I seem to have missed one of these passages. Flandry reflects:
"Because how can we remain forever the masters, even of our insignificant spatter of stars, on the fringe of a galaxy so big we'll never know a decent fraction of it? Probably never more than this sliver of one spiral arm that we've already seen. Why, better than half the suns, just in the micro-bubble of space we claim, have not been visited once!
"Our ancestors explored further than we in these years remember."
-Poul Anderson, The Rebel Worlds IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 367-520 AT CHAPTER TWO, p. 381.
Similarly, characters in the later Star Trek series remember the early explorers of the Original Series. Van Rijn's trade pioneer crews focused on those planetary systems that had been passed by rather than on extending the outer frontiers of known space.
Flandry is wrong in one respect. By the time of the Commonalty, long after the Terran Empire, when even Anglic has become a dead language, human civilizations have spread through several spiral arms.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
In Flandry's defense I would point out it took four or five thousand years for various human civilizations to spread to PARTS of those spiral arms of the Galaxy. And it took the chaos of the fall of the Empire and the Long Night to FORCE many humans to emigrate out of known space. And it's safe to say some were refugees fleeing disasters of one kind or another. Including, perhaps, actual attempts by the Merseians to exterminate the human race?
Ad astra! Sean
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