One sentence in Poul Anderson's Technic History suggests a comparable spin-off:
"Desai had worked in regions that faced Betelgeuse and, across an unclaimed and ill-explored buffer zone, the Roidhunate of Merseia."
-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 74-238 AT 3, p. 82.
OK. A Terran Navy special forces team works in the buffer zone where it explores, establishes advance bases, covertly contacts any natives that have not yet been contacted by Merseia and spies on any that have been. The Merseians maintain a similar force, not necessarily all of their own species, although we know that they have no Chereionites to spare.
What would it be like for intelligent species to live in such a zone? Such a series could have legs.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I like your suggestions here, plus Anderson touched on that idea in a couple of the Flandry stories. I found this in the fourth paragraph of "The Game of Glory," at the beginning of the story: "He slipped into the Merseian Empire itself, wormed and blackmailed until he found a suitable planet (uninhabited, terrestroid, set aside as a hunting preserve of the aristocracy) and got home again: whereafter the Terran Navy quietly built and advanced base there and Flandry wondered if the same thing had happened on his side of the fence."
I know this was one of the stories Anderson decided did not need revising. But I might have suggested changing "Merseian Empire" to "Merseian Roidhunate."
Ad astra! Sean
Gggggrrrrrrrr, "and" should be "an" before "advanced base."
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Here's another example, clearly set in that buffer zone between Empire and Roidhunate, from Chapter XI of A CIRCUS OF HELLS: "If the Merseians had installed no more than that [two relay satellites orbiting Talwin], they had a barebones base here. It was what you'd expect at the end of this long a communications line: a watchpost, a depot, a first-stage receiving station for reports from border-planet agents like Rax."
And again: "The value of Talwin was obvious. Besides surveillance, it allowed closer contact with spies than would otherwise be possible. Flandry wondered if his own corps ran an analogous operation out Roidhunate way. Probably not. The Merseians were too vigilant, the human government too inert, its wealthier citizens too opposed to pungling up the cost of positive action."
Fortunately, as the quote from "The Game of Glory" shows, that human government was not always too inert to take positive action!
Ad astra! Sean
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