9 thoughts on “The Colliers Series”

  1. If the space elephants ever attack us, it’s good to know that old boom boom would still work to put battleships in orbit.

    Would we be more serious about space settlement if we knew we were in competition for it with an alien species in our own solar system?

    There could be a whole ecosystem beyond Pluto orbiting Sol and we wouldn’t even know about it. Has anyone read any SF like that?

    growing awareness about nuclear fallout radiation and its associated public health hazards

    That’s a laugh.

  2. Robert Forward had a great book on such a civilization. Its was called Camelot 30K and was about humans discovering a civilization that lived in the Kupier Belt.

    1. Thanks for the ref. Thomas. Just read the plot summary. It goes in a totally different direction from what I’d envisioned. This is one of the things I love about SF.

  3. For a historical analogy, I’ll call Von Braun the equivalent of Prince Henry the Navigator who died in 1460. Vasco da Gama returned from India in 1499 setting off the very lucrative Portuguese India trade or 39 years after Henry’s death. 39 years after Von Braun’s demise is 2015. Is 2015 the beginning of a new commercial era?

  4. OP: “introducing the American public to the coming age of space. ”

    Um, no. It introduced America to an economic fantasy that has been dogmatically followed by NASA, leading to preposterously costly but perpetually dead-end “infrastructure” like Skylab, Shuttle, and ISS.

    Real space commerce — the kind dominated by actual private sector customers — took advantage of technology like semiconductors, the potential of which was little understood at the time, and has gone in a radically different direction.

    “For a historical analogy, I’ll call Von Braun the equivalent of Prince Henry the Navigator who died in 1460. ”

    von Braun is far more analogous to the eunuch who, funded by the Ming Emperor, embarked his preposterously oversized fleets on economically worthless excursions of glory to India and east Africa. Meanwhile, Prince Henry the Navigator, like the companies even now industrializing GEO, was creating a self-sustaining commercial industry, first along the west African coast, learning thereby how to navigate without the Pole Star, and then around the horn of Africa to India and China and their trade riches. It was tiny Portugal, with its self-sustaining real commerce, and not gargantuan China with its politically funded economic fantasies, that conquered the Indian and western stretches of the Pacific Ocean and captured their trade. It was followed by other European traders and colonizers following a similar strategy. (Spain, also trying to find a route to India, ended up with America instead).

    It has taken China over five hundred years to recover from that mistake. Hopefully it won’t take us so long to recover from von Braun’s idiotic fantasies.

  5. Mr. Antony – There’s a really old series with the title The Starchild Trilogy, written by Jack Williamson and Poul Anderson. Way out of print, but it might be possible to find it? The first book is called “The Reefs of Space”.

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