Wednesday 25 January 2017

Ythrian History

See here.

To recapitulate information from earlier posts, Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization incorporates eight stages of Ythrian history. Six are included in the Earth Book:

human explorers under Captain Gray discover Ythri;

Ythrians and human beings jointly explore a planet named after Gray;

an Ythrian ship takes van Rijn of the Polesotechnic League to Mirkheim and its captain sees the shadow of God the Hunter over van Rijn's way of life;

human beings and Ythrians colonize islands on Gray, renamed Avalon;

colonists on Avalon spread to a major continent;

[the Terran Empire and the Domain of Ythri wage war and Terra tries to annex Avalon];

soon after the war, an Avalonian Ythrian writes The Earth Book Of Stormgate;

[much later, an Avalonian Ythrian spies for both Domain and Empire].

Ythri is as important as League and Empire and we want its history to continue.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I am not sure I would agree with the Ythrian space captain in "Lodestar" seeing the shadow of God the Hunter over Nicholas van Rijn's way of life. A human might say instead that human foolishness and blundering was was causing the League to break down.

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Sean,
I think 2 ways of saying the same thing, though? When God stoops on an Ythrian during a storm, the Ythrians do not deny that the storm was the physical cause of death.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

True, two ways of saying the same thing. But a human believer in God as King and Father might insist that God did not will the death of, or "stoop" on the Ythrian who died in a storm. He or I would say God simply permitted the Ythrian's death.

Sorry to be so pedantic!

Sean