Greg Bear's "Legacy" and Yours Truly's "Transition"
This review of Greg Bear's sci-fi novel Legacy is juxtaposed to the next-to-sci-fi experience that is Transition because it is the neatest metaphor I have found to date.
It contains spoilers and probably errors.
In Legacy...
Most of what remains of humanity lives in Thistledown, a hollowed-out asteroid, where people are immortal, and have assistant computers integrated into them. And from Thistledown, we have opened a fifty-kilometre-wide hyperspace trunk called "The Way," from which wormhole portals can be opened to other times and places.
Five years ago, a branch of Luddites took advantage of political turmoil to quietly emigrate, wiping out all computer records that they ever existed, and telling their friends that they "might be away for a bit." They open an unliscensed and unstable portal halfway along the FTL-corridor and use it to settle "Lamarckia." Lamarckia is one of the more inhabitable planets that we've surveyed, although it's location in the universe, and even when it exists are unknown.
This is a problem as in doing so they have
- (1) destablizied the hyperspace corridor that humans rely on (although the danger of this may have been exaggerrated for politcal ends)
- (2) stolen two of the FTL "clavicle" devices that are used to manipulate wormholes
- (3) screwed around with an alien world
Or at least this is what we've sorted out five year after they left. The protagonist, Olmy Ap Sennon, is an eager Way-protection expert on a n awkward career path. He volunteers for the mission to find the Luddites, take their FTL devices before they break anything important, and report home with news of where to go to arrest their leader. Because opening portals is not an exact science, and because the Luddities kinda tangled up the portal lines on their way out, his short trip through spacetime has him arrive about a generation and a half late.
Oops.
On site, Olmy finds out that what looks habitable from space isn't on the ground. The seas are full of fizzy-stinging potassium salts, almost nothing is edible, and the biosphere's airborne chemical messages often cause lethal allergic reactions. Add to this that a lot of the colonists have lost all faith in Able Lenk, the guy who led them here (without food synthesizers or power plants), and they've seen more than one civil war.
In other words: this planet is very pretty, but it sucks to live here. And it is gradually killing the colonists.
Olmy makes his way to the other side of the globe by joining the crew of a biology expedition in a wooden ship. And after a couple of years, Olmy tracks down both the leader and the hyperspace clavical, to find that the former has broken the latter - making return, and arrest, impossible.
At this point, the leader of the other side of the civil war has taught an, er, para-sentient bioregional locality new biochemical tricks - and said locality, not understanding that "living individual humans = biochemical insights" responds by using these tricks to stop trying to help the humans and redirect its enegies to overrunning all the other localities. Human survival in the affected areas becomes next to impossible.
Olmy is now stuck on a planet that is falling apart. He's smart and useful, and something of a leader, if not a great one, so he's instrumental. He uses the rest of his life to help the surviving humans move ahead of the tide of inhabitability, then again, and again, and again.
After five decades of this, he winds up with the five-thousand or so survivors on one of the few remaining inhabitable islands. He is an old man now; twice a widower and having buried children and grandchildren. He is tired and probably hopes to be not long for this world, and spends most of his days on a cot.
And then another Thistledown protector, who left a few years after him, arrives and quitely takes him back home where he is regenerated and made whole, young and fit.
But Olmy has spent most of his life dying on that rock, and while he welcomes the change, he finds it hard to adjust.
A week later by his time (fifteen years Lamrackia time) Thistledown evacuates the remaining three-thousand survivors.
Seeing this, still shocked, bewildered and numb from all the changes, he watches them arrive: they're bedraggled but alive. A few remained behind, and are almost certainly doomed.
He reflects "I become who I am now."
This analogy occurs to me in reference to transition - A process I feel that I am now mostly on the other side of.
Stunned; I spent a lot of time in that other place, and it was killing me. I think. Was I actually there? It seems so distant. But I remember when I think about it, and it slips out in conversation.
"Here" is a strange place; not quite what I left more than half a lifetime ago, but it's familiar. Both it and I are changed. I thought about here often, but thought I'd never get here.
So being here is good.
But it's even better to not be there
- - - I was sure I was gonna die down there.
Is this real? Did this really happen? I suppose so.
Am I going to wake up tomorrow and have all this stripped from me? I don't see how. And if that loomed, I would not let it.
