The wealth of Poul Anderson's Technic History is shown by the list of planets that Tabitha Falkayn/Hrill of Highsky, who has never been further than the Avalonian moon, Morgana, wants to visit:
Terra
Ansa
Hopewell
Cynthia
Woden
Diomedes
Vixen
- my point being that all these names mean something to readers of the History and we can add many more:
Ythri
Lucifer
Satan
Aeneas
Dido
Ivanhoe
Merseia
Dennitza
Ramnu
Imhotep
Daedalus
Irumclaw
Hermes
Starkad
Freehold
Gorzun
Vanrijn
Chereion
Atheia
Mirkheim
Nor is this a complete list. Blog readers are welcome to search this blog for information about all of these planets. Whenever one of them is referenced, we remember previous references or scenes set on the planet. A well constructed future history series is more than the sum of its parts.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Freehold was not yet part of the Empire, that would have to wait another two centuries or more (as we see in "Outpost of Empire"). And Gorzun was an ally or client state of Terra. Jihannath was another planet not on your list that would not come under Imperial rule till THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN. And all these worlds was only a fraction of the 100,000 or more planets formally acknowledging allegiance to the Imperium.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
And in the collection called FLANDRY OF TERRA, we see three more, very different planets: Nyanza, Altai, and Unan Besar. All of them could be added to your list.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
They could but I wasn't trying to write a complete list but it shows how rich the Technic History is.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree! And I suspect a truly exhaustive listing of planets, human and non human, known to be in or out of the Empire would be over a hundred.
FINALLY finished Julian May's MAGNIFICAT. I was getting impatient with her Galactic Milieu books. Because of too many implausibilities I found in them.
Next will probably come rereading Anderson's THE REBEL WORLDS. I sill wish it could have been expanded in some of the ways suggested in this blog.
Ad astra! Sean
Now that we can actually detect extrasolar planets, the estimate is (based on the observed sample) that in our galaxy there must be at least 300,000,000 roughly Earth-sized planets in liquid-water-zone orbits around their stars.
Poul was sorta prescient...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, in many ways Anderson was prescient! And I hope astronomers soon find worlds with oxy/nitrogen atmospheres with temperatures humans would find reasonably tolerable!
It would help, of course, to have full scale observatories OFF Earth in locations where they would not be hindered by Earth's atmosphere or the lights of human cities. The Far Side of the Moon comes to mind as one possibility.
Ad astra! Sean
But is FTL possible?
Kaor, Paul!
First, I an not proposing anything radically far beyond the cutting edge of current knowledge and technology. The US, for example, COULD and should have done far more in space, including making use of the Moon after 1973 (when the Great Stagnation began). I believe observatories could have been built on the Far Side of the Moon using technology building on what had been achieved by 1973.
Poul Anderson's story "The Communicators" is set largely in an observatory built on the Moon's Far Side. So there were people seriously thinking of using that part of the Moon for such purposes.
I don't know if FTL is possible, but there have been serious non-fictional speculations about how to get around the light speed barrier to interstellar travel. The one I am most familiar with being the Alcubierre FTL drive. But I certainly hope that may be practical!
In the "Commentary" Anderson wrote for SPACE FOLK, he advocated the developing and settling of the Solar System whether or not FTL is possible. But he also argued for aspiring to the stars whether or not FTL was achieved. Anderson also believed it would be possible to reach the stars by STL means, if human being were willing and determined enough to do so.
Ad astra! Sean
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