Sensitives make the postal service redundant.
Men's and women's washrooms are no longer separated.
Of necessity, scientists work together for a while to address the change but then become free to follow their own interests. A few recidivists plan to reproduce the inhibitor field and thus to reverse the change but they will be easily detected and stopped by the majority.
Poul Anderson tries to present the new truncated conversations using italics and brackets as well as quotation marks and the text becomes somewhat disjointed.
Mankind is advancing beyond the readers' comprehension. The novel approaches its conclusion and as with many other such works, e.g., Starfarers and The Boat Of A Million Years, there will be no sequel. I am a series man, myself.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
No more postal services means no more letters (or even post cards), which would be a serious loss for mankind. The writing of letters forces people to make some effort to organize their thoughts in a reasonably coherent way. To say nothing of letters often being valuable historical sources. And that last actually happened to me, when a French fan of PA found out about my correspondence with him and asked me to give him copies of these letters, for him to use in a book he was writing about Anderson.
Rest room facilities for both sexes? A very bad idea! That's been tried in the US--with bad results. And of course fake women "transsexuals" has been raping real women in women's facilities and in prisons for female criminals.
And that conflict with the pro-inhibitor faction was too easily settled to be convincing. It would be more realistic to show the pro-inhibitors foreseeing what their opponents would do and taking obvious counter measures.
Ad astra! Sean
Obviously, the super-humans have their own version of the Internet! 8-).
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