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Overview
On a spaceship rocketing toward the stars, an official council meets to discuss how to censor history for the benefit of a new generation in space—which stories to preserve and which ones to discard forever . . .
Golden-age hard science fiction luminary Poul Anderson approached the future with a mixture of excitement, hope, and skepticism. In Tales of the Flying Mountains, the multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner offers stories from a new war of independence and beyond—portending a time when a North American government on Earth will take up arms against its own rebellious children colonizing the cosmos, then exploring the shape of the universe in the war’s aftermath. Firmly based in hard science and human nature, here are seven excursions into a distant tomorrow, from the tense saber rattling preceding the hostilities to the establishment and growth of the independent Asteroid Republic.
Whether he’s spinning an imaginative yarn about the courageous crew of an unarmed state-of-the-art commercial space station using every resources at hand to battle a military incursion from the home world or chronicling a space colony’s desperate gamble to thwart a government takeover by moving an entire asteroid, Anderson builds truly breathtaking worlds and imagines astonishing yet eminently credible future scenarios while infusing his unforgettable tales with intelligence, compassion, surprise, and humanism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497694286 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 12/30/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 281 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
In 1952 he met Karen Kruse; they married in Berkeley, California, where their daughter, Astrid, was born, and they later lived in Orinda, California. Astrid and her husband, science fiction author Greg Bear, now live with their family outside Seattle.
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) grew up bilingual in a Danish American family. After discovering science fiction fandom and earning a physics degree at the University of Minnesota, he found writing science fiction more satisfactory. Admired for his “hard” science fiction, mysteries, historical novels, and “fantasy with rivets,” he also excelled in humor. He was the guest of honor at the 1959 World Science Fiction Convention and at many similar events, including the 1998 Contact Japan 3 and the 1999 Strannik Conference in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Besides winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards, he has received the Gandalf, Seiun, and Strannik, or “Wanderer,” Awards. A founder of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, he became a Grand Master, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
In 1952 he met Karen Kruse; they married in Berkeley, California, where their daughter, Astrid, was born, and they later lived in Orinda, California. Astrid and her husband, science fiction author Greg Bear, now live with their family outside Seattle.
Read an Excerpt
Tales of the Flying Mountains
By Poul Anderson
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1970 Poul and Karen AndersonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9428-6
CHAPTER 1
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
"Oh, no!" Junius Harleman turned from the door-scanner. "It's him!"
"Who?" His wife looked into the screen. It showed a small, thin, unkempt man in a lurid aloha shirt, tentatively prodding the chime button on their porch.
"Quentin Emett," Harleman groaned. "You've heard me talk about him. That crank who's been besieging my office this past year. Now he's tracked me down to my home."
"We don't have to let him in, do we?"
"I'm afraid so. I can't simply brush him off. He's Senator Lamphier's cousin."
"Pity." Martha gestured at the television set which dominated the outmoded Neo-Sino décor of their living room. "And just when the Kreemi-Rich Hour is due on."
Harleman brightened a trifle. There might be worse fates than listening for a while to Q. Emett, Scientechnist. Like most middle-aged husbands, he had resigned himself to many things, privately admitting that his wife doubtless did likewise. "Well, I'm sorry," he said, "but an administrator's lot is not a happy one. Will you make some coffee? I'll get rid of him as fast as I can."
His paunch preceded him down the hall. When he opened the door, a street light gleamed off his scalp, between strands of gray hair. The summer evening of Silver Spring, Maryland, rolled pitilessly over him. You could boil in that air, he thought, if you didn't drown first. The neighborhood was quiet, the only traffic at the moment one of the armored patrol cars which kept it in that state.
"Why, hello," said the chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. "What brings you here?"
"I, uh, I think you know," answered his visitor.
"Well, this is hardly the hour for business discussions, Mr. Emett."
"On the contrary, uh, it, it is. You, uh, you're supposed to testify in Congress tomorrow, aren't you? And you expect a, a, a hard time, don't you?"
