(i) "The Saturn Game": the beginning of Technic civilization and the earliest exploration of the outer Solar System.
(ii) "Wings of Victory": the earliest interstellar exploration, including first contact with Ythri.
(iii) "The Problem of Pain": the earliest exploration of Gray/Avalon.
(iv) "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson": the beginnings of Jim Ching's and Adzel's careers.
(v) "The Three-Cornered Wheel": the beginning of David Falkayn's career.
(vi) "Esau": the beginning of Emil Dalmady's career as an entrepreneur.
(vii) "The Trouble Twisters": the inauguration and first mission of van Rijn's first trade pioneer crew.
(viii) "Lodestar": the discovery of Mirkheim and the founding of Supermetals.
(ix) "Wingless": the colonization of the Hesperian Islands on Avalon.
(x) "Rescue on Avalon": the colonization of the Coronan continent on Avalon.
(xi) "The Star Plunderer": the founding of the Terran Empire.
(xii) Ensign Flandry: the beginning of Dominic Flandry's career in Intelligence.
(xiii) A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows: the beginning of the Molitor Dynasty.
(xiv) The Game Of Empire: the beginning of Diana Crowfeather's career.
(xv) "The Sharing of Flesh": the beginning of the restoration of interstellar civilization.
(xvi) "Starfog": the beginning of a new era of unprecedented wealth based on the mining of the Cloud Universe.
I have found sixteen beginnings among forty-three installments, including the forty-third.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I hope Elon Musk is successful in founding his colony on Mars! That would finally be the BEGINNING of mankind getting decisively OFF this rock at long last!
And your comment about "Starfog" makes me regret again that Anderson wrote only four stories set in the post-Imperial era of Technic history. But he wanted to go on to other ideas and themes.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Elon Musk's ideas sound like a pipe dream - unless he proves me wrong.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
No more nutty than D.D. Harriman was in THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON. And serious people like Robert Zubrin, in his book THE CASE FOR SPACE, take his work and hopes very seriously. So, I hope you will check out Zubrin's book.
Ad astra! Sean
Musk has -already- accomplished many things that seemed like pipe dreams — reusable rockets, making a new company the world’s primary space launch agency and driving an entire nation (Russia) out of the market, for instance. Not to mention the electric cars, grid-scale energy storage, and so forth.
He’s an illustration that to succeed, you must be prepared to take risks and accept setbacks and failures. Fail-learn-iterate-fail-learn-iterate-tail-learn-iterate-succeed. You fail until you succeed.
Also, that you -cannot- anticipate all contingencies and trying to do so means sitting around in a circle talking forever and ever; it’s self-paralysis.
You not only can’t answer all the questions in advance, you can’t even know what they ARE in advance. You get out there and do it and learn by doing.
Rockets will explode, people will die. So what? We’re all going to die anyway. Eventually the sun will swallow the Earth. It’s what you do in the meantime that counts.
When Kipling wrote his poem about the pathfinders and explorers, he didn’t call it the “Song of the Risk Averse” or the “Song of those Who Thought If They Were Very Careful They’d Live Forever”.
He called it “The Song of the Dead”
We were dreamers, dreaming greatly
In the man-stifled towns
We yearned beyond the skyline
Where the strange roads go down.
Came the Whisper, came the Vision
Came the Power with the Need
Until the soul that is not Man’s soul
Was leant to us to lead.
As the deer breaks — as the steer breaks
From the herd where they graze;
In the faith of little children
We went on our ways.
And then the food failed — then the wood failed — then the last water dried
And in the faith of little children... we laid down and died.
In the sand-dunes, by the veldt-side, in the fern-breaks we lay
That our sons might follow after, by our bones upon the way.
Follow after — follow after —
For we have watered the root
And the bough is come to blossom
That is ripening for fruit.
Follow after: we are waiting
By the trails that we lost
For the sound of many footsteps, for the tread of a host
Follow after — follow after
For your harvest is sown.
By our bones upon the wayside
Ye shall come unto your own!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I absolutely agree with your characterization of Elon Musk and the quote from Kipling you gave! I would disagree with Mr. Musk about Tesla and electric cars, which I consider a distraction from the far greater goal of getting off Earth in a REAL way!
Or, if you like, only a space based solar power system will probably make electric cars truly practical.
And I can only have admiration for people like Elon Musk and fictional exemplars such as D.D. Harriman and Anson Guthrie!
Ad astra! Sean
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