I have reached a passage that clearly demarcates "Home" from the Rustum History:
ships approaching light speed have ranged less than fifty light-years;
the Directorate had established scientific bases, not permanent colonies, on a few extra-solar planets and is now terminating all of them;
one such base is on Mithras which is thirty three light years from Sol and is the only humanly inhabitable planet to have been discovered.
It follows that there are no ideological exiles founding a permanent colony on a humanly inhabited planet called Rustum a mere twenty light years from Sol.
However, these two fictional histories are closely related and could have been combined if the author had taken that option. A Directorate could have displaced the Federation on the crowded Earth and then have terminated the scientific bases while leaving the one self-sufficient colony founded by dissidents to fend for itself. I will now continue to follow the Directorate future history.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And the captain of the ship sent to Mithras to evacuate the scientific base there, disagreed. That is, Jacob Kahn thought it was too soon to close down the base there, that there was still much to be learned on Mithras. He probably would have preferred the Mithras base lasting another 50 Earth years or so.
Apparently, later on, there was a change of policy on Earth, and the Directorate did eventually sponsor the founding of colonies on other planets, even if most of the first colonies eventually failed (see "The Alien Enemy"). But not all, as "The Faun" and "Time Lag" shows us.
Sean
Sean,
Whether Anderson intended "The Faun" and "Time Lag" to be set later in the Directorate history is another question but I will reread the stories and see what I think.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I don't think there's any direct mention of the Directorate in either "The Faun" or "Time Lag." The few mentions of Earth gives the impression the Home world is far away in both space and time to the people in these stories. I suggested including these stories with "Home" and "The Alien Enemy" largely because they use STL means of traveling to the stars and because it was convenient to place them with the undoubted Directorate stories.
Sean
Sean,
I agree but will reread the stories, scanning for details.
Paul.
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