Because My Tears Are Delicious to You 22: The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett

[james_davis_nicoll]

The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Speaking of "Letter to a Phoenix", it seems to me an author could salvage the old Planetary Romances by setting them a couple of dozen Phoenix Cycles down the road, when there's been enough time for great civilizations to rise, reshape the Solar System and its neighbors and then fall hard.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Something like that occurred to me, after wading through a pile of words by an author who wanted a sword & planet adventure story inhabited by people with starships...but who did not understand the uses of potential energy.

If we're several collapses along it's not unreasonable for the characters to find 'magic' gadgets and mysterious ruins. Old genetic engineering projects would probably leave bizarre monsters and suspiciously convenient life forms all over the place. Depending on one's tolerance for rubbery science it may even be reasonable to find eldrich portals to unknown realms, probably lying around where curious people will get in trouble by messing with them. The planetary romance seems to be out of fashion at the moment (although the space opera is still lurching along); that may not always be the case.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

For some reason I really liked the teleportation network in Simak's Shakespeare's Planet, where the directory had been lost ages ago and people were mapping it out the hard way.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

It's always challenging when the links aren't bidirectional and the characters can't just step back home...

John DeChancie put a different spin on that with his Starrigger novels. It's amusing to see trucks or trains used for interstellar travel.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

It's interesting to consider a "Stargate" series where the portals are unidirectional. Or even better, set up kind of like regular reverse neurons- one entrance, and several destinations, or vice versa. The Stargate people would have to try to map out the network to find the the gate that leads home.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

Also Peter Hamilton in "Pandora's Star" and its sequels: A gate is set up between two planets, tracks are laid, and people take trains from one to the other.

That's actually something that bothered me in SF long time ago -- "If we have a magic device that instantly transports you across light years, why are we putting it on top of a giant firecracker?"

[(Anonymous)]

There were also some Doctor Who expanded-universe tie-in novels that established that in some era of human civilization, there were subway trains going through wormholes to distant planets.

The usual SF handwave about starships is that there's some reason the jump drive has to be used in space. It won't work too far into a planetary gravity well, or it involves going to a specific point in space or a specific rest frame or both, or it involves dangerous astrophysical phenomena that are not healthy for children and other living things. Or some combination of the preceding, as in The Forever War. Of course, the out-of-universe reason for this is usually just that the author wants to still have spaceships.

Matt M.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

The least handwavy explanation IMO is that "hyperspatial jump" (or whatever you call it) is just not very precise. No reason not to initiate it on a planet's surface, but if your target area is light-hours across, you'll end up in vacuum and need an appropriate vehicle. Unless you are really, really unlucky :)

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

It also makes things more interesting in space warfare. If your enemy can just teleport their heck-bombs directly from their planet to yours as soon as they find it, there's not much room for pseudo-Napoleonic maneuvers! in! space!

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

That's certainly the case in Old Man's War and sequels, in which the Skip Drive needs to be well away from planets to engage but will deliver starships or missiles anywhere the operators desire. This makes for obvious difficulties if you want to keep your planet un-nuked. Luckily for the protagonists, every single other species in the known galaxy is even dumber than the people in charge of the Colonial Union, nor do they have the blessing of the author.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

IIRC, that was a minor plot point in the Dragonfall 5 novels. The titular spaceship was obsolete, because modern FTL vessels simply went into hyperspace directly from their planetside launching cradles.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I remember reading those as a kid! I think I've forgotten what circumstances required an actual flying-though-space vehicle but the operators actually got to go places and see things, unlike their compatriots who simply disappeared at A and reappeared at B. Do you know if the books escaped the Suck Fairy? Would they be worth digging out for an adult?

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind that it's been over thirty years since I read them, so I don't actually remember much. I think part of the use of the Dragonfall was to go to places without facilities. Maybe.

[(Anonymous)]

That matches my memory of the couple of those I read. The 'modern' ships couldn't go somewhere where there was no receiving cradle, and someone had to deliver the first receiving cradle (or the means to build it).

There's also Kuttner's "The Big Night", where hyperspace ships are being replaced by matter transmitters. One of the jobs still available to the ships is delivering matter transmitter gates to new locations.

-- Paul Clarke

[mr-mediocre.livejournal.com]

You mean similar to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun?

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

I really like how House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds takes on what you called "Phoenix cycles". House of Suns is set six million years from now, where not only the entire galaxy has been colonized (all at sublight speeds, BTW), but almost every inhabited planet has had five or six apocalypses. What protagonists call "microwars" (i.e. wars that engulf only a handful of inhabited systems) and subsequent re-colonizations come with such regularity, the general term for it is "turnover". And nearly every inhabitant of the galaxy has some relics of some bygone civilization to look at -- usually several.

These planets rarely regress to complete barbarism thanks to Lines -- societies which completely decoupled from any kind of fixed base, and spend their time traveling the galaxy at near-light speeds. So almost every inhabited planet gets visited by Lines every few millenia or so. Enough to maintain at least modicum of knowledge.

[(Anonymous)]

I reread this a few weeks ago. To your review I would add two comments:

One is that her characters are rarely entirely good or bad. The best practice deception, with some zest, and are certainly working against their democratically elected government. The worst do have real fears to contend with - though some have an affection for murder as opposed to the law (the warehouse affair).

Second is the atmosphere. I was never jolted out of the book by something that didn't seem to fit. Even when there are aspects I find doubtful the prose keeps me going. And the ending is consistent with the world she has built.

I was quite happy to read it again. She was a more complex writer than I remembered.

William Hyde

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Nitpick: I think Brackett's character is Eric John Stark, not John Eric Stark.

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

I think the first sentence has one burning too many.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Yeah. A volunteer has offered to help me with that and I am taking them up on the offer.