Life Off Earth

"Margin of Profit." (here)

"This tiny, outlying corner of the galaxy which Technic civilization has slightly explored is that big and various." (p. 149)

This much repeated observation about the relative smallness of known space on a galactic scale is made that early in the Technic History. The observation will remain true throughout the League and Empire periods although eventually, millennia later, human civilizations will have spread through several spiral arms of the galaxy. But that will be long after the fall not only of the Terran Empire but even of Technic civilization. Not that subsequent civilizations will not be technological but "Technic" has come to mean a particular global and spacefaring civilization that succeeded Western.

In the 1950s, I loved the idea of human beings able to move freely around in interstellar space. Now I am more conscious of the difficulties of remaining alive off Earth. Also, there is a question about the psychological effects of leaving the Terrestrial environment. Will colonists on Mars remain sane?

"It was a cruel world, this Mars, a world of cold and ruin and soaring scornful emptiness, a world that broke men's hearts and drained their lives from them - rainless, oceanless, heatless, kindless..."

-Poul Anderson, "Un-Man" IN Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 1 (Riverdale, NY, October 2017), pp. 21-100 AT III, pp. 28-29.

This passage continues for several more lines of text but I do not want to post lengthy quotations.

I am now having a problem familiar to readers. Books have been moved around here. James Blish planned a novel to be called King Log that was never completed although three extracts from it, entitled "The City That Was The World," "Darkside Crossing" and "Our Binary Brothers," were published in Galaxy. I want to quote from "Darkside Crossing" but that is the one issue that I cannot now find beside the others on the shelf! 

From memory:

John Hillary Dane makes the two light-month crossing from Sol to a previously unnoticed white dwarf companion star. When he glances back and realizes that he can no longer see Sol, he suffers a nervous breakdown because he is cut off as no man has been before. Is this an insight into possible psychological effects of space travel?

Addendum: Persevering, I found "Darkside Crossing" on another shelf in another room and will now reread it. There is nothing quite like the pleasure and relief of re-finding something.