A Future History Or Not?

In "The Queen Of Air And Darkness" by Poul Anderson, human beings in slower than light spaceships have colonised several extrasolar planets, including Rustum, Beowulf and Roland. In "Home" by Anderson, human beings in slower than light spaceships have established but are now terminating scientific bases on several extrasolar planets, including Mithras.

These stories are the last two in Anderson's collection New America and the first two in his The Queen Of Air and Darkness and other stories. Anderson collections include redundancies that would have to be edited out of any Complete Works editions.

In New America, these two stories are preceded by four about the colonisation of Rustum. Those four in turn are sequels to the four Rustum History stories collected as Orbit Unlimited. In The Queen..., the two stories are followed by four others, all but one also featuring slower than light interstellar travel and extrasolar colonies.

Do these thirteen stories form a continuous sequence? Nine are definitely connected by common references to Rustum. Further, slower than light travel, extrasolar colonies and their related economic, political and ecological issues are strong common themes. However, the author's Foreword to The Queen... states that the stories in the book do not project a single future history. An italicised "Publisher's Note" in New America implies that both "The Queen Of Air And Darkness" (agree) and "Home" (disagree) fit into the Rustum History timeline. However:

in the Rustum series:
 there have been Atomic Wars;
Earth is ruled by a Federation;
there are enduring extrasolar colonies.

In "Home":
there has been a Solar War;
Earth is ruled by a Directorate;
there are terminated extrasolar bases.

These are different timelines. "Home" could have been called "Earthman, Come Home," which is the title of a James Blish collection. Anderson's characters reflect on history and argue about whether the terminated Mithran base should be turned into a colony. Would human beings expanding across the planet displace the pacific native Mithrans? In one chilling passage showing a Mithran point of view, we, though not the human characters, learn that if the human beings were to exceed certain limits, then a Mithran:

"...would be forced to kill. But he would continue to love as he did." (1)

Although "Home" is not consistent with Rustum, it might just form a very loose tetralogy with the three other interstellar stories in the collection. In "The Alien Enemy," the Directorate has a failed colony on Sibylla but surviving colonies on Zion, Atlas, Asgard and Lucifer. Did the Directors, after terminating bases, reverse their policy and initiate colonies?

"The Alien Enemy" has a remarkable surprise ending in which Anderson characters succeed against all the odds. Unable, with their limited resources, to survive on the inhospitable Sibylla, the colony's leaders had faked an alien attack in order to be recalled home. On Earth, they are given the challenge of developing the Sahara where, hardened by Sibylla, they succeed and, decades later, when a spaceman has returned from his next voyage, they are making a difference to Earth itself.

"The Faun" is set on Arcadia which could be another of the Directorate's colonies. "Time Lag" involves relativistic travel between Chertkoi and Vaynamo which could also have been colonized by the Directorate. I suggest that the nine Rustum History stories be collected in one volume and the "Home" four in another.

(1) Anderson, Poul, New America, New York, 1982, p. 253.

Three Paperbacks III

I now understand why the blurb of Poul Anderson's New America (TOR, New York, 1982) wrongly described the Rustumite colonists as "Jeffersonians" although their self-description, fully explained in the previous volume, Orbit Unlimited, is "Constitutionalists."

First, although the term "Constitutionalist" is present, it is not used a lot in the second volume. Secondly, the Rustumites have convened a Constitutional Convention to devise a libertarian government now that their population has grown enough to need more than a mayor and a council in a single town. We are not told the outcome of the Convention because the story is about a more urgent matter that must be settled first.

However, while preparing to participate in the Convention, Dan Coffin reads the Federalist Papers and thinks of Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison. A group of extrasolar colonists in James Blish's future history are called "Hamiltonians" and someone reading or browsing through New America must have thought that the Rustumites were "Jeffersonians" if not, indeed, "Washingtonians."

