The Fleet Of Stars II

Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars begins with an "Epilogue," almost incomprehensible on first reading, in which two Alpha Centaurian planets, uninhabited Phaeton and humanly colonized Demeter, begin to collide. At the end of that novel and throughout Volumes II and III of the series, the Demetrian colony exists although it is mostly off-stage as the narrative follows contemporaneous events back in the Solar System. By Chapter 3 of Volume IV, The Fleet Of Stars (New York, 1997), the collision has at last occurred, a thousand years after colonization.

An Anson Guthrie download, passing through the Alpha Centaurian system en route from Beta Hydri to Sol, sees Demeter, bigger than Earth, molten, glowing red, streaked black with smoke and slag, spinning crazily, racked by mountain-sized fire-geysers, surrounded by randomly orbiting rocks, some crashing down but many forming a ring or thickening into a Luna-sized moon. It sounds as if Demeter has not been destroyed but will reform into a possibly life-bearing planet?

Lunarians, human beings adapted to live and breed in lunar gravity, must spend their entire lives in artificial environments but have the creativity, ingenuity and technology to make their environments spacious and agreeable. They are extinct on Luna but flourish in the Outer Solar System and at Alpha Centauri where one habitat, Zamok Sabely', has spokes a hundred kilometers in length. As often when describing an imagined future society, Anderson conveys social wealth and dynamism although the term "bustling" is inappropriate for the quiet Lunarians. Inside Zamok Sabely':

"Arches opened on arcades, tier above tier, of shops, workplaces, taverns, gambling dens, recreation halls, foodsteads, joyhouses, establishments more esoteric, spacious and gracious or darkling and secretive, often screened by a living curtain or an induced aurora. A fire-fountain leaped and roared in the middle of a plaza. Birds trailing rainbow tails winged down a corridor of crystal." (p. 29)

It does not seem to matter that they must always live surrounded by vacuum.