Harleman winced. Emett pressed his advantage with the fierceness of timidity that has at last nerved itself up: "You only hope your budget won't be cut further. Your whole agency might be dismembered. True? Well, I believe I, uh, I can help you. Mr. Harleman, I know you c-c-consider me a crackpot. All right. I won't try again to, uh, prove my ideas are sound per se. But it's occurred to me, uh, whatever your opinion of them as engineering, uh, well, they may have very practical uses in p-p-politics. If you'll hear my suggestion?"
Something went click inside Harleman. A tingle followed it, up and down his spine. "You know," he said, "you might barely have something there. I can't give you any promises, but—come in, come in."
Air conditioning enfolded them like a blessing as he closed the door. After introducing Emett to his wife, Harleman declared solemnly, "We have a confidential matter to discuss. Would you bring us coffee in my study, please?"
Thirty years before, a writer in the New Republic had called Congressman Ashley Stanhope (R.-S.C.) "Uncle Scrooge." The swear word stuck. He was in truth fanatically tight-fisted with what he described as the taxpayer's hard-earned dollar, except, of course, for always vital undertakings in his district. Before long, he started gleefully using the nickname himself. After seniority gave him the chairmanship of the House Committee on Space and Science, it became generally known as Murderers' Row. Every good liberal wondered, often aloud, when he would have the decency to die.
Though the room over which Stanhope presided was duly cooled, Junius Harleman sweated. He was almost glad of the absence of spectators—not because this hearing was secret, merely because news media and public alike were monumentally uninterested. The men who sat around the long table looked equally bored; all except Stanhope. Uncle Scrooge saw a chance to kill a federal agency. His ears virtually quivered.
After the oath had been gabbled, the old man spoke. Magnolia blossoms dripped from his lips. "Welcome, suh. Ah'm sure you're tired of appearin' befoah this group, and others, each yeah. Ah sympathize. We'll try and make this a short, easy session, ri-ight?"
"Thank you, sir." Since two others were already smoking, Harleman dared start a cigarette. Drawing the pungency into his lungs, he remembered he was overdue for an anticancer shot. "I quite understand that NASA must explain its plans and justify its requests for appropriations like any other bureau. I am prepared to do so."
"Well, now, that's mighty good of you, Mr. Harleman." Stanhope bridged the fingers of his liver-spotted hands. The wattles wagged beneath his chin. "Ah'm mighty pleased to see such cooperation. Believe me, it's a seldom thing. Too many of these bureaucrats seem to believe they have a divine right to their jobs and their projects."
"I have been a civil servant throughout my working life, sir," Harleman answered, and added automatically, "The entire thrust of my action orientation has been toward a meaningful decision-making dialogue."
Stanhope cocked one bushy eyebrow. You're an incompetent hack, he refrained from saying, as witness the fact that you allowed yourself to be maneuvered into the directorship of NASA, a wretched blind alley where no one wants to be and which I intend to brick off.
"Dialogue," he did say. "Ye-es, Ah think we might just do a little talkin' today. A little down-to-earth conversation. Down to Earth," he repeated with an audible capital. "Ah do believe it's past time we spoke about fundamentals. Ah mean, suh, the reason why NASA should be continued at all."
"Mr. Chairman," said the gentleman from Nebraska. "Point of order. Did not the same act which commanded this agency to dispose of its oversized Houston facilities and headquarter itself in Washington ... did not that act specifically extend its life for a minimum of twenty years?"
"Why, yes, Mr. Bryan, it did," Stanhope purred. "But legislation can be amended or repealed, can't it, now? And Ah do feel this committee should consider whether it oughtn't to put moah emphasis on the 'science' part of its function and distract itself less with the 'space' part."
I knew this was coming, Harleman thought, and braced himself.
"Let us be frank, suh," Stanhope said in his direction. "It's no service to you, either, to preetend that the space program's not in deep trouble. And not only our space program; the Russians, the West Europeans, the Asian League, ever'body's is falterin'. Befoah we go into such matters as the budget you propose to propose, why don't we take an hour or two and ask ourselves what produced this situation?"
And get your oratory into the Record and mail copies to your constituents ... franked, Harleman dared not say. Aloud: "I am at your service, Congressman. I am as much in favor as you are of generating escalation of focus on multilinked problem-complexes."
