Going For Infinity by Anderson Poul

Author:Anderson, Poul [Anderson, Poul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

X

There were other series. They were never planned beforehand, it was just that one story would suggest more, exploring the theme further. The Maurai chronicles began with a novelette, “The Sky People,” and ended with a novel,Orion Shall Rise . The basic premise came from a book by Harrison Brown,The Challenge of Man’s Future, published long ago but still well worth reading, very pertinent to the world around us today. (As said earlier, I steal only from the best sources.) The author pointed out that our civilization got started by exploiting a treasury of ores, coal, petroleum, timber, fertile soil, and everything else. As these have grown scarcer and more expensive, we have so far found substitutes, ways to economize and recycle, and generally keep going. Indeed, on the whole, our high-tech societies grow ever richer, and could do better yet were it not for their wars, ideologies, and other tragic, all too human foolishnesses.

But meanwhile the less fortunate majority of the race sinks ever deeper into poverty. It’s not that those people aren’t as intelligent as anybody else or that the well-educated among them don’t have access to the same science and technology. The reasons are manifold. A major one is that population growth is pressing too hard on depleted resources. They can’t make the necessary capital investment. Whether the luckier societies can help them get over the threshold remains to be seen. Let us hope.

Meanwhile, the balance on which high-tech civilization rests is more precarious than we like to think. Suppose it collapses, perhaps as the result of an all-out nuclear war, which is what my stories assume. Can it rebuild itself? The knowledge won’t be lost; it’s too widely distributed, in too many books and, for that matter, too many heads. But neither was the knowledge of how to build good highways, strong bridges, and municipal sewers lost when Rome fell. It was just that for the next thousand years Europe was too chaotic and too poor.

Moreover, as Harrison Brown observed, by now the great iron mines, oil fields, forests, and other sources of raw materials and energy have been worked out. Doubtless much could be salvaged from the wreckage if the rebuilders were well organized and knew precisely what needed doing. Basically, though, they’d have to work with lean resources and low power. How far might they be able to go?

How far might theywant to go?

That would depend on who they were, what their ethos was. I imagined several different civilizations rising from the ruins in several different regions, each with its ownWeltanschauung and ambitions. Most powerful were the Maurai of the Pacific basin. Highly sophisticated, their technology was based on renewability, because this was the all-overriding ideal of their otherwise tolerant and easygoing society, that the mistakes which had devastated life on Earth must never be repeated.

Here is an incident out of their effort to impose it everywhere.

Windmill

—and though it was night, when land would surely be colder than sea, we had not looked for such a wind as sought to thrust us away from Calforni.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.