I usually think of Poul Anderson as a successor of Mary Shelley, HG Wells and Robert Heinlein but Verne is somewhere in there as well. Think of the directions of exploration in the nineteenth century (in fact or in fiction):
beyond certain northern and southern latitudes
through the air
into the upper atmosphere (a Conan Doyle short story)
under the Earth
under the sea
through space
through time
Unless modern authors want to go retro, which they sometimes do, they are not going to describe journeys into a non-molten Earth's core, hollow Earth etc. Poul Anderson is at the space-time end of this list, particularly in Tao Zero and "Flight to Forever."
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I hope this is a recent translation of Verne's book, by a scholar who respected his text and gave English speaking readers an accurate version of JOURNEY.
Ad astra! Sean
It is a 2009 translation. I still find Verne's narrative style difficult.
Kaor, Paul!
I didn't, at least not the three Verne books I read--which were all older, almost certainly unsatisfactory translations.
Ad astra! Sean
I didn't do a hollow earth in the LORDS OF CREATION series... but I did put a Dyson Sphere in the third book!
You do introduce the Dyson Sphere at the end of the 2nd book.
I mean to reread the 1st 2 before getting the 3rd to read.
One thought I had on reading the end of "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings" was that humans exploring the sphere would want to use various geophysical techniques to investigate the shell. Eg: Vibroseis, in which a plate on a heavy truck is vibrated against the ground to send sound down & reflections from changes in the rock layers are recorded from geophones. This would allow determining the thickness of the shell and whether there are interesting variations within the shell. One can also use explosions to send sound into the ground, but vibroseis is less disruptive to nearby structures. I would certainly want good data about the thickness of the shell before doing anything that could make a hole.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Jim!
Mr. Stirling: And I love the Dyson Sphere you showed us in THE LORDS OF CREATION.
Jim: Too late, the most advanced cultures discovered by the Americans exploring that Dyson Sphere had been blowing things up for centuries.
Ad astra! Sean
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