But the threat seems real, just having lived with the alternative long enough.
I guess I get used to it, and learn how to live from here.
I mean, what else do you do?
It contains spoilers and probably errors.
In Legacy...
Most of what remains of humanity lives in Thistledown, a hollowed-out asteroid, where people are immortal, and have assistant computers integrated into them. And from Thistledown, we have opened a fifty-kilometre-wide hyperspace trunk called "The Way," from which wormhole portals can be opened to other times and places.
Five years ago, a branch of Luddites took advantage of political turmoil to quietly emigrate, wiping out all computer records that they ever existed, and telling their friends that they "might be away for a bit." They open an unliscensed and unstable portal halfway along the FTL-corridor and use it to settle "Lamarckia." Lamarckia is one of the more inhabitable planets that we've surveyed, although it's location in the universe, and even when it exists are unknown.
This is a problem as in doing so they have
- (1) destablizied the hyperspace corridor that humans rely on (although the danger of this may have been exaggerrated for politcal ends)
- (2) stolen two of the FTL "clavicle" devices that are used to manipulate wormholes
- (3) screwed around with an alien world
Or at least this is what we've sorted out five year after they left. The protagonist, Olmy Ap Sennon, is an eager Way-protection expert on a n awkward career path. He volunteers for the mission to find the Luddites, take their FTL devices before they break anything important, and report home with news of where to go to arrest their leader. Because opening portals is not an exact science, and because the Luddities kinda tangled up the portal lines on their way out, his short trip through spacetime has him arrive about a generation and a half late.
Oops.
On site, Olmy finds out that what looks habitable from space isn't on the ground. The seas are full of fizzy-stinging potassium salts, almost nothing is edible, and the biosphere's airborne chemical messages often cause lethal allergic reactions. Add to this that a lot of the colonists have lost all faith in Able Lenk, the guy who led them here (without food synthesizers or power plants), and they've seen more than one civil war.
In other words: this planet is very pretty, but it sucks to live here. And it is gradually killing the colonists.
Olmy makes his way to the other side of the globe by joining the crew of a biology expedition in a wooden ship. And after a couple of years, Olmy tracks down both the leader and the hyperspace clavical, to find that the former has broken the latter - making return, and arrest, impossible.
At this point, the leader of the other side of the civil war has taught an, er, para-sentient bioregional locality new biochemical tricks - and said locality, not understanding that "living individual humans = biochemical insights" responds by using these tricks to stop trying to help the humans and redirect its enegies to overrunning all the other localities. Human survival in the affected areas becomes next to impossible.
Olmy is now stuck on a planet that is falling apart. He's smart and useful, and something of a leader, if not a great one, so he's instrumental. He uses the rest of his life to help the surviving humans move ahead of the tide of inhabitability, then again, and again, and again.
After five decades of this, he winds up with the five-thousand or so survivors on one of the few remaining inhabitable islands. He is an old man now; twice a widower and having buried children and grandchildren. He is tired and probably hopes to be not long for this world, and spends most of his days on a cot.
And then another Thistledown protector, who left a few years after him, arrives and quitely takes him back home where he is regenerated and made whole, young and fit.
But Olmy has spent most of his life dying on that rock, and while he welcomes the change, he finds it hard to adjust.
A week later by his time (fifteen years Lamrackia time) Thistledown evacuates the remaining three-thousand survivors.
Seeing this, still shocked, bewildered and numb from all the changes, he watches them arrive: they're bedraggled but alive. A few remained behind, and are almost certainly doomed.
He reflects "I become who I am now."
This analogy occurs to me in reference to transition - A process I feel that I am now mostly on the other side of.
Stunned; I spent a lot of time in that other place, and it was killing me. I think. Was I actually there? It seems so distant. But I remember when I think about it, and it slips out in conversation.
"Here" is a strange place; not quite what I left more than half a lifetime ago, but it's familiar. Both it and I are changed. I thought about here often, but thought I'd never get here.
So being here is good.
But it's even better to not be there
- - - I was sure I was gonna die down there.
Is this real? Did this really happen? I suppose so.
Am I going to wake up tomorrow and have all this stripped from me? I don't see how. And if that loomed, I would not let it.
But the threat seems real, just having lived with the alternative long enough.
I guess I get used to it, and learn how to live from here.
I mean, what else do you do?