W: LP: GRP: PA:: Time is the bridge that always burns behind us.

The Burning Bridge by Poul Anderson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This short story (really, in between a short story and a novella in length) is a tightly paced account of the journey of a fleet of colony ships traveling from Earth to another star system with a habitable planet roughly twenty light-years distant. This has all the elements of the type of science fiction that I loved most in my youth. In this story, the heroic captain and admiral of a fleet of Libertarian Separatist colonists is a believing New England Christian but is haunted by the profound psychological strain of alienation from his own home on Earth by time and the vast distances of space. In a very short time the author gets inside the head of this main character as events of the story unfold. As the story progresses, you get scientific explanation of how the spacecrafts traverse the vast distance of the journey traveling at half the speed of light. Most of the crew and passengers are in cryo-sleep except for a fractional "awake" crew to monitor everything. After some time into the voyage from Earth, at the limit of signal attenuation, they receive a message from Earth that the Educational Mandate (requiring all citizens to be indoctrinated in government schools) is rescinded for the "Constitutionalists" and other laws may be relaxed and that the colonists may return to Earth. There is little time to debate the issue and the captain must decide the course of action, and his choice requires him to do something wrong which now alienates him further as he may be required to no longer be involved in space travel (all of his life that he has left is his existence as an astronaut). The end was poignant, but requires experience of the entire story to get the intensity. Here is a quote from the end of the story:



"You aren't alone, Joshua, she wanted to call. Every one of us is beside you. Time is the bridge that always burns behind us."



Anderson, Poul William (2010). The Burning Bridge (Illustrated Version) (p. 42). Unknown. Kindle Edition.



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