Of the four Dan Coffin/Rustum stories collected in New America, the third, "A Fair Exchange," is an extended discussion of economics while the fourth, "To Promote the General Welfare," is a discussion of both economics and politics. We read conversations in "A Fair Exchange" and speeches in "To Promote the General Welfare." Does this spoil them as stories? On the contrary, Anderson addresses basic issues while considering both the future of Earth and the idea of a new colony. We see Rustumite issues grow from physical survival to social well being. On a personal level, we see a bullied and frightened schoolboy grow into an old, respected, influential public figure and we see his large lowland dwelling, empty and haunted after his wife's death, filled again with younger members of his family. There is a sense of completion.

Between "To Promote the General Welfare" and "The Queen Of Air And Darkness," is this curious italicized passage:

"Publisher's Note:

"Here ends the story of High America. But other worlds than Rustum were to receive the seed of Earth. Each responded in its own way to the men and women who had fled their own ruined planet..." (p. 158)

Even odder, after the last story:

"And so end these chronicles of the folk who took the long road to the stars. And long it is, not at all like those here, nor the highways of other fictional universes. It is unlike them in another way, too. It is a road that is always open. It is real..." (p. 260) 

Who wrote these passages, Anderson or a TOR editor? The passage on p. 158 could be part of the fiction whereas the passage on p. 260 stands back from the fiction and refers to the possibility of a real interstellar voyage as discussed in the concluding article. The passages seem to be a rather contrived attempt to make a unity out of four Rustum stories, two non-Rustum stories and one piece of non-fiction?

Three Paperbacks II

New America by Poul Anderson collects seven items:

four stories set on the planet Rustum which had been introduced in Orbit Unlimited;

two other stories, "The Queen Of Air And Darkness" and "Home," which are also the first two stories collected in The Queen Of Air And Darkness and other stories;

an article on interstellar travel.

The four Rustum stories were first published in issues I-IV of Continuum, edited by Roger Elwood, 1973-'74. All are about the, now older, Dan Coffin who had been the child rescued from the Rustumite lowland in the concluding story of Orbit Unlimited. Thus, these four stories form a continuous sequence that is a sequel to the four that had been collected in Orbit Unlimited.

At the end of Orbit Unlimited, it had been discovered that Dan was a rare individual who could survive comfortably without needing a helmet in the high air pressure at Rustumite sea level and it had then seemed to be a foregone conclusion that he and his descendants would colonize all the surface of the planet that could not be reached by the majority of colonists who were confined to the plateau of High America.

However, Dan had for many years afterwards suffered from nightmares of his ordeal when lost in the lowland and threatened by a spearfowl. The new stories chronicle four further stages of his life:

first, he must be persuaded to join a mission to the lowland before he realizes that it is a place that he will return to again;

secondly, he realizes that, having settled in the lowland, he must marry a woman who shares his tolerance for the high air pressure, not Highland Mary but Eva;

thirdly, Eva and he have children and live well but need economic help, which Dan negotiates, from the more industrially developed High America;

fourthly, Dan, widowed but now a great grandfather, proposes that Rustum welcome five thousand new immigrants approaching from Earth and that their arrival be preceded by a joint research effort to find a way to enable anyone to live in the lowlands so that the new immigrants will not have to crowd the plateau.

We now know of five generations of Coffins. We first encountered Dan's father Joshua as a spaceship captain on Earth in the opening story of Orbit Unlimited where he conversed with the man who later became the first mayor of Rustum. Dan, not born until that concluding story of Orbit Unlimited, ends the first volume as a lost boy and the second as an elder statesman.

In an earlier post on Anderson's future histories, I wrote that all but one of the six stories in The Queen Of Air And Darkness and other stories were not incompatible with the Rustum History but will now reread that collection to confirm or disconfirm that statement.

Three Paperbacks I

I am looking at three paperbacks by Poul Anderson:

Orbit Unlimited (Pyramid Books, New York, 1961);

New America (TOR Books, New York, 1982);

The Queen Of Air And Darkness and other stories (NEL Books, London, 1977).

