When reading Cosmonaut Keep, there are many concepts that pique my interest. The Quasi-Orwellian Earth of just-a-few-decades-from-now, and the alien world of Mingulay. The characters of each are (for the most part) interesting, as are their histories. However, it is the technology of Cosmonaut Keep that fascinates, or rather, the tech of interstellar travel.
The concept of space travel in Cosmonaut Keep is one based solely in relativity, e.g., while to those on the ship a journey from point A to point B will seem instantaneous, it will be tens to hundreds of years to those at point A and B, depending on where those points lie. This, as one saur suggests to the descendants of the Cosmonauts, lets the ships act as one way time machines,
allowing someone to jump into their planet's future. However, the unfortunate affect is of course that once someone leaves on a star ship, they might as well be gone forever (which, by the way, is the only sympathetic aspect of the Elizabeth-Gregor-Lydia triangle, as otherwise they might as well be torn from one of those cheesy romance novels that the vendors of Mingulay are so careful to keep tucked under the stand). And upon returning to your home world after a star-faring journey, you are probably going to be in for quite a culture-shock.
This concept is furthered by the fantastic way the novel jumps time periods, and how it slowly reveals how one time-line will eventually meet the other. This time distortion is somewhat similar to what early Earth explorers and merchants likely experienced when they returned home after prolonged journeys. While yes, they will be aware of time passed, they would have almost (if not any) idea of what had been happening in their homelands. And during feudal times, this could mean an entirely different world waiting for them, and sometimes, they would not always be welcomed back.
It is concepts and ideas like these that keep me absorbed in Cosmonaut Keep, no so much any one character or plotline, although the story back on Earth is really picking up around pg. 120.
-Dan
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I think that a culture that uses starships that travel at the speed of light would have to either be stable enough that things wouldn't change much or the people on them would need to, somehow, become acclimatized to experiencing dramatic changes.
I agree that you would have to be used to the changes in time. also i think the goods you bought would probably be obsolete by the time you got them home. i guess it's a risk you take. (they should use the star gate in Colorado springs. That's right i said it)
"which, by the way, is the only sympathetic aspect of the Elizabeth-Gregor-Lydia triangle, as otherwise they might as well be torn from one of those cheesy romance novels that the vendors of Mingulay are so careful to keep tucked under the stand."
i couldn't agree more. so far i don't see why this guy won a tony and an emmy and first prize at the hog hollerin' contest. i don't really doubt that it's there, it's just that it's taking it's sweet time getting there.
and what you said about travel displacement is true. even if you're gone for a very short time (2 weeks i took off to go to ireland last year for example), you kind of return with the expectation that nothing's the same. i almost think it's a phenomenon inherent to traveling.
Yes, very excellent points there, spacecrafts really are a bad idea aren't they? What we should do is send robots in spacecrafts to get things settled in on a new planet and then build a teleportation gate that we can use to get there and skip the inconvenience of time-skipping. It's just so much more practical, and I only wish I could share this idea with the characters in the story just to same them some time.
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