Both "A Tragedy of Errors" and The Night Face refer to a Nebula but I do not know whether these are the same Nebula. Close to the one in The Night Face, stars are blurred:
"Sol, of course, was hidden from telescopes as well as from eyes, an insignificant yellow dwarf two hundred parsecs beyond that veil, which its light would never pierce." (p. 553)
Earth and the Solar System have two contradictory roles in some sf: important as the birthplace of the race of Earthmen but physically insignificant on a galactic scale. In his future history, James Blish encapsulates these two roles in a single passage:
"There were many corners of the galaxy which knew Earth only as a legend, a green myth floating unknown thousands of parsecs away in space, known an ineluctable thousands of years away in history. Some of them remembered much more vividly the now-broken tyranny of Vega, and did not know - some of them never had known - even the name of the little planet that had broken that tyranny."
-James Blish, Earthman, Come Home IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 235-465 AT PROLOGUE, p. 241.
A little planet orbiting an insignificant yellow dwarf star: future histories take us a long way not only in time but also in space.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And in Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium timeline Earth was rendered largely uninhabitable due to the Great Patriotic Wars which brought down the Co-Dominium.
In Anderson's Technic series some planets were colonized by humans who revered Terra, as can be seen in Section VII of "A Message in Secret", as Flandry conferred with the leaders of the Tebtengri Shamanate: "Aye-aye-call the Terrans, warn the Mother of Men--" Flandry felt how passion flared up in the scarred warriors before him. He had gathered that the Tebtengri had no use for Subotai the Prophet but built their own religion around a hard-boiled sort of humanistic pantheism. It grew on him how strong a symbol the ancestral planet was to them."
Ad astra! Sean
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