Chee Lan:
"'We can't go home to what we left when we were young; it may still be, but we aren't...'"
-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp 1-291 AT XXI, p. 290.
Captain Nansen:
"'We can never return home. When we come back to Earth, we will necessarily come as foreigners, immigrants.'"
-Starfarers, 7, p. 59.
Chee Lan cannot return to what she left because decades of life, work and experience have changed her. Nansen's crew cannot return home because ten millennia of history will have changed their home out of all recognition. Thus, they are saying not the same thing but the opposite.
James Blish's Earthman, Come Home ends with its characters on a planet in the Greater Magellanic Cloud but also with the realization that Earth is not a place but an idea. We cannot go home but, on the other hand, home is where we are.
2 comments:
Ten millennia of history would put you... hmmm... in the position of a person from the early neolithic in the modern world.
Kaor, Paul!
And Chee Lan had planned on retiring to a life of wealth and luxury! Instead, as times were darkening, she had to face the prospect of taking up a second career as a politician on Cynthia, to help prepare her race to face chaos as the Polesotechnic League declined.
Ad astra! Sean
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