Robert Heinlein wrote three alternative first men on the Moon stories. In his Future History, the first rocket to the Moon is in 1978. Poul Anderson's equivalent story is "The Saturn Game," about exploration further into the Solar System. James Blish's is Welcome To Mars. Larry Niven's Known Space future history series opens with the exploration of Mercury, Venus, Pluto and Mars.
If the human race survives, then our descendants will do great things on and off Earth and will make unpredictable and unimaginable discoveries about the universe by either close or remote observation.
John W. Campbell, introducing Volume I of Heinlein's Future History, wrote:
"These are a window on tomorrow; a television set tuned to the future. But we lack the key to the door that would let us walk through into that future; we must only watch and listen to the highest of all adventures - the conquest of the stars!"
-John W. Campbell, Jr., INTRODUCTION IN Robert Heinlein, The Man Who Sold The Moon (London, 1963), pp. 11-14 AT p. 14.
Some of us who read the Future History have walked some distance into the future. The highest adventure will be whatever human beings do accomplish in the further future. The conquest of the stars? I doubt conquest in any sense. Interstellar travel is a symbol of freedom in American sf, maybe only a symbol. Our descendants will either be interested that we imagined them as DD Harriman, Nicholas van Rijn, Dominic Flandry etc or will have forgotten such imaginings.
We refer to:
Wells
Heinlein
Blish
Niven
Campbell
Anderson
Wells is a Homer and Anderson is a culmination.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Anderson did write a First Man on the Moon story, except it was set long before 1969, with Leonardo da Vinci in "The Light."
Humans being what we are there will be conquests of many different kinds, both on and off Earth.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But we will not "conquer the stars" if we have to use massive effort and energy expenditure to get to even the closest.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But I am expecting/hoping that kind of conquest to happen in stages, first with exploration, developing, and settling of the Solar System. And that alone would obviously need centuries to be achieved. And I like Jim's suggestion that the outward expansion might focus on the Oort cloud due to the resources likely to be found there. And that in turn will start getting closer to the nearer stars.
I'm hoping this happens gradually, stage by stage, as and when allowed by technological changes and advances. And this process might be stimulated by political turmoil and upheavals on Earth, as the dissatisfied, disgruntled, or defeated leave Earth to seek new lives elsewhere.
Ad astra! Sean
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