Three Future Histories, Another Action Scene And Self-Driving Cars

Later in the evening, I turn to non-Andersonian reading or rereading but find it difficult to keep focused on Frank Herbert's Children of Dune. Herbert either is unaware of or just ignores the need to control narrative points of view. His characters connive for power and influence in an interstellar empire without conveying any sense of life in that empire. By contrast, we do receive some impression of how people live on Hermes, Dennitza, Imhotep, Daedalus and, to a lesser extent, Terra in Poul Anderson's Technic History. The Technic History gives us everything that Foundation and Dune should have given us but it has not yet been filmed.

Meanwhile, rereading Anderson's The Byworlder, there is a second action scene. This time, Yvonne is kidnapped and Skip goes to extraordinary lengths to assist the FBI's rescue job. As I said before, what we have had so far is mostly not human-Sigman interactions but human interactions caused by the Sigman's presence.

The cars in this fictional future are not aircars as we have come to expect but are self-driving. In Yvonne's car:

"...the pilot opened fuel cells to maximum..." (II, p.15)

"...pilot..." makes us think of aircraft but here it means the gadget driving the car.

"Pilot set, the car hummed into motion." (X, p. 99)

"An auto purred by. Skip shouted and waved. The man inside was watching television and didn't notice." (XI, p. 102)

Watching television? Sure. The car is a self-mover, a true auto-mobile.