"'You frontier people are the healthy ones. You'll be around - most of you - long after the Empire is a fireside legend.'"
-Poul Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), p. 206.
We know that Vixen, having been a frontier planet, will later found its own colony, New Vixen, that will participate in an interstellar civilization much vaster than the Empire. Some colonies, like Altai and Unan Besar, have survived for centuries without any contact from Terra so there is no reason why they should revert to barbarism merely because the tenuous interstellar rule from Terra ceases.
The basic information about Vixen is summarized here. Another detail is that cattle cannot survive there. Consequently, the Vixenites have no dairy industry and Flandry is able to introduce Kit to ice cream. On one extrasolar colony world in Julian May's Galactic Milieu Trilogy, there is milk but something in the grass makes it a different color. This is the kind of detail that matters when persuading readers to imagine daily life on a new planet.
4 comments:
Donald Kingsbury's "Courtship Rite" is set where humans are stranded on a world with the native life mostly (all?) inedible and they have a few terrestrial crops that can survive there & make human life possible there. One detail is that dairy products like cheese are rarities that some women make from breast milk they can spare from their infants.
Kaor, Jim and Paul!
Jim. Not sure if it's plausible to use human breast milk for any kind of cheeses, if only because you would need such large AMOUNTS of milk for such products.
Paul: Yes, but the problem Unan Besar faces is that it needs advanced technology for producing the kind of medicine humans there need in order to survive at all. Take away that technology and everybody soon dies horribly!
And welcome back!
Ad astra! Sean
"Take away that technology and everybody soon dies horribly!"
There is a somewhat similar situation in "Outcasts of the Heaven Belt" by Joan D. Vinge.
It is set mostly in a solar system with no habitable planets, but people live very good lives there with the resources of a rich planetoid belt & the moons of a Jupiter like planet. However in the backstory to the novella, there is a war in the system that damages the infrastructure so badly, that the survivors of that war will over the decades slowly die because they cannot maintain the technology they have.
Kaor, Jim!
And that strengthens my conviction most humans who leave would prefer to settle on reasonably terrestroid planets: because they would not need to depend on ARTIFACTS like O'Neill habitats for long term survival. Even a cold, frigid world like Altai would be better than a slowly failing habitat.
Ad astra! Sean
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