Hugh Valland:
"'Between them, immortality and star travel changed everything.'" (IV, p. 26)
They would. But is either possible? If not, then this kind of sf is not futuristic speculation but an academic exercise and more like fantasy. Immortal interstellar travellers are as fantastic as immortal gods or elves. In "A Style in Treason," James Blish called the faster than light drive the "Imaginary Drive" as an auctorial comment. (Then one of his characters commented that this was an inappropriate name in The Quincunx of Time.)
Poul Anderson and James Blish were masters of this kind of improbable sf. The PRELUDE of BOOK ONE of Blish's Cities in Flight, Volume I, ends:
"He was thinking about an immortal man who flew from star to star faster than light."
-James Blish, Year 2018! (London, 1964), p. 17.
He was anticipating John Amalfi, first seen in the concluding chapter of Volume II. Moving sideways in time, he was also thinking about Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long and Poul Anderson's Hugh Valland. Moving away from faster-than-light universes, he was also partly thinking about Anderson's mutant immortal, Hanno, in The Boat Of A Million Years, who traverses interstellar distances but at sub-light speeds. Will anything like this ever happen? In Anderson's Genesis, it is only post-organic intelligences that star travel, again at sub-light speeds.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Reread the "Commentary" Anderson wrote for SPACE FOLK, in which he stated that human beings could achieve STL Einsteinian interstellar space traveling if mankind was determined enough.
Ad astra! Sean
There's a difference between "not aging" and "immortality".
Even if you don't age, eventually the dice will roll snake eyes and you'll die.
And there are living organisms that don't age, so we know it's theoretically possible.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, even if we live thousands of years, something will get us sooner or later.
I am still skeptical something like the antithanatic of WORLD WITHOUT STARS will ever be practical. Something more modest, like the antisenescence of the Technic stories seems more realistic.
Ad astra! Sean
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