Orbit Unlimited collects four stories set respectively on Earth, in space, in Rustum orbit and on Rustum. The fourth story describes life on the plateau and a rescue expedition to the lowland. This concluding story, and thus also the book, has a positive ending:

a lost child is rescued;

his rescuers, the child's father and another man, are heroes;

the father, a strict puritan, has resolved some personal issues during the rescue;

the mayor had blackmailed the second man to accompany the father in order to counteract the colonists' tendency towards isolated agricultural selfishness - public duties performed freely from a sense of responsibility will minimize the need for coercive laws as the colony grows;

the boy, an exogene formerly bullied by his peers, is now a hero to them;

more importantly, he is a rare individual who can live comfortably in the high air pressure at sea level, thus he and his descendants will colonize the rest of the planet.

This positive ending is well expressed by the concluding sentences as the blackmailed but now happy rescuer recuperates:

"Svoboda didn't return to his book at once. He lay for a while gazing out the window, toward the horizon where the snowpeaks of Hercules upheld the sky." (p. 158)

I am currently rereading New America but can comment now that the title and the blurb are misleading. The latter refers to "...freedom-minded Jeffersonians..." whereas the book features not Jeffersonians in a place called New America but Constitutionalists on a plateau called High America. This book, a sequel to Orbit Unlimited, continues the story of Rustum and introduces other extrasolar colonies.

Rustum

Twenty light years away, Rustum, a planet of e Eridani, hotter and more oceanic than Earth and with one and a quarter terrestrial gravities, has a semi-permanent cloud layer separating two life zones (eg, lower spearfowl are larger) and containing nebulo-plankton browsed on by occasionally glimpsed cigar-shaped, jet-propelled air porpoises.

Theory: the dense air carries fine particles scoured by wind from surface rocks into the clouds where water drops dissolve out minerals which are consumed by microscopic organisms preyed on by larger life forms like the porpoises which rise by filling a bladder with biologically generated hydrogen, eat by sucking in air and plankton and move by blowing air out.

Vegetation is blue-tinged green, brown or yellow. Sea level air pressure is too high for most human beings who therefore colonized an above-the-clouds plateau, High America, where the Swift and Smoky Rivers from the western Centaur Mountains join to form the Emperor River. Hercules Mountains are to the south.

Rustum has two moons:

the outer Raksh changes apparent size as seen from Rustum, sometimes appearing twice the size of Luna as seen from Earth, and raises tides in a lowland lake;

Sohrab moves fast enough for its motion to be seen, like the hurtling moons of Mars in Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter series.

Three thousand colonists, transported from Earth in suspended animation, increase their numbers by both natural and exogenetic births. Little native life is edible so they grow terrestrial crops. Because the ecology supporting the crops is not yet firmly established, harvests are poor and most colonists must farm immense holdings with children transported to the Anchor village school in a publicly owned airbus. More scientifically oriented colonists become, e.g., iron miners or lowland explorers, competing with farmers for machinery and differing culturally, being more pragmatic and hedonistic.

The day-night cycle is longer than Earth's so Rustumites must be active at night although Dan Coffin wonders why they could not adapt to forty hours of activity and twenty of sleep. 

Public policy is settled by televisual discussion without formal government. Military defense is unnecessary and public services are voluntary but one elected official, the mayor, administers laws, presides in debates, judges disputes, oversees medicine and education and collects taxes.

Most sea level explorers must wear helmets but a minority who can live there comfortably settle and begin the colonization of the entire surface of Rustum.

Historical Dramas III

In Poul Anderson's Orbit Unlimited:

Torvald Anker founds the Constitutionalist philosophy;
the younger Laird leads the movement without meeting Anker;
Laird disappears, Governmental assassination suspected;
surprise ending - a Government Commissioner had for devious reasons paid an actor to play Laird, then retire with a new face and name.

So Laird is a historical figure who could be enacted in films but he himself was a role played by an actor on the stage of history and no one will ever know. Is that possible? Could it even have happened somewhere, some time? (I don't think so.)