Stanhope smiled tigerishly. "Thank you, suh. Now let's pree-tend foah about five minutes that Ah'm one of yoah agency's outright foes. You know it's very possible that Mr. Ruysdale will be a candidate in the next presidential election, and you know he openly advocates abolishin' NASA. Suppose Ah take the position of one of the many people who agree with him. A hypothetical position only, you realize, Mr. Harleman. Only foah the purpose of hearin' youah counterarguments, which Ah'm sure are good."
As a matter of fact, Harleman thought, they're lousy, and you know it and I know it and I don't really want to save NASA, just my own career, and you know that and I know that.
For a moment he locked eyes with the old man. It was almost like telepathy. If we go through the motions, in the next three or four years we can help each other achieve our ends. You can kill the further development of astronautics; I can get the directorship of a viable agency. But the motions include a ritual combat.
"I'm familiar with the position you describe, Congressman," he said. "Naturally, I consider it untenable. But if you would like me to refute it for your minutes, please do set it forth."
"Thank you, suh." Stanhope glanced at a bescribbled sheet of paper on the table before him. "The points are really quite simple, as you know.
"Let's admit the o-riginal impetus of the various national space programs was military and political rivalry. Well, that's fadin' out, foah a while at least, along with the twentieth century itself. We'll soon be enterin' a whole new millennium with its special problems. Those problems are so serious they're partly responsible for the decline of international tensions. Everybody's got too much to do at home—what with overpopulation, poverty, unrest, exhaustion of resou'ces, pollution of environment, and growin' sho'tage of chemical fuels. Ah might remark that the giant rockets have contributed a good share to those sho'tages and that pollution. And what have they given us in exchange?"
Harleman drew breath. Stanhope gestured for silence. "Oh, yes," he continued, "weather satellites, communication relays, knowledge in biology and astronomy and stellar physics and planetary structures.... Ah'm not a yut, suh, in spite of the image certain people project of me. Ah'm aware of the benefits. But Ah'm also aware that we're long past the point of diminishin' returns.
"No place but Earth is habitable without the most ee-laborate life support systems. No natural resou'ces out yonder are worth the cost of transportation heah. Each expedition we send out brings back less new knowledge; and the knowledge it does bring has less impo'tance; but the price tag hasn't been lessened any, no, suh. I have testimony from moah than one authority; we're about at the end of the line as far as improvin' the rocket goes. They talk and talk about 'break-throughs,' but the last one was the reusable booster, and that was a generation ago.
"We don't want to discontinue the useful programs, like relays and monitors. But those have long since become so standard that they've gone under the jurisdiction of othah agencies, like the FCC or the Weather Bureau. What's left foah NASA? A rare interplanetary exploration. The Lunar base, the orbital stations—but if we can get othah countries to close down theirs, and it looks like we can, then we'll be closin' down ours, at a mi-ighty big annual savin'.
"The fact is, except foah work in the immediate neighborhood of Earth, space is costin' us too much and givin' us too little. We can't affo'd that any longer, what with so many domestic problems cryin' out foah an answer, not least the problem the o'dinary citizen's got, keepin' enough money after taxes to suppo't his children.
"And let's be blunt, Mr. Harleman, maybe impolitely blunt, but we're talkin' as friends today, aren't we? Isn't it a fact that NASA's own personnel are aware of this? Aren't they quittin' in droves, not simply because of reduced appropriations, but because nothin' is left that appeals to any ambitious young man?
"Shouldn't we maybe try foah an international agreement to suspend the whole futile scramble? Won't you confess that NASA has outlived its usefulness?"
Stanhope leaned back and waited, still smiling.
Harleman gathered in his wits. The ancient intimidated him. And so did the others, especially the liberals, like intensely staring Thomasson of Massachusetts. Their purpose in starving his agency was not to save money but to release it for welfare expenditures. That suited Harleman fine—if he could get a decent post disbursing part of that money. He wouldn't, if he made too much trouble now. On the other hand, they would feel there was something wrong about an administrator who did not put up a spirited fight for the bureau he already headed. Scylla and Charybdis....
