Commuting

"Though he liked the neighborhood he lived in, he often wondered if it was worth the commuting. Ninety minutes a day made seven and a half hours a week, fifteen complete days a year, gone from his life with nothing to show for their passage but a stomach ulcer..."
- Poul Anderson, "Escape from Orbit" IN Anderson, Time And Stars, London, 1970, pp. 81-100 AT p. 85.

Those were fifteen days during which he was conscious. Consciousness evolved as a means to survival but can now be an end in itself. The time seems wasted if you are thinking about something else that you could have done instead of simply attending to the present moment, practicing awareness. We are cosmic self-consciousness - in scientific knowledge, aesthetic experience and momentary awareness.

This story, "Escape from Orbit," is the kind of sf that CS Lewis called "the Engineer's Story." It presents a technical/human problem, how to get shipwrecked astronauts out of lunar orbit onto the surface where they can be rescued by Apollo Base. As ever, there is a moment when our hero suddenly realizes the solution:

"He stopped. For a very long time he stood altogether motionless." (p. 96)

- followed by successful execution of the solution. Leaving the technical details to the experts, I have instead commented on two other aspects of the short story, the opening dream and the midpoint commuting.

After all these months, can anyone remember whether I have posted about Anderson's novel, The Long Way Home? I will have to check back.

Escape From Orbit

As its title suggests, Poul Anderson's "Escape from Orbit" (Time And Stars, London, 1970) is hard sf, in fact about a spaceship in lunar orbit. However, it begins with a dream. Dreams are universally experienced so it makes sense that they be described in fiction. This dream includes fantasy: a horse leaps off the Earth. Anderson readers must be alert to which genre they are reading. It is not always clear in an opening paragraph. Magic can work in a dream in a hard sf story.

The dream is interrupted and the viewpoint character, Wister, woken by a phone call in the middle of the night. He had dreamed of the "...tinge of Julie's hair..." but wakes beside Florence. (p. 81) The ringing cuts through the dream like a saw. This reminded me of a peculiar experience: I needed to make a phone call and was surrounded by half a dozen public phones not enclosed but displayed on shelves or pedestals but they were just out of reach and far too big to be picked up - an Alice in Wonderland scenario.

Then I awoke in our attic in the middle of the night to hear the phone ringing two floors below. An acquaintance, dealing with what she regarded as an emergency, had rung at that time and had kept ringing until I answered. My sleeping brain had reversed the facts: in the dream, I was not being rung but needed to ring; I was not hearing one persistent phone but seeing several giant phones. That memory has endured.

At a residential College, someone spoke of hearing an owl during the night. Deciding to describe my giant phones, I began, "Talking about noises heard at night...," then saw the looks of horror on the faces of the guy in the next room and his girlfriend - but, instead of breaking off, I continued with the story, I suppose to their relief.

OK, the point is to read "Escape from Orbit" and to stay with the plot next time.