An Unexpected Parallel

I have found an unexpected parallel between Larry Niven's second Man-Kzin Wars story and Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy but am too tired to seek out the Anderson references this late in the evening. Clue: something growing bigger than it can on Earth.

I do not think that planetary populations would, with apparent unanimity, accept and support the extension of the death penalty in order to fill organ banks. There would be much disagreement and conflict on such an issue. So I find a major premise of the Known Space series sociologically implausible.

When a kzin is tranquil and happy, he feels - at one with the cosmos? No:

"...ready to conquer a cosmos."
-Poul Anderson, "Inconstant Star" IN Larry Niven, Ed, Man-Kzin Wars III (New York, 1990), pp. 167-310 AT CHAPTER I, p. 173.

There is more here about kzinti psychology but this also will wait.

Anderson mentions that Munchen, the commercial, cultural and political capital city of the human colony planet, Wunderland, in the Alpha Centaurian System, has a steel-steepled St. Joachim's shimmering against the evening sky, imparting a sense of human habitation and place.