Forum pracy nad projektem wskrzeszenia The Forge

[rewangluo459]

Apart from the United States,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], which to its great honour has preserved its heritage of English-language measurements, we in the rest of the English-speaking world live in a style-deaf age in which the authorities would have us believe that "centimetre" and "kilometre" fit in with the natural rhythms of English prose just as well as "inch" and "mile". How anyone can accept such cultural vandalism is beyond my capacity to comprehend; but I suppose it's a bit like living on junk food - you get used to it and cease to be aware of anything better.
A look at the practice of science fiction writers can shed some light on what is going on.
Arthur C Clarke is a no-nonsense advocate of metric units, whose writings, for instance some of the dialogue in the novel A Fall of Moondust, make it obvious he believes metres and kilometres to be the wave of the future (or even the present) and feet, inches and miles to be ridiculously old-fashioned.
His novels are typically set in the near future - the next few centuries. In these, his use of metric units, though jarring to the ear as all metric words are, is in line with scientific practice and therefore credible, however regrettable they may be from the aesthetic point of view.
However, something interesting happens in his great work The City and the Stars. This is a magnificent, stupendous novel, which I will not review here, merely pointing out its relevance to the issue I am discussing. The great city Diaspar's immortal inhabitants,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], periodically frozen in its memory banks and then re-materialised, have created a culture that has more or less conquered Time. Secure within its walls, Diaspar is the last and greatest city on an almost desolate Earth. a billion years in our future. Its brilliant, though in some ways sick,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], society is inward-looking, agoraphobic, and unable to understand the hero Alvin's wish to venture outside the walls... The novel resonates on all sorts of levels, making us wonder about the good and evil inherent in technological mastery, the far future destiny of all living things, the destiny of the cosmos itself. And guess what? No silly kilometres here. The city's dimensions are given in miles.
In other words Clarke's sense of artistry has triumphed over his conscious mind. Whether his decision was conscious or not, he knew that kilometres in Diaspar simply wouldn't do. The cacophonous sound of the word would break the spell. Clarke is actually a very poetic writer, his best work full of beautiful verbal music, and when the time came to size up the ultimate wondrous far-future city,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], he turned to the unit of measurement that has grown as an organic part of the English language.
Isaac Asimov is a less euphonious writer, though some of the prose in Foundation and its two original companion volumes has a magic of its own: economical, hauntingly memorable. Sadly, there is a retrogression in Asimov, from English miles in Foundation to metric kiloblahblah in his last work,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Forward the Foundation. The Imperial Palace grounds on Trantor are in miles in the former, in kilowhatsis in the latter. Perhaps it was the same conscientious spirit of modernisation which led him to mention, in one of his late works, that Trantor, capital of the Galactic Empire, isn't really at the centre of the Galaxy (as it was said to be in the early volumes) but on the inner edge of the inner spiral arm; the actual centre being taken up with a black hole - as we now know to be the case. Unnecessary amendment, in my view. Sequels to Foundation ought to be sequels to Foundation, not incorporating contradictions to it. You have to suspend disbelief anyway, reading SF; you might as well suspend it enough.
The Ooranye Project makes no bones about the importance of miles and yards and inches. It postulates that these are actually universal, and that they arose on Earth due not to historical accident but as a result of access to a layer of truth analogous to a racial unconscious for all humanoid cultures, hard-wired into the nature of such creatures. The signal from this force is weak, which is why reception is so patchy - this is to get round the objection, "why doesn't everybody on our planet use miles?" - but on Ooranye miles and yards are the normal units of measurement and have been so for over a million years. Only in periods of decay such as the Nitrogen Era is there a mad attempt to impose artificial systems such as the "snargle": a hundred foopisnargles make one snargle, a thousand snargles one kruntisnargle, and so on.