Dives

How many "low dives" do fictitious characters frequent? Quite a lot. Remember the bar scene in Star Wars and Larry Niven's Draco Tavern. I have already celebrated the "Pey d'Or" meeting place in Poul Anderson's Orion Shall Rise. One of Anderson's time traveling characters recruits a traveling companion in a stereotypical underworld haunt in "Flight To Forever" and, in three other Anderson works, there is a (more respectable) inn between the worlds, the Old Phoenix.

The Stars Are Also Fire (New York, 1994) introduces a "Downright medieval" dive, the Asilo, a bistro with a surrealistically dancing lightsign above the door (p. 169). Blue-hazed air reeks of tobacco, marijuana, opium and sniph. The Asilo is "...a hangout for metamorphs...," Titans, Tinies, Drylanders, Chemos, Aquatics, Chimpos, bulge-headed Intellects and Exotics - "...genomes modified for purposes of science, industry, war, pleasure...," continuing to procreate (pp. 170, 171).

Titans were gene-bred for strength and endurance as infantry. Chemos are hardy against radiation and pollution. Drylanders' bodies store water so that they can survive in deserts. Having projected a cosmos in which human beings do not meet any aliens, Anderson then imagined altered, and alienated, forms of humanity.