A Five Year Mission

"The Saturn Game" describes just one incident on one moon of one outer planet in the mid-twenty-first century. An entire series would be necessary to describe the explorations of Mars, Jupiter, the rest of the Saturnian system, the rest of the Solar System and contemporaneous events on Earth.

"Wings of Victory" describes the discovery of just one inhabited planet by one ship of the first Grand Survey. An entire series would be necessary to describe this "Star Trek" period of the Technic History, literally a five year mission by an entire fleet.

The service motto:

"'We come as friends.'"

-Poul Anderson, "Wings of Victory" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, December 2009), pp. 75-102 AT p. 81.

The next stage:

"After five years the survivors would meet and compare experiences."

-ibid.

The narrator, Maeve Downey, conveys the sense of adventure:

"...the wonder wasn't gone. How could it ever go - from world after world after world?" (p. 79)

But the worlds - beautiful, terrible, dissimilar and mysterious - were so many that they blurred together in the explorers' minds.

"It was still a heart-speeding thing to find another sentient race, actually more than to find another planet colonizable by man. Now Ali Hamid had perished of a poisonous bite a year back, and Manuel Gonsalves had not yet recovered from the skull fracture inflicted by the club of an excited being at our last stop." (pp. 79-80)

Very Star Trek: an international crew; a series of incidents on planetary surfaces - then a planet with a puzzle to be solved.

Would interstellar explorers be so quick to expose themselves to planetary environments? Surely there would be more fundamental hazards than poisonous bites and club-wielding beings? They sound as if they had just been exploring a newly discovered continent on Earth.