's "Uncle Jack" takes him in a large propeller-less "jet" aircraft where they see a film in Technicolor.

"[Ranu] had read of jet aircraft that outpaced the sun, before the nuclear war."
-"Progress," p. 101.
 
Again, the change of perspective is extraordinary. In this example, we jump straight from a pre- to a post-jet period.
 
Ranu has seen a reconstructed film of a jet plane and does:
 
"...not understand how anyone could want to sit locked in a howling coffin..."
-ibid.
 
He prefers to experience the sky by clinging to a blimp like the Neil Gaiman character who wants to go to sea only in a ship with sails.
 
Read Anderson's and Gaiman's multiverses.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

But Ranu should have recalled how impatient people can be! If I wanted to go to Hawaii from Boston in Massachusetts and I had to choose between an airliner or a ship taking weeks to sail there, I would pick the former. A few hours of boredom and mild discomfort is worth it, getting to where I wanted to go.

But Ranu was thinking from the POV of a society which had to adapt to the loss of so much of the technology which existed before the War of Judgment.

Ad astra! Sean