To Become Like It

The Fleet Of Stars, 19.

"Always suspicious, the Selenarchs never found it reasonable that the cybercosm would withhold observations simply because they were enigmatic. If the great equation proved in need of amendment, what harm in that? Or...what promise, which the Teramind did not want humans to know of, lest they become like it?" (p. 237)

That concluding phrase is a covert Biblical reference: Genesis 3:22.

("...like one of us..." and some similar passages imply the polytheism that had preceded monotheism.)

Unlike at Alpha Centauri, the Lunarians in the outer Solar System have revived the title, "Selenarch," implying that they have never dropped their claim to the Moon. Political conflicts continue, just very slowly.

Early Space Travel?

In our childhoods - I refer to people of a certain age - , sf writers envisaged, barring a nuclear war, early space travel in the late twentieth century and routine interplanetary travel in the twenty-first century. In Robert Heinlein's Future History, the first rocket to the Moon is in 1978 and the The Green Hills Of Earth stories are all set around 2000. Larry Niven's Known Space future history - a bit later than my childhood - presents interplanetary exploration in the last quarter of the twentieth century. 

In Poul Anderson's Maurai future history, the War of Judgment - a version of what we call World War III - delays space travel for centuries whereas, in Anderson's Psychotechnic History, Mars and Venus are colonized in the immediate aftermath of WWIII and, in the same author's Twilight World, it is mutants resulting from the radiation of World War III that go to Mars. Thus, after all, nuclear war and space travel were not necessarily incompatible. 

But what I am leading up to is: what has meanwhile happened on Earth Real? A later Anderson future history series has to acknowledge that:

"The human space endeavor came near dying soon after it was born."

-The Fleet Of Stars, 19, p. 234.

And it is a private enterprise that restarts it:

"...Fireball Enterprises kindled fresh vitality..." (ibid.)

Any future history always reflects the time in which it is written even if its opening instalment is set in a further future. 

In less than half an hour, I will watch TV news to find out whether Artemis II launched today.