Vast Conflicts

In The Peregrine, near the end of Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, the Alori threat to the Stellar Union is averted because the Peregrine escapes from Loaluani and carries a warning to the Coordination Service. In The Game Of Empire, near the end of Anderson's Technic History, the Merseian threat to the Terran Empire is averted (I think) because the Merseian Roidhunate suffers the last of a series of demoralizing defeats.

Tachwyr the Dark bravely says:

"'By adversity, the God tempers the steel of the Race.'"

-Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 189-453 AT CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO, p. 447.

But too much adversity demotivates the racists.

Both these conflicts are interstellar in scale and Tachwyr invokes his conception of the transcendent. I am surprised to learn that events on an even vaster scale are possible in a mainstream novel. In Susan Howatch's Glamorous Powers, a psychic senses a departing soul entering the Platonic hereafter. Since the Platonic realm transcends space and time, it is indeed vaster than interstellar empires. We accept first that many people believe in a hereafter and secondly that souls may enter hereafters in fiction although we might reclassify the fiction as fantasy. Back to Genre Overlaps. In any case, Howatch's characters' spiritual crises are as dramatic as Anderson's interstellar imperial conflicts.