Exploring Avalon

"The Problem of Pain." 

The story focuses on a small group of four Ythrians and two Aenean human beings but it is important to remember their context which is stated only briefly. A spaceship that cannot be spared to wait in orbit has left about a hundred explorers on the largest continent, later called Corona, where they establish a base, then spread around the globe. A married couple, Enherrian and Whell, their grown children, Rusa and Arrach, and Peter and Olga Berg are on the shore of a gulf from where a strong current flows east until it is deflected north by an archipelago. These places as well as the planet itself will be named when Avalon has been colonized, the Gulf of Centaurs and Oronesia. It is unusual and rewarding to read about places before they are populated and named. And that is all that we have time for this evening. Other reading calls.