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conulyGosh, I like that book. Always have. (I'm especially fond of the little detail of asking Shevek if he's right-handed - I feel it shows that his society is overwhelmingly lefty and it just fills me with left-handed pride. Left-handedness is part of neurodiversity, after all.)
At one point near the end of the book he says that his work might, in many years, come not to the invention of faster-than-light travel, but maybe to the invention of faster-than-light communication, and he makes several points about how not having to wait 20 years to talk to somebody from another world might make all the difference. What's very striking, of course, is the fact that the communication in this book is strikingly backwards for people with space travel (though it wasn't when the book was printed, of course)! All that talk about how they can get away with suppressing his books (despite not even having a government) with the very real claim of a paper shortage, and all that talk about missing letters (and about societal pressure not to send unnecessary letters), and about having to set an appointment to make a phone call, or else just get a message (more societal pressure against "waste", and presumably it has also to do with actual, human switchboard operators)! No email, no messageboards (except presumably the physical kind), no chatrooms or webpages or blogs or any of that. How different would this story have been if he could've just posted his theory in dribs and drabs online, gotten help from the whole world - or both worlds! Of course, much of it still could've been done, but the story would have to have been written around that, wouldn't it?
At one point near the end of the book he says that his work might, in many years, come not to the invention of faster-than-light travel, but maybe to the invention of faster-than-light communication, and he makes several points about how not having to wait 20 years to talk to somebody from another world might make all the difference. What's very striking, of course, is the fact that the communication in this book is strikingly backwards for people with space travel (though it wasn't when the book was printed, of course)! All that talk about how they can get away with suppressing his books (despite not even having a government) with the very real claim of a paper shortage, and all that talk about missing letters (and about societal pressure not to send unnecessary letters), and about having to set an appointment to make a phone call, or else just get a message (more societal pressure against "waste", and presumably it has also to do with actual, human switchboard operators)! No email, no messageboards (except presumably the physical kind), no chatrooms or webpages or blogs or any of that. How different would this story have been if he could've just posted his theory in dribs and drabs online, gotten help from the whole world - or both worlds! Of course, much of it still could've been done, but the story would have to have been written around that, wouldn't it?
