"[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:
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
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