In Starfarers, the starfarers are the Kith, the Envoy crew and the Venture League. The League, led by the Envoy survivors, employs former Kith but also includes anyone else with sufficient strength, skill and motivation. In There Will Be Time, the starfarers, called the Star Masters, are both human and non-human and are the direct successors neither of the Maurai Federation nor of the Eyrie but of Jack Havig's time travel group. The Venture League will transmit "'Newness, fresh ideas, or stories -'" (Starfarers, 48, p. 457) The Star Masters transmit:
"'Ideas, arts, experience, insights born on a thousand different worlds, out of a thousand different kinds of being -'"
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), XVI, p. 175.
The Maurai History
Maurai (three short stories)
Orion Shall Rise (long novel; the end of the Maurai period)
There Will Be Time (time travel novel; past and future history, before and after the Maurai)
Kith Histories
Kith (three short stories)
Starfarers (novel, incorporating revised versions of two of the stories)
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Being the contrarian I am, I can't help but wonder what will be the PROBLEMS and crises the Venture League and its successors will face. Because I don't believe the new star faring civilization it inspires will always be successful. Not that I don't believe those hopes and aspirations should not be striven for, only that we need to be realistic as well.
And your mention of the Maurai stories reminded me of the discussions we had here about a major flaw in the original Maurai pieces: an alleged critical shortage in metals. While I can see metals becoming somewhat more costly, Stirling out how they would still not be rare. E.g., metals from abandoned cars, appliances, steel framed buildings, mines, etc. And we see Anderson backing away from that idea in ORION SHALL RISE.
So, in some ways, I find "The Sky People," "Progress," and "Windmill" unsatisfactory. Yes, "The Sky People" was written early in Anderson's writing career, but I wish that even then, he had realized how defective that "metals are prohibitively costly and rare" premise was.
And I was pleased to see how, in THE WINTER OF THE WORLD, we get a more correct understanding of how metals would be mined/reused in the world thousands of years after the fall of a high technology civilization.
Ad astra! Sean
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