There is a gunfight on Mars exactly as in a Western film. In the 1950's, I enjoyed Westerns a lot but preferred sf. I realized that I enjoyed pictures of men in spacesuits more than pictures of men on horseback. Many of my contemporaries preferred footballers. I still wonder about that a lot.
The main outcome of this Martian gunfight is that Fenn's fiancee, Kinna, is shot dead. Thus, Fenn suffers exactly the same kind of bereavement as Poul Anderson's series character, Dominic Flandry.
In the following chapter, Chuan begins to tell Fenn the Big Lie that is meant to distract and mislead humanity. Human beings are to be shown manufactured evidence of a cosmic civilization so that they will spend entire lifetimes entranced by this fiction instead of venturing out into the universe, beyond the control of the cybercosm.
Knowing from previous readings that this cosmic civilization is an elaborate falsehood makes it anti-climatic to reread what would otherwise have come across as a massive revelation by Chuan to Fenn. I will reread The Fleet Of Stars to the end but might not find much more to say about this concluding volume of Anderson's Harvest Of Stars future history.
Ad astra.
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