1/12/2024 0 Comments The road not taken short story![]() The yellow leaves also evoke a sense of transience one season will soon give way to another. One forest has replaced another, just as-in the poem-one choice will supplant another. An inveterate New England farmer and woodsman, Robert Frost would have known these woods were “new”-full of trees that had grown after older ones had been decimated. Both birches and alders are “pioneer species,” the first trees to come back after the land has been stripped bare by logging or forest fires. The leaves of both turn bright yellow in fall, distinguishing them from maple leaves, which flare red and orange. The yellow leaves suggest that the poem is set in autumn, perhaps in a section of woods filled mostly with alder or birch trees. Defining the wood with one feature prefigures one of the essential ideas of the poem: the insistence that a single decision can transform a life. ![]() In his description of the trees, Frost uses one detail-the yellow leaves-and makes it emblematic of the entire forest. Out walking, the speaker comes to a fork in the road and has to decide which path to follow: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, “The Road Not Taken” begins with a dilemma, as many fairytales do. … Mea culpa.” However, Frost liked to quip, “I’m never more serious than when joking.” As his joke unfolds, Frost creates a multiplicity of meanings, never quite allowing one to supplant the other-even as “The Road Not Taken” describes how choice is inevitable. Soon after writing the poem in 1915, Frost griped to Thomas that he had read the poem to an audience of college students and that it had been “taken pretty seriously … despite doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling. When they went walking together, Thomas was chronically indecisive about which road they ought to take and-in retrospect-often lamented that they should, in fact, have taken the other one. All vessels landed and deployed their foot to horrible effect.Robert Frost wrote “ The Road Not Taken” as a joke for a friend, the poet Edward Thomas. The crew attempted to communicate but their radio signals were ignored and the Roxolan fleet proceeded to Earth since they had not detected any signs of hyperdrive. It is first detected by the crew of the Ares III, the third manned mission to Mars. In 2039, an invasion fleet arrives in the Earth's solar system. ![]() If the fleet did not detect a hyperdrive emanation, they located any habitable planets and invaded them, using their vastly superior technology to overwhelm the primitive inhabitants. The star system consisted of a yellow dwarf star and usually at least one habitable planet. The empire was expanding in its usual manner by sending an invasion fleet of 100-150 warships into a likely star system. They were also one of the most technologically advanced societies in space having discovered gunpowder, casting iron, smelting steel, manufacturing matchlock muskets and spyglasses to steer their starships. The Roxolan Empire had long had the hyperdrive and anti-gravity devices and took pride in having invented them themselves. The story is told by four POV characters: Captain Togram commanding a company of foot on board the Roxolan star warship Indomitable Spec-1 Billy Cox, a draftee in the US Army Buck Herzog, an interplanetary geologist and Hilda Chester, a linguist. This story is a prequel to " Herbig-Haro", expanding on the initial human contact with aliens that was mentioned in that story. Carr, Tor 1985 Kaleidoscope, Del Rey 1990 Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century, edited by Orson Scott Card, Ace 2001 3xT, Baen 2004, and Alien Contact, edited by Marty Halpern, Night Shade Books 2011. It has been reprinted in There Will Be War V: Warrior, edited by Jerry Pournelle & John F. It was first published in Analog, November, 1985. "The Road Not Taken" is a short story by Harry Turtledove, published under the name Eric G. Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century
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