Distant stars
Ferne Sterne is a collection of science fiction short stories and tales by the Englishman Eric Frank Russell , published in 1961 in English under the title Far Stars and in German in 1962 in translation by Heinz Bingenheimer by Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag .
The collection includes the works of legwork (Engl. Legwork , 1956), The Offund (Engl. Allamagoosa , 1955), the Warteinweiler (Engl. The Waitabits , 1955), Post Scriptum (Engl. PS or PostScript , 1953) Timeless ( engl. The Timeless Ones , 1952) and Diabologik (engl. Diabologic , 1955).
Action of short stories and narratives
Legwork
From the realm of Andromedan culture, a hypno travels through the world and on earth to sound out how one can subjugate people to the empire of 200 planets from which it originates. His name can be approximated as Harasha Vanash . He telepathically sees through thinking beings within a radius of a mile and holds them completely under his spell at this distance. His power only fails to command others to destroy themselves. Above all, however, he is not armed against the tenacious and unexciting approach of humanity on the basis of experience .
Vanash's appearance revived rumors of alien visits. He sends his spaceship into orbit, hides the remote control in the mountains and only takes a small compass with him on his way. He gave himself the exact appearance of William Jones , a gardener, who seemed inconspicuous to him and therefore suitable as a model for a copy, and was taken to the next town by the representative Burge Kimmelman . He gets a small amount of money by telepathically influencing the customer of a supermarket, settles in a boarding house and digs a bank, again assuming the exact shape of a cashier who is familiar to the employees of the house by appearance.
Treasury investigator Edward G. Rider and local police inspectors Harrison and Kastner check whether the cashier has a relative who is particularly similar, hand out a flyer to all bank employees in the country describing the perpetrator's approach, and create a phantom image of this based on the memories of a leather goods dealer of the suspicious buyer of a money bag. Above the picture one comes across Jones and in a crack in the floorboard of Vanash's boarding room two almond-shaped seeds from the alien's provisions. When Jones and the cashier noticed that he seemed to have been in two places at the same time, the gardener describes Kimmelman to the police, who first dropped Vanash, but shortly afterwards met him and fell from the clouds in amazement .
Meanwhile, astronomers discover Vanash's spaceship. It is initially believed to be the first human-made satellite on earth. When the analysis of the seeds found leads to mystery, Rider reveals the truth. On the basis of the information provided by Kimmelman and other witnesses, Vanash's remote control is tracked down, it is documented according to its dimensions and appearance, it is stored in its hiding place for the time being and then replaced by a dummy in which the supposed button to bring down the spaceship is sprayed with a narcotic gas triggers; you install microphones in the ground and lie in wait with searchlights, special rifles and flak batteries.
Vanash explores human research and manufacturing facilities for four more months. When he returns to his landing site, the gas has no effect on his organism; he makes the guards shoot each other. Another guard is out of the range of Vanash's hypnotic influence and therefore does not fall for the illusion and shoots the fugitive. The people then use the remote control to bring the spaceship to the ground, examine it and erect an armada of similar, but larger and in many ways improved vehicles.
See also: Terminator 2 - Reckoning Day
The offund
Captain McNaught's spaceship Bustler lies in Siriusport after a long flight when Feldman , the fleet commander for the Sirius Sector at Terran headquarters, informs McNaught that the chief inspector for ships and their facilities, Admiral Vane W. Cassidy , will be due to be with him in three days will. McNaught fears that minor discrepancies with the whereabouts of individual items could lead to ruinous legal proceedings, has the ship repainted and takes an inventory of what is on board with Second Officer Pike . Being on the list between the haves pieces of the ship's dog Peaslake a Offund appearing refers chef Blanchard (which indeed has a strong French accent, but in the possession of a certificate from the Cordon Bleu College and similar other significant certificates is) that the he unknown object would belong in the area of the radio operator Burman , the fragments of which (intercoms etc.) are spread over the whole ship and also over the kitchen. This seems logical to McNaught, since the radio operators pull together nicknames for the names of the devices they work with. Confident that Cassidy would not know the term either, he obliges Burman to give whatever type of and possibly quite expensive off and a physical form.
The inspector accepts the hastily manufactured workpiece as a device for balancing opposing gravitational forces. After five days, the Bustler was ordered to return to Earth; one wants to overtake them in view of the smoothly run inspection and equip them with an improved drive. On the flight, Burman draws the captain's attention to the fact that a larger number of technical experts will come on board when overtaking the ship and that the off-and-off dummy will not be able to fool them. McNaught reports to Earth that the Offund was torn apart by the gravitational forces acting on it while it was flying past the twin sun Hector . Two days later, all spaceships are directed to the ports by a general alarm. McNaught enjoys the disturbing experience that he can only rarely have due to serious incidents, e.g. B. a ship explodes or his entire crew goes insane. Burman tears the captain out of his thoughts by presenting him with the worrying report from headquarters regarding the tearing up of the official ship's dog Peaslake and the order to immediately examine the entire crew for any symptoms.
