Sunday, 23 August 2026

The Astra And The Per Aspera

(i) Ad astra per aspera.

(ii) "We the people of the spaceship Astra..."

(iii) "...this ship, the Per Aspera..."
-James Blish, They Shall Have Stars IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 7-129 AT p. 108.

Poul Anderson has a spaceship named the Astra. James Blish has a spaceship named the Per Aspera. 

That might not look like much of a post but a certain amount of research went into it. I remembered (so I thought) recently rereading a Blish text about the Per Aspera so I spent quite a while looking through The Seedling Stars before I thought instead to look in They Shall Have Stars and there it was.

Stars and Mars are the two commonest words in sf titles, I think. I have somewhere listed the Anderson and Blish titles with Stars in them but tonight I leave that as an exercise for blog readers or you could google their bibliographies.

I will be elsewhere for a while early tomorrow.  

No comments: