Counterfeit World by Daniel Galouye
AIs inhabit a virtual reality, thinking that it is material reality. People from material reality visit the virtual. I think that there was one virtual inside another . (This was original when I read it.)
Beta Sol, James Blish
Sol is part of a binary. Its companion is a white dwarf, six light months away. Beta Sol has an inhabited planet and is reachable by 1970s technology.
Perelandra by CS Lewis
Lewis, visiting Ransom, is about to be introduced to a being in whom the distinction between extraterrestrial and supernatural breaks down. He finds it hard to articulate his disquiet.
The Goblin Reservation by Clifford Simak
A cartoon-style ghost like a white sheet has been called from the hereafter but died so long ago that it has forgotten who it was. William Shakespeare time travels to the future and meets the ghost which then remembers that it was William Shakespeare.
(This linking of ghosts and time travel ties in with Wells' The Time Machine. When the Time Traveller first glimpses a Morlock at night, he wonders whether it is a ghost, then reflects that, by 802,701 AD, there should be more ghosts because more people will have died. Ghosts appearing in old houses might also be linked with time travellers flitting through the old houses.)
There Will Be Time by Poul Anderson
Time travellers can travel into the future within slower than light interstellar spaceships and can report on the outcome of a voyage before it starts.
(I had thought of this idea. I envisaged "The Haunted Spaceship" with crew members glimpsing apparitions that are time travellers from later in the history of the ship.)
The Shield Of Time by Poul Anderson
A historical alteration is caused not by extratemporal intervention but by a quantum fluctuation in space-time-energy. Right at the end of the series, Anderson invents something new.
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I too can think of some Big Ideas I first came across from reading science fiction.
THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY, however dissatisfied I later became with it, Asimov's "psychohistory" made a deep impression on me as a boy.
AGENT OF THE TERRAN EMPIRE, the very FIRST of Anderson's books that I read introduced such things as FTL travel and extra-Solarian colonization to me.
THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS, I THINK it was this book in which I first came across the idea of alternate or parallels universes.
THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE, by Pournelle and Niven. Because of how carefully the authors worked out what might happen from First Contact with non-human intelligent life.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I should have added ENSIGN FLANDRY to my list of SF books with Big Ideas. The original concept which struck me in that book being how that was where I first knowingly came across cloning, using our DNA patterns for regaining lost limbs and organs. Even if that word "cloning" was not used in that Anderson book.
Ad astra! Sean
THE SHIELD OF TIME was in many ways the best of the series, to my way of thinking. A great accomplishment, considering how many series peter out.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree with the HIGH opinion you have for THE SHIELD OF TIME. No argument there!
I think it's kinda almost inevitable for most series to peter out. Many, probably most such series have to "end" with many loose ends dangling. E.g., we don't know anything about the later years of Dominic Flandry after THE GAME OF EMPIRE. Or what happened to Roan Tom after "A Tragedy of Errors." We are told in "The Sharing of Flesh" that the planet Gwydion was interdicted, for its own safety, from contact with the outside universe by the Allied Planets after the events seen in THE NIGHT FACE. But nothing further. And so on and on. Loose ends galore!
Ad astra! Sean
The quantum fluctuation is something new, but it adds depth to the series as a whole.
The Patrol not only guards history against criminals and fanatics, but also against the forces of Chaos itself, as embodied in Lorenzo becoming a human vessel of it.
This was hinted at in THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN.
The Mongol expedition to North America isn't caused by time criminals: it just happens naturally, and if the Patrol -hadn't- intervened, then Columbus (if he sailed, given potential butterfly effects) would have found a 'modern' continent with advanced (by 15th-century standards) technology.
Incidentally, they'd also have found a continent which had resistance to Eurasian diseases, because they'd have been exposed to them via China, which had a disease environment very much like Europe's.
Poul didn't emphasize this much in the story, which speculates that the Mongol conquest would have been much better for the Indians.
It might have been, but the plagues would have been just as bad -- and the native population dropped 90% in the century after Columbus. Mexico went from around 20 million people to around 1.5 million by the mid 1600's, and a chunk of those were Spanish or part-Spanish in descent.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Yes, while Kublai Khan might have been inspired by the tales about the West told to him by the Polos, the story has him thinking of sending an exploratory expedition to the east all by himself. A hint of that quantum fluctuation we see most fully in THE SHIELD OF TIME.
I agree, a Sino/Mongol conquest of the Americas would probably not have been all that different for American Indians, compared to the European conquest, because of those plagues you mentioned. Things like the common cold, measles, smallpox, and the 'flus which proliferates in China would have devastated the Indians.
I think the idea of how epidemics affected history was only just starting to be seriously studied at the time Anderson wrote "The Only Game In Town." So I can understand why that was not stressed in the story.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the common cold was probably present in the Americas by 1492, but otherwise, yes.
The Americas were never -totally- isolated from the Old World; but the contact was mainly across the Bering Strait, which is where the Inuit/Eskimo came in, the last of the trans-Bering migrants, somewhere between 2000-3000 years ago, IIRC.
That made it very limited, and through a filter of very sparse hunter-gatherer populations who weren't part of the Eurasian disease environment until into the 19th century. Russian expansion across Siberia produced many of the same sorts of virgin-field epidemics as European expansion into the Americas or Australia.
I have a vague memory of reading Beta Sol--or at least about an expedition to a planet orbiting a star VERY close by. Is there any information about publication or where it might reside online? I'd like to read it again.
Lee,
"Darkside Crossing" and "Our Binary Brothers" by James Blish were published in GALAXY.
Paul.
Found it! Ordered a copy.
Right on.
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