Alpha Centauri B II is an inner planet so maybe it is terrestroid? In fact, its envoy, Helmung, is a large blue humanoid with beady eyes, a black mane, a battered face, antennae and tattoos. (All these guys have two eyes in front. This is an anthropomorphic assumption.)
Helmung, who is from the continent of Almerik, carries a spear and a sword and wants fights, females and booze so it sounds as if Almerik is based on Almuric which is like Barsoom: Cairn travels there by teleportation and finds beautiful women.
Helmung wants spaceships and atomic weapons to "'...sack many worlds...'" (p. 289) - like the barbarians in the Technic History. His people have limited telekinetic power, enough to affect dice, possibly based on neural-quantum interaction. So even these dudes might have something to offer - also something to explain the mysterious data theft that is being investigated. Sf and detective fiction meet again.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Hard to see what can be sold to the people of Almerik that THEY would want that did not also make them even more dangerous to their neighbors.
Sean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psionics
Psionic abilities appear frequently in science fiction and provide characters with supernatural abilities.[11] John W. Campbell, an editor of a science fiction magazine, became excited about fringe science,[12] and went on to define psionics as "engineering applied to the mind".[13] His encouragement of psionics led author Murray Leinster and others to write stories such as The Psionic Mousetrap.[12]
Science writer Martin Gardner wrote that the study of psionics is "even funnier than Dianetics or Ray Palmer's Shaver stories", and criticized the beliefs of Campbell as anti-scientific nonsense.[6]
-kh
Kaor, Keith!
While Poul Anderson was skeptical of most claims involving "psi powers," he did not entirely dismiss the possibility that things like telepathy might have some rare basis in fact. One example of Anderson examining such ideas is "Journeys End."
Sean
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