Tuesday, 15 April 2025

Other Planets In The Technic History

Many planets appear only once in Poul Anderson's Technic History. Often they are the setting of a single story. Some are only mentioned. I am not going to write a very long list.

Diomedes appears twice, in a van Rijn novel and a Flandry novel. Diomedeans are like junior Ythrians, intelligent flyers but unimportant on an interstellar scale. That Flandry novel, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, also features Terra (seen before), Dennitza (new) and Chereion, Aycharaych's home planet often mentioned before.

Next, A Stone In Heaven, the last instalment to feature Dominic Flandry as central character, features Ramnu (new), Hermes (Falkayn's home planet, seen before) and Terra. Last in the Flandry period, The Game Of Empire features Gorrazan (see before), Sphinx (new) and Terra but mainly introduces the fascinating Imhotep and Daedalus, both in the Patrician System and humanly colonized. Imhotep is where the Starkadians were evacuated to. Daedalus has a Cynthian village and a Donnarian settlement, also a Zacharian island. Zacharians are human but different.

That is such a small sample.

7 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And no matter how hard working and peripatetic he was, Flandry could only have visited a small number of the 100,000 and more planets of the Empire.

Ad astra! Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

Note that Ythrians can fly on planets with terresteroid atmospheres. Diomedians can't -- their planet's atmosphere is much denser.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Mr. Stirling!

Dang, a good point I wish I had thought of myself. I can see how that would limits the options available to Diomedians on an interstellar scale. Not as many planets of the kind their race would find suitable.

Diomedians have one advantage over Ythrians, however, they have true legs. Meaning that, even they could not fly on Terra or Avalon, or permanently live there, they could walk on such worlds far more easily than Ythrians.

For that matter, I'm not entirely sure Ythrians could fly on Terra, due to that planet having a gravity 25% heavier than Ythri (with a gravity 75% Terran).

Ad astra! Sean

Jim Baerg said...

Given the prevalence of 'superearths' among known exoplanets, there might actually be more worlds suitable for Diomedeans than Ythrians.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Jim!

Now that was interesting!

I think one reason we are "seeing" so many super Earths is because larger are easier for astronomers to detect, using the methods/technology currently available.

Ad astra! Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

Jim: seeing all those super-earths is a function of our inability to detect earth-sized planets, so far. When we get much bigger space telescopes... then we'll see.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Mr. Stirling!

Exactly.

Ad astra! Sean