For the short story Der Offund , Eric Frank Russell received the Hugo Award (Best Short Story) in 1955 .
The Warteinweiler
The commander of the spaceship Thunderer , Leigh , is assigned by his superior Markham to explore the planet Eterna . The scout Boydell discovered this far out in the universe; According to him, it resembles the earth so much that one can live on it without special equipment, and it is "inhabited by intelligent beings with different but equal thinking abilities", whom he calls Warteinweiler and classifies as invincible.
The sociologist Pascoe and the geophysicist Walterson observe the planet, which possesses cities, villages, roads and rail tracks, from orbit. Pascoe puts the population low. The Thunderer lands near a major city. It turns out that day and night take about six months each. A train powered by solar batteries passes by at half walking speed and returns after a break of fifteen minutes. The helicopter pilot Ogilvy notes that the Warteinweiler have no aircraft or artillery and that the streets of the cities are overcrowded with immobile people and are used by creeping cars and trams. The only flight animal he sees is an extremely slow type of flying lizard.
The unarmed contact experts lift some of the strange passengers off the train and try to communicate with them. While they are struggling with dizziness, the zoologist Garside discovers from beetles that the local organisms are of normal structure, "but exceptionally slow in every respect". In town, Leigh and his people found out that the people of Warteinweiler have a sense of beauty, technical understanding and criminal law and that they are amazingly efficient for their circumstances. They do not seem to communicate through an audible language, however, but through screens and colors; their font is about 3000 characters.
When the Warteinweiler start to make a pilgrimage to the Thunderer , it evades by a few hundred kilometers in order to do it again when the next rush begins after about a day on earth. The plan to leave an ambassador on Eterna has to be abandoned when saying goodbye to the planet for lack of a volunteer.
Leigh and Pascoe shudder at the thought that people could be as slow for members of another, possibly aggressively spreading culture as they are for themselves.
The scouts always condense the nature of the worlds they have discovered very briefly into the names they give them. For Pascoe this reached a temporary high point when Markham and Leigh sent him to the planet Stinky with Leigh after their visit to Eterna (Latin for " eternal ") , which Boydell had scouted for them.
post Scriptum
Doctor Malcolm Harrison has been retired for twelve years and tends to wander the streets between which he ran a small clinic for a quarter of a century and which will soon fall victim to the progressive penetration of the city by technology. In the café of Silvio , whose birth he once helped, he finally meets Jim Corlett again , the spaceman whom he also knew as a boy. Since the whole world and also the doctor are thoroughly familiar with the famous places in the universe through three-dimensional cinema, Corlett Harrison tells about the inhabitants of the remote misty and swampy planet Reba . They measure barely half a meter, are gray-green, faceless and sexless and covered with excesses, have a terrifying smell and can only run a few steps "like drunk people" before they are forced to cling to the ground with their roots again. Reba's only human resident is the eccentric sectarian Father Josef , whose predecessor taught the Rebanians to read and write in English.
Harrison does not tell Corlett that he has been exchanging letters with one of Father Josef's pupils through the Institute for Transcosmic Relationships since he was a child and that he now even discovers this pupil in a group photo that the spaceman shows him. The doctor has always considered Vandrashanda to be female; Throughout the entire marriage with his wife Petula , an ever deeper exchange with the transstellar contact person developed. Harrison is now writing the longest letter since ever and finally includes a compliment for Vandrashanda's wonderful beauty. From the photo he realized that the spirit does not depend on the outside.
The timeless
The professor Xtith Vjarm belongs to a type of living being that has four legs, multiple angled arms and a thick, gray fur. Together with forty subordinate species, they rule an empire of well over 7,000 inhabited planetary systems. The citizens of this world are of exotic diversity; they work together in everyday life but cannot all mix biologically with one another. Vjarm went into the depths of the universe for fourteen years to take part in the search for a planet which is believed to be the source of all life . In the system of an orange dwarf , however, he encounters something that appears to him to be scientifically more important and more fruitful. He states that a single species, the two-legged Miggies , inhabits the system and comes from its third planet, but that another variant of the species on this planet first discovered space travel and after incessant and powerful, but ultimately fruitless, defensive wars by the Miggies has been bioabsorbed. Since the Miggies have now taken over 177 planetary systems, it follows for Vjarm that in about 12,000 years they will also be masters of the system of his own race. He dreads the silent and unstoppable power that reveals itself in it; he feels compelled to question his usual feelings, which are absorbed in the present and its time constraints. His concerns are based on the fact that there are now several thousand Miggies in his home country. He turns to various official bodies because he fears for the continued existence of the empire. One of the timeless people with his soft, light skin, his "black, narrow eyes" and his "[childlike] and [unselfconscious] smile" solves the problem with the assistants Heigl and Jursin from the secret service, the war ministry and Vjarm's colleagues Mnorth and Prof. Dakane from the College of Cosmic History and Archeology, however, had no fear of it. Dakane notes that he is indifferent to the times after his death and that of his children and grandchildren and that no one has puzzled over the current problems in the past. He refuses to discuss the matter in college because of the socio-psychological dangers it would harbor.
