The Traveler was a single early faster than light interstellar colony ship, lost in space. Its crew spent some years looking for Earth but did not find it. Therefore, they settled on an uninhabited terrestroid planet, Harbor, where they used automatic machinery to farm and a spaceboat to trade with another inhabited planet in the same system. However, some Harborites realize they they had preferred spacefaring so they set off on an endless voyage, becoming the first Nomads. Some of them will colonize planets whereas others will use automatic machinery to build more ships, thus becoming:
"...a fleet, a mobile city hurtling from sun to sun."
-Poul Anderson, "Gypsy" IN Anderson, Starship (New York, 1982), pp. 12-34 AT p. 32.
They expect to become:
"...the bloodstream of the interstellar civilization which was slowly gestating in the universe." (ibid.)
This is the role of James Blish's flying cities although they are instead compared to pollinating bees.
In The Peregrine
An interstellar civilization exists, protected by the Coordination Service. Within that civilization, each Nomad ship flies around its own trade circuit and they periodically meet at a planet outside known space called Rendezvous. The original endless voyage has been lost.
The Nomads will survive the Stellar Union.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Except, assuming FTL is possible, the kind of nomadic culture envisioned in "Gypsy" would not be practical. With FTL you don't need large crews living for generations aboard their ships. It would be far more economical, for civilian ships, that crews be small. That's exactly what we see in the Technic series, where many FTL Polesotechnic ships had only three, four, or five crew beings. It's more reasonable to think FTL ships would carry large numbers of people transporting them in a one-way journey to another planet.
I think considerations like these is why we don't see FTL interstellar nomads in the Technic stories. I believe interstellar "gypsies" would be practical only if STL tech was the best means of traveling between the stars, as we see in Anderson's Kith stories and STARFARERS.
This is yet another possible reason for why Anderson became so dissatisfied with the Psychotechnic series.
Ad astra! Sean
I wonder if getting lost in space in the way of "Traveler" could actually happen even given some random jump of hundreds or thousands of light years.
The Gaia space telescope (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft) ) has catalogued the 3D position of billions of stars, about 1% of the Milky Way. We can expect more such surveys to catalogue even more stars in the future. Would any starship leave without such a catalog stored in their computers? If they could not identify their location after the random jump from that catalogue I would expect them to immediately conclude they are too far from the solar system to get back using their normal drive, and decide the only option is to lock for a place to settle somewhere 'near' where the jump dumped them.
Post a Comment