Tuesday 23 July 2013

Borthu

In the original version of Poul Anderson's "Honorable Enemies," the star Betelgeuse has forty seven planets, six of them with native intelligent races, five of them ruled by the blue humanoid Alfzarians who were the first of the six to develop interplanetary travel! In the revised version, there are still forty seven planets, six of them inhabited, but now there is a single race whose ancestors had come from a planet of another star.

This change reflects the discovery that planets of a giant star would not remain hospitable long enough for life to evolve upon them. Thus, again, there are two alternative histories of Dominic Flandry. In the "earlier" history, the laws of physics and chemistry were sufficiently different that life and intelligence were able to evolve on six Betelgeusan planets. In the "later" history, these six planetary orbits are at least in the zone where water can be liquid so that the planets can be terraformed, or the equivalent, and colonized.

The process sounds familiar from Anderson's later Harvest Of Stars tetralogy:

genetically engineered micro-organisms generate an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere within decades;
automated processes produce soil;
plants and animals are grown from cells and released.

My question, however, is this. Alfzar has a region called the Borthudian mountains which are inhabited by large, dangerous, flying beings called Borthudian dragons. Centuries earlier, Nicholas van Rijn had tangled with a planet called Borthu whose inhabitants were "Borthudians" - so is this the place of origin of the beings that colonized the Betelgeusian System?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello again, and welcome back,

I had noticed the use of "Borthudian" in different contexts, but I don't think there's a connection, just an author re-using a sound-combination which he liked. From a Doylist perspective, these are both stories written before Anderson inserted a reference to "Polesotechnarch van Rijn" into a Flandry story. From a Watsonian perspective, the Borthudians with whom van Rijn comes into conflict don't appear to be colonists from elsewhere, or to have colonized the planets of Betelgeuse; they had only recently acquired starships and modern weapons.

Regards,
Nicholas Rosen

Paul Shackley said...

Nicholas,
Yes but the Betelgeuseans could have been an earlier Borthudian species?

Anonymous said...

Just possibly, but if the time span is so long that one intelligent species abandoned Borthu, and another evolved there, how would the name "Borthu" have been remembered and kept?

Paul Shackley said...

You have spotted the fatal flaw in my argument!