Friday, 29 March 2024

Holatans And Commons

I had not rated The Long Way Home as a significant novel by Poul Anderson and have reread and blogged about it at least once before but look how much we can still out of it:

the peculiarities of the interstellar superdrive
the two theories of how it functions
the "beyond contact" civilizations that it generates
the planet, Thor
the Holatans
the Solar Technarchy
the Commercial Society
the Commons
the paramathematical theory of man

A crucial point is reached when it is acknowledged that man has not been liberated. Why not and how might he have been?

Holatan life is grounded in family rites and pantheism. Commons families chant hymns to Father in a temple. Could there be some common ground between them? Holatans and Commons do have a single creator: Poul Anderson. 

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

What interested me here was how Anderson, unlike some other SF writers, had humans still having belief in God/Father thousands of years from now. The illustration you chose is an Ace double with both Anderson's NO WORLD OF THEIR OWN and Asimov's THE 1000 YEAR PLAN, from the FOUNDATION books. Unlike Anderson's efforts Asimov's treatment of religion in the FOUNDATION series was absurd, weak, unsatisfactory. Asimov was one of those atheists who seemed unable to have any understanding of religious believers.

Ad astra! Sean