The Starship and the Canoe

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Kenneth Brower. The Starship and the Canoe

Praise for The Starship and the Canoe

Foreword

PART I

1. Boom Boom Boom

2. Almost a Mad Stare

3. Comets

4. Flying Squirrels

5. Wunderkind

6. Fire Storm

7. A Blue Smile

8. Jail

9. The Origin of Species

10. Two Years Before the Mast

11. Asteroids

12. Inside Passage

13. The Promise of Our Destiny

14. The Promise of Our Destiny (Another Opinion)

15. Orion

16. Baidarka

17. Oatmeal

PART II

18. Homo, Lupus, Leviathan

19. Inletkeeper

20. Cook

21. Ramblings

22. Mouse Woman

23. Sweathouse

24. Rum

25. The Most Beautiful Thing in the World

26. Burma-Shave

PART III

27. Starship

28. Some Kind of a Gifted Person

29. Speeding

30. Black Hole

31. Total Madness

PART IV

32. South Again

33. My Opinion

34. Tyee

35. Ravens

36. Starbuck

PART V

37. Junk

38. A Specimen of Intelligent Life

39. Streets of Longing

40. Launch

PART VI

41. La Jolla

42. Reunion

43. Dukhobor

44. Hanson Island

45. Don’t Touch It

46. Clarion Profundus

47. M-31

48. Rescue

49. Farewell

Envoi

About the Author

Отрывок из книги

“This is science fiction come real . . . The Starship and the Canoe is neither a wilderness survival manual nor a book of blueprints. It is another of those rare books impossible to define: the kind that seeks you in time. And you will know it, live it and consult it thereafter simply by name.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

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This, from George Dyson, is a powerful admission. George is a pacifist who first came to Canada at the height of the Vietnam War. The squirrels were testing his creed. They were bending his essential nature. He never got the shotgun, but he began practicing with a slingshot and became, in a purely theoretical way, deadly with it. He honed his skill down very fine, continually postponing the day of the massacre. Then came an idea for a new sort of trap.

Conventional rattraps don’t work with flying squirrels, according to George, because the squirrels know how to set them off harmlessly. Had he proceeded conventionally, he says, bomb squads of squirrels would have eased into his house, defused his devices, then whistled an all-clear. George believes that living in trees boosts intelligence, and that squirrels are smart, like primates. Arboreal life had sharpened George’s wits too, of course. He designed a cage with a door like a guillotine blade, a mousetrap for a trigger, and power supplied by rubber bands. He trapped three squirrels, transported them thirty miles, and released them. They were the ringleaders, apparently, for he had no more trouble that year.

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