Neither Hloch of Stormgate Choth nor Donvar Ayeghen of the Galactic Archaeological Society introduces the first Captain Flandry story, "Tiger By The Tail." Nevertheless, the revised text of this pulp magazine short story is rich in future historical background details:
"...known space itself was the tiniest splinter off the outermost part of a spiral arm of a galaxy whose suns numbered above a hundred billion." (p. 243)
Known space encompasses several starfaring civilizations, including the Terran Empire and the Ythrian and Merseian domains;
there are scores of thousands of sophont species in the Empire alone plus comparable numbers in the other domains;
most such species within the Empire are obscure, primitive and rarely visited, bearing merely nominal allegiance;
centuries long developments among them can remain unknown;
pre-Imperial merchant adventurers, not necessarily scrupulous about what they sold, had explored further;
some natives had been given passage to advanced planets and had returned home with revolutionizing information;
such information was often passed to other species;
thus, some otherwise primitive cultures have interstellar spacecraft and nuclear weapons;
barbarians raided advanced planets during the pre-Imperial Troubles;
sometimes, barbarians have been hired as mercenaries against other barbarians;
the Empire, which had enforced the Pax, is now losing its grip on its borders and relying more on hireling fighters;
a powerful barbarian coalition, if such exists, might mount a serious threat;
maybe Flandry has just been captured by such a coalition...
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Current estimates has the Milky Way Galaxy containing two hundred billion stars.
I did hesitate a bit at that "scores of thousands of sophont species in the Empire alone." I wondered if that was too many, that it was more likely the Empire simply had THOUSANDS of intelligent species. Not SCORES of thousands.
"A Little Knowledge" gives us an example of how unscrupulous persons could irresponsibly spread advanced technology and knowledge to barbarians unprepared for such things.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
It sounds a lot but Flandry definitely reflects on "...the scores of thousands of sophont species over which the Terran Empire claimed hegemony..." (p. 243)
It is possible that passages in different installments of the Technic History give different impressions of the numbers of inhabited planets.
Paul.
More on this soon.
Kaor, Paul!
I should track down an exact quote, but I will go by memory and recall how the Flandry stories repeatedly stated 100,000 worlds, human and non human, owed allegiance to the Empire and had regular, formalized relations with it and many other Imperial planets. Next, it was stated a few multiples of that number also had a shadowy, nominal membership in the Empire. If we put both of these categories together, then I can see scores of thousands of intelligent races in the Imperial domain.
Rax, whom we see in A CIRCUS OF HELLS, probably passed itself off as coming from one of those obscure worlds which had been visited only once or twice.
Ad astra! Sean
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