After landing in a side lane, Naysmith drives the care manually, presumably on the road, to the Donners' house. Donner had been an engineer by training. His wife, Jeanne, works from home:
"...as a mail-consultant semantic linguist - correcting manuscripts of various kinds..." (VI, p. 45)
Semantics has become big business and is one of the sciences or disciplines that had fed into psychotechnics. The house is prefab with:
"...severe modern lines and curves..." (ibid.)
Jeanne Donner gardens which Naysmith knows that his Brother, Martin Donner, would not. So the world still has room for family homes surrounded by colourful gardens but can all this exist so soon after nuclear devastation?
I am milking the text for details of daily life but we will soon be back into fight and flight scenes.
A young girl skipping across the road might be a UN agent:
"...the biological laboratories could do strange things..." (ibid.)
That is a bit too strange for my liking. Technological resources are being channelled not into conflicts between nations but into attempts either to preserve or to destroy a new international regime. This must still be a transitional phase in the Psychotechnic future history series.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Given advanced technology, a peace enforced by the UN world gov't, and a little luck, I can see reasonable numbers of people in the right jobs and professions prospering enough to have private homes and gardens. Even if this was only forty years after Anderson's WW III.
Happy New Year! Sean
Post a Comment