Sunday, 24 January 2021

Cultures Of Mixed Species

"Wingless" begins by stating that Avalon is the only known joint colony of two species whereas, much later in Technic History, Dominic Flandry refers to Avalon as one of the cultures of mixed species so that, by his time, there have been more. However, we do not know what becomes of any of them. The four post-Flandry, post-Imperial installments of the Technic History describe only certain later stages of human social development and even biological evolution but do not mention Merseians, Ythrians, Avalonians, Cynthians, Wodenites, Diomedeans, Ramnuans, Donarrians, Shalmuans etc. It is mentioned just once that there is contact with non-human intelligences but they are not described. We do not need to ask about Chereionites because we had learned that they were extinct except for Aycharaych who, we think, died in the bombardment of Chereion. Apart from that, we realize how little we know.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And as we see mentioned in THE REBEL WORLDS, Terra itself had many beings of different races living permanently on the capital world of the Empire. Mention is made in Chapter II of Flandry casually passing many non human employees at Admiralty Center. And some of them must also have been Navy officers!

Chapter III of THE REBEL WORLDS also shows us Flandry discussing several examples of how wildly varied the races found in the Empire could be.

Besides Avalon, the planets that comes most clearly to mind as having mixed species were Imhotep and Dennitza. The former had humans living in the highlands, where they could breathe unassisted. With the lowlands and the seas being where Starkadian Tigeries and Sea People could live in similarly unassisted ways. And about ten percent of the population of Dennitza were Merseians.

I've now started rereading the Gregg Press edition of AGENT OF THE TERRAN EMPIRE, which begins, of course, with the revised version of "Tiger By The Tail."

Ad astra! Sean