(i) When Dominic Flandry is based on Irumclaw, his pilot's data list several nearby habitable planets, including a few with intelligent natives, although none of these worlds has ever been revisited. Imagine that: so much life on so many planets that several intelligent species can be ignored.
(ii) The fourth planet in the system of Irumclaw has an unbreathable atmosphere with dust clouds in a purple sky but is mined and therefore has a small human colony with a floating population and a shabby spaceport "...in the middle of an immense rusty desert..." (Poul Anderson, Young Flandry (New York, 2010), p. 356), where a tube stretches from airdome to airlock, but that is all that we see as Flandry's single human passenger disembarks.
(iii) Irumclaw is not on any liner routes but a Cynthian tramp freighter transports two human passengers to Ysabeau which has cities and is a transfer point to the rest of the Empire although, again, we learn nothing further of Ysabeau.
(iv) All that we know about Therayn is that it is on the opposite side of the Roidhunate from the Empire and that it is conquered by the Merseians.
How many such tangential planets are there in the History?
2 comments:
That sort of thing is one of the factors I like about Poul’s work — he gives you a vivid sense of the -scale- of things. Each of those worlds is an immensity; the ones with intelligent natives will have histories as long and complex and contradictory as humanity’s... and you pass them by in seconds! It’s tantalizing, but exhilarating at the same time.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Again, I agree. And those "passed by" worlds mentioned so briefly in Flandry's pilot's manual as having intelligent races are themselves worthy of their own stories. Such a fate could have happened so easily to Talwin as well if Ydwyr the Seeker hadn't become fascinated by its two intelligent races.
What happened on those bypassed worlds? How did even fleeting contact with interstellar outsiders affect them? Some might have had races at am advanced enough level of culture/technology to understand what that meant/implied. As was the case with planets like Trillia and Merseia.
Ad astra! Sean
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