Distant Earth

(A friend has emailed a more flattering photo of Ketlan.)

When I began to read prose sf in the 1960s, I was fascinated by the idea that, in future, Earth might be all but forgotten by human beings then living elsewhere or, whether alternatively or concurrently, that our home planet might be only dimly known by non-human inhabitants of other planetary systems. Poul Anderson and James Blish were two powerful purveyors of such ideas.

"...when revolt erupted, many Navy personnel, like civilians, discovered that those homes meant more to them than a Terra most of them had never seen."
-The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER SIX, p. 423.

"There were many corners of the galaxy which knew Earth only as a legend, a green myth floating unknown thousands of parsecs away in space, known and ineluctable thousands of years away in history. Some of them remembered much more vividly the now-broken tyranny of Vega, and did not know - some of them never had known - even the name of the little planet that had broken that tyranny."
-James Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), p. 241.

We are simultaneously "little" and important.

Blish's passage is ambiguous. Earth is thousands of parsecs away to, human or non-human, inhabitants of other systems and thousands of years away to descendants of its own colonials. However, only members of other species would be able to remember the pre-human Vegan tyranny without also knowing the name of Earth.

In both of these future histories, Earth takes its place within an already inhabited galaxy where Earthmen play a leading role for a while and where many of their descendants never see Earth.