(i) cut government spending on space technology because they want either to save money or to spend it on something else like welfare;
(ii) label all scientific research secret in case it has weapons applications and would benefit an enemy.
Both cuts and secrecy stifle research. (i) happens in Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains and (ii) in James Blish's Cities In Flight. However, in both cases, researchers develop antigravity despite the political restrictions.
Blish's scientific rationale is the little-known Locke Derivation followed by the Blacket-Dirac equations whereas one of Anderson's characters speaks more vaguely about:
"'...equations like those of a rotating force-field.'"
-Poul Anderson, Tales Of The Flying Mountains (New York, 1971), p. 28.
When Senator Carter of Virginia expostulates against antigravity and says that he could reach Mars more easily by astral projection, we are reminded that all fiction is one and that Edgar Rice Burroughs preceded Anderson.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
A few tritely obvious comments about politicians came to mind. Politicians are merely the people who manage the public business of their state or society. Nor does it matter how such officials came to power: whether by hereditary right or by counting noses. What matters is whether such leaders are believed by their peoples to legitimately hold power.
Humans being what we all are, flawed, imperfect, prone to folly and strife, we have to expect many politicians to be dunderheads, bunglers, or tyrants. Incompetence and tyranny are things that can only be managed, not solved.
Been thinking or rereading ORBIT UNLIMITED. I've also been reading parts of MULTIVERSE, such as Stirling's "A Slip in Time" and C.J. Cherryh's "Dancing on the Edge of the Dark."
I loved Stirling's Time pastiche, it was so convincingly Andersonian that I thinik Anderson would have approved of it. I was also fascinated by the glimpses we got of a steadily more powerful Austria-Hungary in a world where there was no Sarajevo assassination.
By contrast I was frustrated by Cherryh's story altho "Dancing" was just interesting enough to make me read it. What affronted me the most was Cherryh having Dominic Flandry and Queen Gunli of Scotha having a daughter. Doesn't she understand it's impossible for humans and non-humans to have children, no matter how superficially alike they might look, externally? Why do some SF writers still insist in perpetrating such absurdities?
I discussed that issue at greater length in my "Futuristic Sex" article, esp. in Appendix II.
Ad astra! Sean
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