Adults In Space

Decades ago, I enjoyed sf comic strips about characters called Dan Dare and Jet Ace Logan. ("Have to say it, sir: whole of Space Fleet thinks Dare's gone too far this time!" Bus driver: "I'm bettin' on Danny boy!") I saw that there were prose paperbacks with spacemen and robots on the covers - even one called I, Robot - and wondered what they would be like: presumably adult subject-matter although with the familiar space-based settings. Sure enough, before long I was reading:

"She said: 'Bob, I mean to have a child here.'"

-James Blish, They Shall Have Stars IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 7-129 AT CHAPTER EIGHT, p. 90.

I knew that the bearing of children was an adult matter and also that this child was to be born in a base on Jupiter V. Dare or Logan would have fitted right in there but would not have been conversing with a woman who proposed to have a child.

Similarly, in a spaceship en route to the Saturnian system:

"'...you'd rather be with that Broberg woman. I only came by to tell you in person I'm getting out of the way of you two.'"

-"The Saturn Game," II, p. 14.

The best of both worlds: adult relationships and space exploration.

They Shall Have Stars is Volume I of Blish's Cities In Flight future history series. "The Saturn Game" is the opening instalment of Anderson's Technic Civilization future history series. Our civilization has not caught up with either of them yet.