Fully Realized Fictional Worlds

See the previous post and its combox here.

This opening passage of the first Wing Alak story, originally published in 1949, addresses political and military relationships between planetary governments and a Galactic government but does not describe any particular planet's physical environment or galactic location. The viewpoint character is on an extrasolar planet but also in a hotel room which could just as well have been in future New York. In that kind of sf, other planets were effectively empty stages for human-alien or even just human-human interactions.

Yet to come were the days when:

human beings explore Ythri out beyond Alpha and Beta Crucis;

Ythrians, employing some human beings, explore Gray, later renamed Avalon, which is in the same region of space;

human beings and Ythrians jointly colonize Avalon, first the Hesperian Islands, then the Coronan continent;

at last, Avalon is fully populated by both species and is part of the Domain of Ythri which is attacked by the Terran Empire;

thus, there are political and military interactions but between fully realized fictional worlds;

human beings have also colonized Hermes, Dennitza and other planets which are as fully realized as Ythri and Avalon.

I did not set out to post about the Technic History but have wound up doing so. But Wing Alak is still on our radar.