For Love And Glory

All One Universe has been located and the pessimistic story in it is indeed "In Memoriam." However, I am now reading For Love And Glory (New York, 2003) and the next task is to track down Going For Infinity, "...a collection and retrospective of his life's work" (For Love And Glory, jacket).

For Love And Glory, 290 pages of text divided into LIV short chapters:

incorporates in changed form two stories set in a multi-author universe created by Isaac Asimov;

combines recognizable elements and themes from Anderson's Technic Civilization and Harvest of Stars future histories.

Despite these connections and similarities, it is a distinct and independent novel of interstellar civilization and exploration, well illustrated by its cover.

A noticeable difference from the Technic Civilization History is that hyperbeaming, communicating long distance by a hyperspatial equivalent of radio, is possible. For Love And Glory is set not only in a different timeline but also apparently in a much further future. Earth is not the capital of an interstellar empire but a quiet, depopulated planet where people are somehow merging their consciousnesses into a quantum internet.

Human beings live for centuries as they are periodically rejuvenated to a physical age of twenty. It is known that the galactic center is a monstrous black hole. Anderson imagines yet another unlikely astronomical event: a collision between two massive black holes in galactic orbits, with human explorers arriving just in time to observe. I await the outcome.