The Second Interstellar War

In Poul Anderson's The Star Fox, Gunnar Heim argued persuasively that economically self-sufficient planets have no reason to fight each other. Despite this, in The Star Fox, the Aleriona fought an interstellar war because of their ideology and, in the sequel, Fire Time, Terrestrials and Naqsans go to war because their people have colonised opposite hemispheres of a single planet and later have come into conflict.

Anderson shows how war in one part of a political realm and economic system affects other parts. Thus, human colonists on Ishtar want to help the natives to cope more effectively with their periodic planetary catastrophes but Terrestrial resources are diverted into the war effort. Of course, the central characters will find some way to cope with this problem but I must read on to find out what they do next...

Meanwhile, Anderson in these two books has given us four interesting alien races, the three already mentioned here plus the Staurni from whom Heim had bought nuclear weapons to fight the Aleriona.