Saturday 16 September 2017

"Less A Planet And A Population Than A Dream"

How will Earth seem to hypothetical future generations living hundreds or thousands of light years away in space?

"...Earth's farflung children had all but forgotten her. The cradle-world had become 'less a planet and a population than a dream.'"
-Sandra Miesel, interstitial passage IN Poul Anderson, Starship (New York, 1982), p. 252.

"They still named [Old Earth] Home, but she lay in the spiral arm behind this one, and Laure had never seen her. He had never met anyone who had. None of his ancestors had, for longer than their family chronicles ran. Home was a half-remembered myth; reality was here, these stars on the fringes of this civilization."
-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 709-794 AT p. 713.

"There were many corners of the galaxy which knew Earth only as a legend, a green myth floating unknown thousands of parsecs away in space, known and ineluctable thousands of years away in history.
"-Acreff-Monales: The Milky Way: Five Cultural Portraits."
-James Blish, Earthman, Come Home, PROLOGUE, IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 237-241 AT p. 241.

"'Earth isn't a place. It's an idea.'"
Blish, op. cit., CHAPTER NINE, pp. 447-465 AT p. 465.

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