Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan.
Title: Inherit the Stars.
Author: James P. Hogan.
Genre: Fiction, science fiction, space opera, speculative fiction.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1977.
Summary: The man on the moon was dead. They called him Charlie. He had big eyes, abundant body hair, and fairly long nostrils. His skeletal body was found clad in a bright red spacesuit, hidden in a rocky grave. They didn't know who he was, how he got there, or what had killed him. All they knew was that his corpse was fifty thousand years old -- and that meant this man had somehow lived long before he ever could have existed.
My rating: 8/10
♥ During that period of history, the ideological and racial tensions inherited from the twentieth century were being swept away by the tide of universal affluence and falling birth rates that came with the spread of high technology living. Traditional rocks of strife and suspicion were being eroded as races, nations, sects, and creeds became inextricably mingled into one huge, homogeneous global society. As the territorial irrationalities of long-dead politicians resolved themselves and the adolescent nation-states matured, the defense budgets of the superpowers were progressively reduced year by year. The advent of the nucleonic bomb served only to accelerate what would have happened anyway. By universal assent, world demilitarization became fact.
♥ "There has to be some way of reconstructing what the surface used to look like."
"Did you ever try reconstructing a cow from a truckload of hamburger?"
♥ Eventually Hunt said: "To think -- a generation ago, all this was just desert." It was more a thought voiced than a statement.
Danchekker did not answer for a long time. When he did, he kept his eyes fixed outside.
"But man dared to dream..." he murmured slowly. After a pause he added, "And what mad dares to dream today, tomorrow he makes come true."
♥ Hunt found that it took time to adjust to the idea of living as part of a tiny man-made world, with the cosmos stretching away to infinity on every side and the distance between them and everything that was familiar increasing at more than ten miles every second. Now they depended utterly for survival on the skills of those who had designed and built the ship. The green hills and blue skies of Earth were no longer factors of survival and seemed to shed some of their tangible attributes, almost like the aftermath of a dream that had seemed real. Hunt came to think of reality as a relative quantity - not something absolute that can get left for a while and then returned to. The ship became the only reality; it was the things left behind that ceased, temporarily, to exist.
He spent hours in the viewing domes along the outer hull, slowly coming to terms with the new dimension being added to his existence, gazing out at the only thing left that was familiar: the Sun. He found reassurance in the eternal presence of the Sun, with its limitless flood of life-giving warmth and light. Hunt thought of the first sailors, who had never ventured out of sight of land; they too had needed something familiar to cling to. But before long, men would turn their prow toward the open gulf and plunge into the voids between the galaxies. There would be no Sun to reassure them then, and there would be no stars at all; the galaxies themselves would be just faint spots, scattered all the way to infinity.
What strange new continents were waiting on the other side of those gulfs?
♥ Pictures from the past rolled by before his mind's eye: a boy, reading books, shut away in the upstairs bedroom of a London slum... a youth, pedaling a bicycle each morning through the narrow streets of Cambridge. The people he had been were no more real than the people he would become. All through his life he had been moving on, never standing still, always in the process of changing from something he had been to something he would be. And beyond every new world, another beckoned. And always the faces around him were unfamiliar ones - they drifted into his life like the transient shadows of the rocks that now moved toward him from the mists ahead. Like the rocks, for a while the people seemed to exist and take on form and substance, before slipping by to dissolve into the shrouds of the past behind him, as if they had never been.
♥ He raised his eyes, and gasped involuntarily. Above him., five times larger than the Moon seen from Earth was the full disk of Jupiter. No photograph he had ever seen, or any image reproduced on a display screen, could compare with the grandeur of that sight. It filled the sky with its radiance. All the colors of the rainbow were woven into its iridescent bands of light, stacked layer upon layer outwards from its equator. They faded as they approached its edge and merged into a hazy circle of pink that encircled the planet. The pink turned to violet and finally to purple, ending in a clear, sharp outline that traced an enormous circle against the sky. Immutable, immovable, eternal... mightiest of the gods - and tiny, puny, ephemeral man had crawled on a pilgrimage of five hundred million miles to pay homage.
Maybe only seconds passed, maybe hours. Hunt could not tell. For a fraction of eternity he stood unmoving, a speck long among the silent towers of rock and ice. Charlie too had stood upon the surface of a barren waste and gazed up at a world wreathed in light and color - but the colors had been those of death.
♥ "Have you ever stopped to think what it is that makes man so different from all the other animals on Earth? I know that we have larger brains, more-versatile hands, and so forth; what I am referring to is something else. Most animals, when in a hopeless situation will resign themselves to fate and perish in ignominy. Man, on the other hand, does not know how to give in. He is capable of summoning up reserves of stubbornness and resilience that are without parallel on his planet. He is able to attack anything that threatens his survival, with an aggressiveness the like of which the Earth has never seen otherwise. It is this that has enabled him to sweep all before him, made him lord of all the beasts, helped him tame the winds, the rivers, the tides, and even the power of the Sun itself. The stubbornness has conquered the oceans, the skies, and the challenges of space, and at times has resulted in some of the most violent and bloodstained periods in history. But without this side to his nature, man would be as helpless as the cattle in the field."
♥ "The outcome you see all around you today. We stand undisputed masters of the Solar System and poised on the edge of interstellar space itself, just as they did fifty thousand years ago."
Danchekker placed his glass carefully on the table and moved slowly toward the center of the room. His sober gaze shifted from eye to eye. He concluded: "And so, gentlemen, we inherit the stars.
"Let us go out, then, and claim our inheritance. We belong to a tradition in which the concept of defeat has no meaning. Today the stars and tomorrow the galaxies. No force exists in the Universe that can stop us."