Monday 13 May 2013

Stages Of Haertel

James Blish's character Adolph Haertel developed through five stages:

(i) in "Common Time," section I, Garrard, en route to Alpha Centauri, reflects that Haertel had predicted how the ship would accelerate, that the Haertel transformation was non-relativistic and that Haertel's equation had covered both ship and pilot by the same expression, thus not predicting any temporal difference between them;

(ii) in "Common Time," section IV, Garrard, returned from Alpha Centauri, discusses his journey with Haertel;

(iii) several works refer back to Haertel as a successor of Einstein;

(iv) Haertel became the teenage hero of the juvenile novel, Welcome To Mars;

(v) Haertel was the hero of the unfortunately unfilmed screen treatment of Welcome To Mars.

Thus, the chronological order of the published works is (iv), (i), (ii), (iii) although (iii) diverges into alternative timelines.

Blish's unfinished and projected works were not set in further Haertel futures but were based on entirely new concepts:

travel to Beta Solis;
time travel in a finite, spinning universe;
an energy crisis in a far future era of philosophical inquiry.

But could Haertel's career have been extended in screen sequels to the film of Welcome To Mars?

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