Tales Of The Flying Mountains by Poul Anderson
Cities In Flight by James Blish
Anderson's "mountains" are asteroids. In both series, a crackpot theory of gravity leads to antigravity. In ...Mountains, asteroids are terraformed and an inhabited asteroid is launched towards Proxima Centauri. In Cities..., cities are lifted from Earth and launched across space - but they also fly faster than light. The experimenters are:
"...astonished at the accompanying effects: the abolition of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald relationship inside the field, the intolerance of the field itself to matter outside its influence, and so on; not only at their occurring at all - the formula doesn't predict them - but at their order of magnitude."
-James Blish, They Shall Have Stars AT Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 7-129 AT BOOK THREE, p. 97.
"...the formula doesn't predict them..." So is it a deus ex machina by Blish when he suggests that the Blackett-Dirac equations could lead to a faster-than-light interstellar drive? Maybe I'll reread ...Mountains and check whether its gravitational theory connects with Blish's.
What better use of an sf blogger's time than to compare future histories by Anderson and Blish?
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Unfortunately, as regards Blish's Flying Cities books, I lost interest in them after rereading the first two volumes the last time I tried reading them. A pity, I must have been fascinated by the FC books when I first read them over half a century ago. I had to conclude tastes, inclinations, preferences, views. etc., had changed during those decades.
It's a sign of how much and how deeply Anderson's stories has affected me that I had no such difficulties the last time I reread his TALES OF THE FLYING MOUNTAINS a few years ago. I think that had to be at least partly because of how Anderson wrote his stories, being able to make readers want to read them. He was an "instinctually good" writer who learned how to consciously improve on, or build on what was "merely" an instinctual talent.
I think I once accidentally typed somewhere in this blog TALES OF THE FLAYING MOUNTAINS, which almost makes a weird kind of sense.
Ad astra! Sean
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