This single story is a miniature future history in its own right whether or not we think that we can connect it with other interstellar stories by Poul Anderson.
Anderson imagines humanity out in the universe and we want to read more. Future history will not all be as violent as this conflict between Vaynamo and Chertkoi but Anderson wrote good military sf and this story is one example.
Where to next?
Again, the news of the day on the blog - a once-in-a-blue moon event. AI can be beneficial or dangerous, utopian or dystopian, so why has it not been programmed with Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics? This is one sf theme on which Asimov was way ahead of everyone else - although Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History shows us technological unemployment including even the unemployment of the first humanoid robot! (A self-driving car does not need a humanoid driver etc.)
On Roland, the natives conceal themselves and manipulate human colonists telepathically.
On Mithras, human colonists would eventually have displaced the natives but the colony is prevented.
On Vaynamo, the most intellectually developed of the Alfavala:
For more about the planet Mithras, see:
This story poses two questions:
(i) Can a planet with a large and growing urban population afford a space program?
(ii) Should human beings colonize an already inhabited planet?
To answer (ii), Captain Yakov Kahn cites past human conflicts:
Amerinds;
Jews;
Arabs;
Moslems and Hindus;
Europeans and Africans;
a single country bringing forth Bach, Goethe and Hitler.
We can turn directly from one sentence in Kahn's speech to the morning news.
Within the story, Kahn settles his questions by force. However, the questions remain with the readers.
The Directorate Future History
- or just search this blog for Directorate.
We get the impression that an unexpected and understated future history series emerges from a few stories which should therefore be collected in a single volume.
Maybe the two kinds of writing could be brought together in a collection of alternating stories and articles with the stories dramatizing the issues raised in the articles and the articles discussing the issues raised in the stories? Dramatization and discussion are the main distinguishing features. (Greek drama originated by the addition of extra speakers, then of actions, to ritual narrations.) A non-fiction writer directly addresses his readers whereas fiction is mediated through an omniscient narrator and one or more viewpoint characters.
There can also sometimes be an apparently unbridgeable gap between fiction and non-fiction. Thus, Anderson dramatized the effects of time dilation on a spaceship crew in his novel, Tau Zero, then later discussed time dilation in the essay, "Our Many Roads to the Stars," which - maybe only for reasons of space? - did not refer to the novel. It was as if there was an unwritten rule that Anderson as science popularizer must not refer to Anderson as sf writer. Of course this is not the case. The essay begins by referring to sf in general and also mentions Frederik Pohl's "starbow."
Anderson wrote:
non-fiction about thermonuclear war and several works of fiction set during the aftermaths of nuclear wars;
both fiction and non-fiction about space travel and extraterrestrial intelligence.
Thirty-three light-years from Sol, as his ferry leaves its mother ship and descends from orbit, Yakov Kahn sees:
"...the sprawl of Sagittarius." (p. 233)
- and reflects that the galactic centre lies beyond those dust clouds.
Poul Anderson's readers remember:
What we have is three volumes:
Chapter 10: More Suns Than One, pp. 123-135.
Chapter 11: Voyage to the Stars, pp. 136-153.
Poul Anderson, "Our Many Roads to the Stars" IN Anderson, New America (New York, December 1982), pp. 261-287 (essay published, 1975; postscript, 1982).
These works will show us the state of knowledge from the late 1960's to the early 1980's when Anderson was writing sf about interstellar travel. Although this information is now scientifically dated (to say the least), it retains a certain fictive or literary relevance just as the Martian canals, which turned out not to exist, had meanwhile found their way into fiction and literature - as indeed had the Martians, inhabiting not Mars but our imaginations.
I will try to assimilate the technical information some time tomoz.
