"David Brin - The Crystal Spheres" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

v1.0 by Mishap
I think it was David Brin who, at a banquet I attended in 1987, said that
writing a novel was like starting in Vladivostok and walking to Paris on your
knees. When you reach Paris (having completed the novel), you stand up and
celebrate with a wild champagne dinner and go to sleep--and wake up in
Vladivostok on your knees.
I feel exactly that way about it but have never been clever enough to put it into
the proper words. Thank you, David.
Now let me tell you something that "The Crystal Spheres" make me think of.
Sitting around with a group of other writers once, one of us (maybe it was
Lester del Key, but I don't remember) suggested that we all write
first-trip-to-the-moon stories, even though the first trip to the moon was now
history. The idea was that we could all think of ways of getting around the fact
that men had already visited the moon.
For instance, (1) You could visit a well-settled moon, and in some valley
untouched as yet by human beings, you come across the record of a human being
who reached the moon in 1852.
Or (2) You live in an alternate world in which the moon was never reached,
even though Mars and other worlds have been, and you have to explain why--
and how the taboo was broken.
Or (3) The whole Apollo program was faked, and now it must be done right.
As far as I know, no one then present actually followed (3), but suppose a
different idea of the kind had been suggested.
The Greeks felt that each of the seven planets was embedded in a crystal (i.e.,
"transparent") sphere, and each sphere moved at its own speed and in its own
way. Even Johannes Kepler, in 1600 or so, played with that
two-thousand-year-old idea. But then, in 1609, Kepler demonstrated the elliptical
nature of the planetary orbits, and the crystal spheres disappeared forever.
So why don't we science fiction writers compose a story in which the
astronomers from Plato to the young Kepler were right and there were crystal
spheres? Naturally, it would have to fit in somewhat with what we know about
astronomy today, but don't bother...
David Brin wrote the story, as you can tell from its very title, and here it is. And
read what he does with it, too, and remember Fermi's famous question, which I
mentioned in an earlier headnote.
--Isaac Asimov



The Crystal Spheres
 David Brin
It was just a luckychance that I had been defrosted when I was-- the very year
that farprobe 992573-aa4 reported back that it had found a goodstar with a shattered
crystalsphere. I was one of only twelve deepspacers alivewarm at the time, so
naturally I got to take part in the adventure.
At first I knew nothing about it. When the flivver came, I was climbing the flanks
of the Sicilian plateau, in the great valley a recent ice age had made of the
Mediterranean Sea I had once known. I and five other newly awakened Sleepers had
come to camp and tramp through this wonder while we acclimated to the times.
We were a motley assortment from various eras, though none was older than I.