He bought a few seconds by stubbing out his cigarette, and several more by talking while he marshalled his thoughts:
"Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of this committee, I wish to express my appreciation of your foresight as well as your graciousness in offering me this opportunity to contribute to the illumination of those polymorphously reticulated interrelationships, sociological and humanistic as well as technological and economic, which determine the forwarding of a nonalienated and viable infrastructure. This is probably not the appropriate body before which to disseminate multigraphic and quantitative scientific and engineering presentations. Rather, it would appear evident to my perception of the situation that the aegis of this distinguished group is superimposed on the intricacy of era-characteristic fields of inquiry falling more under the rubric of basic philosophical justifications, while simultaneously concerning ourselves not to lose sight of the over-all necessity for action-oriented orchestration of innovative inputs."
Three or four representatives shifted in their chairs and glanced at their watches. Stanhope let his eyelids droop.
"In short," Harleman finished, gauging his moment, "we are about to start off on a whole new tack."
"Tacking in space?" Thomasson muttered.
"No one disputes that NASA has exhausted certain possibilities." For just an instant the buried dream flickered in Harleman, that he had known in the eerie rising of Sputnik One before dawn, and in man's first landing on the moon. He could not but add, quietly: "No basic reason for that, gentlemen. If we'd had more vision, if we'd worked only a little harder, we could have succeeded with the tools we had. We could have built larger and better Earth-orbital stations; supplied them from a colonized, really colonized moon; developed the nuclear-powered reaction drive to its true limits; built our giant ships in space and kept them there, so they needn't contaminate this planet and needn't fight their way up through its gravity well. We could have gone to the ends of the Solar System. By now, perhaps, we might already be thinking about the stars. Maybe then our young people wouldn't be playing at gangsterism and political radicalism. They'd have had better things to do."
Bitterness tinged his words, for he remembered how he had become estranged from his only son. But he saw he was losing them and sprang back in haste:
"Well, never mind. We confront an existing situation. We need a whole new approach. And I think we've found one."
Stanhope opened his eyes wide. "Indeed?" he murmured. "Might Ah ask what?"
"I'm delighted to explain. Have you heard of gyrogravitics?"
Stanhope shook his knaggy head. Carter of Virginia said, slowly, "Has to do with atomic theory, doesn't it."
"That's right," Harleman answered. "I don't claim to follow the mathematics myself, but I've had scientists give me a lay explanation. It grew out of the effort to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics. Those two branches of physics, both indispensable, were at odds on certain fundamental questions. Is nature or is nature not deterministic—describable by differential equations? Well, you may have read how Einstein once declared he couldn't believe that God plays dice with the world, while Heisenberg thought cause-and-effect was nothing but the statistics of large numbers, and Bohr suggested in his complementarity principle that both views might be true. Later, building on the work of such as Dyson and Feinberg—" Harleman saw them drifting away again. Damn! I spent too much time with Emett last night. That jargon of his soaked into my skin.
"Well, the point is, gentlemen," he said, "in the newest theory, matter and energy are described by their properties from the equations, equations like those of a rotating force-field. Including gravitation."
Carter jerked to an upright sitting position. "Wait a minute!" he exclaimed. "You aren't leading up to antigravity, are you? I happen to know what the Air Force has been doing in that line for the past fifty years. It's no secret they've drawn absolute blanks. Antigravity belongs with witches on broomsticks. I could reach Mars easier by ... by astral projection."
"Not antigravity, sir," Harleman told him. "Gyrogravitics."
"A change of labels doesn't——"
"Please sir. I've had some most interesting discussions with a Mr. Quentin Emett. Some of you may have heard of him: an independent investigator——"
"Means he hasn't got his Ph.D.," Thomasson said grimly.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tales of the Flying Mountains by Poul Anderson. Copyright © 1970 Poul and Karen Anderson. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Prologue
- Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
- Interlude 1
- The Rogue
- Interlude 2
- Say It with Flowers
- Interlude 3
- Ramble with a Gamblin’ Man
- Interlude 4
- Que Donn’rez Vous?
- Interlude 5
- Sunjammer
- Interlude 6
- Recruiting Nation
- Epilogue
- About the Author
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