When there is an option to abort the mission to Rustum and return to Earth, Teresa Zeleny is asked what the consensus is among the women:
"'Most want to give up, of course... They came only because their men wanted to. Women are much too practical to care about a philosophy or a frontier, or anything except their families.'" (p. 60)
part three, pp. 71-95.
Jan Svoboda tells his wife, Judith, that he has thought of a solution to a current problem. Although they have talked for a while:
"She still hadn't asked him what [the solution] was. But that was typical of her. Like most women, she kept her warmth for human things and left the abstractions to her husband. He often thought she had come to Rustum less for her beliefs than for him." (p. 89)
Some readers now would question these statements about women.
part three, And Yet So Far, is a story about:
a technical problem (how to retrieve a wrecked spaceship and its life-saving cargo from a lethal radiation zone);
a moment of realization (of the solution to the problem);
a human problem (how to motivate a spaceship captain to agree to implement the solution).
Anderson's characters are problem-solvers. The ship and it cargo are retrieved. The colonization of Rustum begins.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I do not question those statements about women. Allowing for many exceptions and degrees of "intensity," I do believe enough women stress the personal and practical that a mindset of that kind can be considered "typical."
I've also been wondering how much heavier than Earth's would be the gravity of Rustum. If I can go by Imhotep in THE GAME OF EMPIRE, Anderson did not think humans would be willing to colonize a planet with a gravity more than thirty percent heavier than Terra's.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Rustum's gravity is a fourth again as much as Earth's.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
IOW, a little less than that of Imhotep. I've sort of been expecting it to be more than that on Rustum, because of the repeated mentions of the dangers of falls there, due to a gravity heavier than that of Earth's. The first chapter of THE GAME OF EMPIRE mentions how newly arrived humans who were young and fit could soon adapt to Imhotepan gravity.
I would expect planets like Rustum and Imhotep to eventually have colonists mostly on the stocky/short side, because a shorter and thicker bone structure would tolerate the gravity better on those planets. With the usual exceptions, of course!
Ad astra! Sean
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