The allure of the hidden colony world

[james_davis_nicoll]

This is what those two recent books had in common: Plucky freedom-lovers flee an oppressive government (in one case Pax, a world government and in the other a USA gone horribly Republican) to settle a world far enough away that the government probably will not be bothered to follow them. In both cases, the homeworld either never knew or forgot where the colony was. This is easier when travel takes centuries but if fast FTL is available, the colonists can try to hide somewhere in the 40 billion population one stars in the spiral arms.

This isn't an uncommon idea in SF: Anderson's STARFOG has the descendents of people who fled so effectively that their great great etc grand kids think they fled to another universe (Which as I recall the people in RAFT actually did do. This is not a recommendation to read RAFT). The later DUNE books have humans exploit new transportation technologies to spread out over a tremendous volume, far too large to be governed, turning human-space from a tightly regimented one to a collection of tightly-regimented regions (SF aint't where you look for pro-democratic fiction). The plucky would-be starfarers in one Alan Nourse novel hope to become a lost colony but will settle for dying if their example leads to reforms back home (The people in Walter Jon Williams's recent space opera -could- isolate themselves but so far nobody has felt isolation was better than the chance of being killed in the crossfire).

Hidden colonies very hard within the solar system, since even our rather puny rockets are clearly visible across the system. Some of the humans in _The Killing Star_ try to hide deep within one of the ice-giants. How successful this would have been is unclear, since the equipment they use turns out not to be up to the job. An alternative is to deliberately seek out some body that is inconvenient to get to from the bodies controlled by the oppressive government, sort of the opposite approach Hop David takes in his musings on settling the asteroids. Which body is best depends somewhat on technological assumptions but something in an inclined and retrograde orbit might be a good start. Mind you, even if you do find a place not worth following you to, heat will betray that you are there. You could hide in Jupiter: the 60 km/s escape velocity will make it hard for your kids to leave for the city and the thick atmosphere will probably protect you from attacks from above.

Comments

[krfsm.livejournal.com]

I saw the "time telescope" thing in something I read fairly recently (which apparently wasn't good enough to make a lasting memory of which book, dammit).

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Last year's Peter Hamilton? As I recall, the astronomer uses increasingly distant telescopes to narrow down when the target star was en-dysoned.

Of course, having won points by using a telescope, he then has someone examine a mysterious alien artifact by prodding it.

[krfsm.livejournal.com]

Haven't read anything by Hamilton post-Oversexed Space Pirates versus The Living Dead, so not that.

Stross' Iron Sunrise perhaps? (That one was memorable, but it's been almost a year since I read it, so may have dropped some details.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Haven't read anything by Hamilton post-Oversexed Space Pirates versus The Living Dead, so not that.

His later books are better, if only because they are much, much shorter. For reasons I do not understand at present, there's a critical page count above which most SF authors will allow their stories to degrade into muddled twaddle, generally about 350.

Heinlein's Critical Page count was shorter but he learned his trade when there were quite short limits on page counts for SF novels. Even in the 1970s, Gordon Dickson was complaining in print that he could not write the books he wanted to because of arbitrary page count limits.

examine a mysterious alien artifact by prodding it

[garmacottar.livejournal.com]

Yah, but they did spend more than a week rdaring it and hysradaring it, and having robots prod it first, didn't they?