Sunday 28 December 2014

Seeing

(Please also check Poul Anderson's Cosmic Environments, here.)

"The picture showed a bit of a compartment aboard [a Baburite's] ship...The fittings and furnishings were too alien for her fully to see."
-Poul Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2011), p. 150.

"He gazed about him, and the very intensity of his desire to take in the new world at a glance defeated itself. He saw nothing but colours - colours that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things until you know roughly what they are. His first impression was of a bright, pale world - a watercolour world out of a child's paint-box; a moment later he recognized the flat belt of light blue as a sheet of water, or of something like water, which came nearly to his feet. They were on the shore of a lake or river."
-CS Lewis, Out Of The Silent Planet (London, 1963), p. 46.

- in fact, a Martian "canal."

HG Wells imagined a further strange sensory experience in space. Bedford, returning to Earth in the Cavorite sphere, is enclosed in a uniform unchanging environment with no alteration of day and night. Further, he is weightless and alone. Becoming psychologically detached from his physical body and former identity, he conceives himself as an eternal consciousness peering into space-time through the aperture of Bedford.

We might in space experience what some have recounted on Earth.

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