The Anguished Dawn by James P. Hogan
The Anguished Dawn by James P. Hogan
Acknowledgments
The help of the following people is gratefully appreciated:
Dr. Andre Assis, Institute of Physics, Campinas, Brazil, for answering questions on his theoretical work deriving the gravitational force as an electrical effect.
Dr. John Ackerman, for much correspondence concerning his fascinating interpretation of the Indian Vedas as a record of Mars encounters.
Larry Kos, of NASA, Marshall Spaceflight Center, Huntsville, AL, for advice on orbits and weird gravitational effects.
Mark Luljak of Fairlight Consulting, Louisville, KY, and Myrranda Hunter of NASA, Ames, CA, for much useful feedback from the first draft.
All those readers who demanded a sequel to Cradle of Saturn.
Charles Ginenthal and Lewis Greenberg for their support and encouragement.
Des Butler and Emer Carolan, Des Butler & Co., Sligo, Ireland, for photocopying, scanning, and the like, without which the rest would all be in vain.
(See also the “Further Reading” section at the end of the book.)
By JAMES P. HOGAN
Inherit the Stars
The Genesis Machine
The Gentle Giants of Ganymede
The Two Faces of Tomorrow
Thrice Upon a Time
Giants’ Star
Voyage from Yesteryear
Code of the Lifemaker
The Proteus Operation
Endgame Enigma
The Mirror Maze
The Infinity Gambit
Entoverse
The Multiplex Man
Realtime Interrupt
Minds, Machines & Evolution
The Immortality Option
Paths to Otherwhere
Bug Park
Star Child
Rockets, Redheads & Revolution
Cradle of Saturn
The Anguished Dawn
The Legend That Was Earth
Martian Knightlife
PROLOGUE
By the second half of the twenty-first century, Earth had become comfortable and complacent. The military threats that had once spurred technological development were no longer credible, the threat of major war having given way to local counterinsurgency actions and suppression of resistance to what was tending ever more toward the establishment of a global state. With financial institutions finding safe and secure profits close to home and having little incentive to put capital into risky, far-off ventures, the space initiative had not lived up to its earlier vision and promise. Institutionalized science echoed the cultural message of stability and security by reaffirming its doctrine of a universe shaped by gradual, uneventful, evolutionary change under the direction of laws that were immutable and understood.
Not everyone, however, found the notion of material affluence and comfort as the sole aim of life to be a very satisfying philosophy, or accepted the officially promulgated schools of thinking that led to such a conclusion. Landen Keene was one of the restless few who felt that humanity and its civilization were destined for better things. A Texas-based nuclear propulsion engineer who had been battling against complacency and inertia for years to champion meaningful expansion into space, he became a natural ally of the breakaway “Kronian” migrants, who established an advanced technological outpost culture among Saturn’s moons to live by their own moneyless value system based on individual merit and cooperative enterprise.
Freed from institutional control and commercial interests, and flourishing at last as the open pursuit of knowledge for its own ends, science under the Kronians opened up new realms of physics and practical application whose pursuit had languished on Earth, and explored academic questions that had been impermissible under the intolerant dogmas that had come to dominate Earth’s scientific thinking. What brought about changes in the terrestrial environment that would make the existence of dinosaurs impossible in modern times? Why did conventional Ice-Age chronology have to be wrong? Who were the people who had developed writing and elaborate artifacts long before civilizations were supposed to have existed, and how could they have lived beneath the alien sky that their records depicted?
Finally, the Kronians sent a delegation to Earth with evidence of violent upheavals across the Solar System that had occurred into the times of recorded human history. Keene and others joined the Kronians in warning that such events could happen again, and the human race would be vulnerable for as long as it remained concentrated in one place. But the plea was rejected since it didn’t fit with prevailing theory, and dismissed as a political ploy to divert Earth’s resources to Kronia. Its proponents were ridiculed, their arguments misrepresented and distorted . . . until, with the ejection of the white-hot protoplanet Athena from Jupiter and the perturbing of its Sun-grazing orbit onto a course sending it toward Earth, a catastrophe that had come close to wiping out the human race once before was about to happen again.