On Ganymede, the guards are identical and stand like robots. The porter is gigantic and four-armed. This sounds like Brave New World. One of the officials is ranked as an "angel." This reminds us of Robert Heinlein's Angels of the Lord.
"...the ion drive had still been experimental when Ganymede had been colonized." (IV, p. 156)
Another reminder of the difference between early and later days in interplanetary travel.
Huxley's novel and Heinlein's and Anderson's future histories are parallel not in the sense that we are to imagine them as coexisting in a multiverse but just in the sense that they are alternative fictional futures and that we can recognize some similarities between them. All sf writers are engaged in a common endeavour to envisage the future. We have one future and many anticipations of it. The Time Traveller setting off into futurity represents every sf reader.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I've come to think Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD to be a more likely than Orwell's 1984. The former's futuristic dystopia used drugs like Soma and promiscuous sex to stupefy the masses into quiescent obedience to the World State. If a stunt like that can be pulled off it would have the advantage, to the masters, of being less grindingly oppressive and provocative than the police state terrorism of 1984.
Ad astra! Sean
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