Wednesday 13 March 2019

Building A Future History

Two ways to build a future history series: either include stories as long as they do not contradict each other or include only stories that explicitly refer to each other. Both principles apply when we editorially decree that four of Poul Anderson's stories form a short "Directorate" series.

In "The Alien Enemy," Anderson explicitly builds on the background provided by the earlier story, "Home." There is more than just a reference to the Directorate. As in "Home," large interstellar craft take a year to accelerate to near light speed and a year to decelerate although we now learn that smaller ships can accelerate even faster because they can go above one gravity. The crews of the fleet that visits Sybilla experienced several months while traversing 33.25 light years from the Solar System. They came because the colonists had sent a laser message describing an alien attack on their planet. Are we about to read about an interstellar war?

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And I assume the smaller ships were used to send survey parties to stars of interest and to study any planets found there. Hopefully, some of those would be colonizable.

Not only is the Directorate referred to, we meet one of the Directors themselves!

And one of the other two stories I suggested as being appropriate to place with the Directorate series is relevant to the idea of STL interstellar war.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
Smaller ships survey parties good thinking.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And these smaller ships probably have smaller crews, but also still large enough to include some of the specialists needed for studying these planets and systems. Probably no more than 20, with some of them being in cold sleep as well.

Sean