Originally published on Poul Anderson Appreciation, 21 Sept 2013.
In Poul Anderson's The Byworlder
(London, 1974), Maury Station, staffed by respectable, conventional
scientists, must be Ortho, not Byworld? pp. 100-104 present some minimal
information about the Station. Still rereading the novel with 80 pages
left, I cannot remember whether there is more about sea life later.
The
purpose of summarizing interesting details from Anderson's novels is to
convey an appreciation of the imaginative depth and wealth crowded into
each work.
Fifty kilometers from the Oregan coast,
platforms with projecting piers support buildings, machinery and a shaft
with an elevator descending fifty fathoms to the central undersea dome
which is surrounded by a ring of others kept at ambient pressure and
connected by tunnels. Laboratory experiments include producing alcohol
from plankton. When the Viking fleet delivers a cargo of refined metals,
its flag ship, too large to dock, anchors at a safe distance while the
concentrator ship lays alongside a pier.
"McPherson
'gills'..." (p. 103) extract oxygen for the artificially generated
merfolk who are evolving dialects appropriate to the high-pitched speech
caused by the helium content of the air in the decompression chambers
joining to the tunnels to the main dome. In the water, a man directs an
orca. I think that there were earlier references to cetacean speech
although I cannot find them looking back. There are transparent
submarines. Soon, there will be a new undersea civilization. The oceans
cover what, two thirds of the Earth's surface?
That is
it. In mid-paragraph, the viewpoint characters who have visited the
Station are back with the Viking fleet. I am sure that Anderson would
have worked out a lot more detail for Maury Station and there might be
more of it later in the book.
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