Diabology
The scout Wayne Hillder uses an outdated spaceship and, like his colleagues, pushes from the cosmic sphere with which humans are familiar, to the unknown planetary systems waiting outside. Over 700 inhabited celestial bodies have been discovered over the long centuries. T. exploited; Hillder lands on Vard , out of reach of human radio, as the first among beings who are already in space. He follows the tried and tested tactic of appearing emphatically friendly so that the strangers are ready to take over the worried thinking.
The Vards are very similar to humans, not least in their lovable imperfections . The military lure Hillder out of his ship and arrest him in the next town. The specialists Parmith and Gerka teach him the local language within twenty days . A larger commission of military and political leaders interrogates him to see if his logic is more advanced than their own. One is amazed when Thormin finds out from him that he does not know the location of his base, since it wanders freely through the room and he can find it again at any time via the guide beam . Hillder argues that he has a considerable number of conspecifics on three solar planets and names the number of worlds that they rule. He mentions alien races who have denied space travel and are now continuing to conquer space on their own . When asked, he speaks of large and numerous spaceships with strong crews. The weapons expert Shahding speculates that the ballistic science of humans is rather backward when Hillder reports of "energy fields, certain rays that paralyze the nervous system, [...] bacteriological weapons, demonstrations of numbers and power". The Terran then asserts that mankind has largely left the days of ballistics behind. This is followed by a series of apparently alogical thought games in the spirit of the Greek sophists , by means of which he confuses the Vards, who have not yet met such things, and inwardly sets them decisively into turmoil. They are reluctant to execute Hillder because they fear his people might know where he is or might even want to sacrifice him to get an excuse to attack . Such concerns also prevent them from shredding Hillder's spaceship. When Mondafa realizes that people have to be ahead of him and his family in terms of age, technique and number, the freedmen are bid farewell with military honors, a bouquet of foul-smelling flowers and solemn words about “[a glorious] future of well-understanding races ". Back on board, Hillder soberly notes the spiritual and cosmographic coordinates of his hosts. He makes sure that the Vards he has given access to his ship have left untouched the key work of his library, Diabology, the science of the traveling people .
For classification in Russell's oeuvre
The meeting of humans with extraterrestrials ( detailed work , Die Warteinweiler , Post Scriptum , Die Zeitlosen , Diabologik ) occurs again and again in Russell's work as well as (see the same short stories) the softening of values and standards that occurs with him. Russell's preference for a strong bang effect at the end is expressed in Der Offund , Die Warteinweiler and Die Zeitlosen . A mockery of the arbitrariness and rigid hollowness of the military and bureaucrats, familiar to the author, is the subject of the brilliant satire Der Offund and colors The Timeless .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bibliography: Far Stars . Isfdb.org, accessed May 14, 2010
- ↑ Distant stars. In: Catalog of the German National Library . Accessed February 16, 2020 .
- ↑ Bibliography: PS www.isfdb.org, accessed May 14, 2010
- ↑ Publication Listing. Title: Far Stars. Authors: Eric Frank Russell . Www.isfdb.org, accessed May 14, 2010
- ↑ For the whole story: Eric Frank Russell : Detail work . In: same: distant stars. Utopian-technical narratives. Unabridged edition. Goldmann , Munich 1964, pp. 5-66
- ↑ For the full story: Russell 1964, pp. 67–84
- ↑ Bibliography: Allamagoosa . Www.isfdb.org, accessed May 14, 2010
- ^ Russell 1964, p. 86
- ↑ Russell 1964, p. 87
- ↑ Russell 1964, p. 106
- ↑ Russell 1964, p. 107
- ↑ Russell 1964, pp. 108-109
- ↑ Russell 1964, p. 110
- ↑ Russell 1964, p. 111
- ↑ Russell 1964, p. 119
- ↑ Russell 1964, pp. 113, 121f
- ↑ For the full story: Russell 1964, pp. 84–123
- ↑ Russell 1964, p. 125
- ↑ Russell 1964, p. 128
- ↑ a b c Russell 1964, p. 129
- ↑ a b Russell 1964, p. 130
- ↑ Russell 1964, p. 135
- ↑ Russell 1964, p. 136
- ↑ For the full story: Russell 1964, pp. 123-137
- ↑ a b Russell 1964, p. 146
- ↑ Russell 1964, pp. 139, 154-155
- ↑ Russell 1964, p. 161
- ↑ For the full story: Russell 1964, pp. 137–161
- ↑ Russell 1964, p. 177
- ↑ Russell 1964, p. 187
- ↑ For the full story: Russell 1964, pp. 161–188
- ↑ Hans Joachim Alpers u. a .: Reclam's Science Fiction Guide . Reclam , Stuttgart 1982, p. 352