Ivar writes to Tatiana:
"'We're way out on thin fringe of spiral arm, you remember.'" (18, p. 212)
How could we forget? Here, Ivar contrasts human space with the galactic center where the Elders supposedly originated. Again he uses phraseology that is familiar to us both from several other characters in Poul Anderson's Technic History and also from that History's occasional omniscient narrator. See here.
Only in the concluding forty-third installment of the Technic History have human beings and their diverse civilizations spread through several spiral arms of the galaxy. Even later, apparently, a single civilization operates on a "Galactic" scale and looks back on more than one interstellar Empire.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
The idea we see in "Starfog," that even with FTL, it took thousands of years for mankind to spread to several arms of the Galaxy, makes sense to me. And that bit about a later "galactic" civilization belongs more to Anderson's early phase as a writer, not his middle or later periods, where he seems to have abandoned such notions.
Happy New Year! Sean
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