Thursday 12 January 2023

Future Historical Details

"Holmgang."

Ways in which Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History resembles its model, Robert Heinlein's Future History:

Luna City is a "...roaring commercial metropolis." (I, p. 21);

big, heavy Bo Johnson would not have got his spaceman's certificate before the ion drive was introduced;

transport companies with names like Fireball and Triplanetary move passengers and cargo between planets;

unlike more expensive places, the Last Chance does not centrifuge and alcohol, although expensive, is more effective in low gravity;

a Venusian escaping a bar fight must be a spaceman because he knows to leap up, kick the wall and fly out through the door into the corridor.

Thus, a sense of daily life in the future and also technological progress in the interplanetary period with the introduction of the ion drive.

2 comments:

S.M. Stirling said...

Though I think they must have had some fairly efficient, high-delta-V rocket systems before the ion drive, to do all that.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And FIREBALL is a very evocative name, later reused by Anderson for the Fireball Company founded by Anson Guthrie in the HARVEST OF STARS timeline.

Ad astra! Sean