"...Bode's Law was a simple geometrical progression that described the distances of the Solar planets from the Sun."
-Robert Heinlein, Time For The Stars (London, 1978), CHAPTER XII, p. 119.
We have even posted about this before. See here.
Next, we have been considering interstellar travel in cosmic sf so let's reconsider:
Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Tears (London, 1991), XIX, Thule -
- which covers pp. 455-600 and is divided into 34 sub-chapters.
Boat... is mainly historical sf. Sf can be historical if it deals with time travel, immortality, mutants, alien visitations or other recognizable sf ideas in historical periods. Boat... is about "immortal" mutants who will die by violence or accident but not by illness or old age. The book is long enough, 600 pages, that it could have been published as a trilogy:
historical;
twentieth century;
future -
- but it is all in one. Someone that I know disliked the future section, XIX, and thought that it detracted from the novel. I do not. Historical periods do have some future ahead of them (hopefully) so let us speculate about it.
Thus, we can reconsider familiar themes:
what might technological civilization be like in the future?;
a means of interstellar travel;
interactions between "immortal" characters, as in Anderson's World Without Stars;
alien contacts.
Anderson is a master of FTL (faster than light) interstellar travel but he also wrote a lot (maybe more?) about STL (slower than light), the latter including Thule.
"May he go forth in the sunrise boat,
"May he come to port in the sunset boat,
"May he go among the perishable stars,
"May he journey in a Boat of a Million Years."
"-The Book of Going Forth by Daylight
"(Theban recension, ca. 18th Dynasty)"
- quoted in Boat..., p. 7.
An inspiring introduction. (And I still have music from the Chinese New Year concert in my head.)
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I have a Dover Books reprint of E.A. Wallis Budge's edition of THE BOOK OF THE DEAD (from the Papyrus of Ani), first pub. in 1895. This version, esp. some of Budge's commentary, I think is almost certain to be considered obsolete by scholars of our time. But I do wonder if this was the edition Anderson used?
Just a tiny error, that should be "imperishable," not "perishable" stars. And I wish I knew where in THE BOOK OF THE DEAD Anderson took that quote from. Then I would look it up.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
The text reads "perishable" in my edition.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But my copy of THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS (A Tor Book, September 1989), has "imperishable" in that quote from THE BOOK OF GOING FORTH BY DAY, which I think better fits both the context and what I recall
of Pharaohnic Egyptian religious beliefs.
We both can recall how undoubted errors crept into many of Anderson's works. Typos too are imperishable!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
It looks as if my text is wrong. Maybe I should have put "(sic.)" after "perishable."
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, it would have been. And I think this bit from Chapter XV of Budge's translation of THE BOOK OF GOING FORTH BY DAY will be of interest, from a hymn of praise to Ra: "May the soul of Osiris Ani, the triumphant one, come forth with thee from heaven, may he go forth in the matet boat, may he come into port in the sektet boat, may he cleave his path among the never resting stars in the heavens" (Budge, THE BOOK OF THE DEAD (1895, rep. Dover Publications, 1967, page 324).
As we can see this has some resemblance to the version Anderson used. Not sure where "the boat of a million years" came from.
Ad astra! Sean
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