As part of his deception, Commissioner Svoboda manufactures a long standing hostility between himself and his own son but thus manoeuvres the son and his family to a happy ending. Could anyone really do this? Why not just openly cooperate with and help the son?

Sometimes we remember an idea from an sf story without remembering either title or author. CS Lewis even had to make some acknowledgements on this basis. I read a novel in which a time traveller had, for some reason, paid an unemployed actor to play the role of Mycroft Holmes for the couple of times Mycroft appears in the Holmes Canon. Imagine returning home to the future to read or reread Doyle knowing that you had paid a guy to speak Mycroft's lines.

Poul Anderson's Time Patrolmen rub shoulders with Holmes and Watson. Thus, the timeline protected by the Patrol is not ours. The Time Patrol series and the Holmes Canon, fictions here, are true accounts there.

My American correspondent, Sean M Brooks, reminded me that another sf novel, Double Star by Robert Heinlein, has an idea similar to that in Orbit Unlimited. There is a real politician but he is kidnapped. To prevent a diplomatic embarrassment, his supporters persuade an actor to impersonate him. (During a private audience with the Emperor, the actor is asked, "Who are you, by the way? You have obviously not come here to assassinate me..." Told the truth, the Emperor remains silent.) The politician is rescued but dies and the actor continues in the role... He has effectively changed his identity. (I have known people who have changed their identities but not on that scale.)

Double Star has the plot of The Prisoner Of Zenda by Anthony Hope with three differences. Zenda:

is not sf;
has an additional romantic element - the impersonator would like to stay with the impersonated Prince's wife;
has the other possible ending - the kidnapped Prince is rescued, does not die and resumes his throne.

In a story within the story of The Eighty Minute Hour by Brian Aldiss, a British agent and Old Etonian plays the role of Tito. I have confirmed this memory on the Internet but have not yet found the reference by browsing through the novel. That is where my knowledge of this curious speculation rests at present. Might some of our public figures be professional actors? - or should I rephrase that question?

Svoboda

In an earlier post, "Orbit Unlimited," I summarized as much fictitious sociological information as possible in a few sentences in order to convey how much of such information Poul Anderson imparts in a few pages, in this case in the first nine pages of Orbit Unlimited. I omitted personal information on the viewpoint character Svoboda although this is also socially significant.

Sold young to a Brotherhood thiefmaster but wounded at twelve by a guard's explosive slug, Svoboda, re-apprenticed to a fence, learned to read and write, thus starting his ascent from Lowlevel to the Guardian Commission. His estimated age of sixty is ancient for Lowlevel but middle-aged for an upper-level Citizen or a Guardian. He has read Alice In Wonderland but knows that this is uncommon. Breaking out of the dead end Astronautical Department where his superiors had hoped to contain him, he has become Commissioner of Psychologics and now proposes to undermine Constitutionalism because that movement threatens radical social change.

A character with whom Anderson wanted us to sympathize fully would have stayed with Astronautics, turned it out of its dead end and encouraged gradual social change with the help of the Constitutionalists. Svoboda has the redeeming feature of a sense of humor. He is powerful, confident of his ability to break a fellow Commissioner, and able to influence the Premier.

What Anderson plausibly conveys here, as in the first Kith story and in Mirkheim, is conflict between socioeconomic classes in an imagined future society that is strongly grounded in knowledge of past societies.

Addendum, 23/7/12: By the end of Part One, it turns out that Svoboda, like an Asimovian psychohistorian, has manipulated a lot of people towards a satisfactory Andersonian conclusion. He will be dead soon but his son will go to Rustum. The idea that it would be possible to manipulate history by hiring an actor to play the role of the leader of a movement, then retire him while leaving open the possibility that he had been murdered, is pretty amazing.

Orbit Unlimited

As works of science fiction go, the four story collection, Orbit Unlimited by Poul Anderson, is an extremely restrained account of the colonisation of an extrasolar planet:

at the end of the first story, a slower than light space fleet leaves the Solar System;

the second story describes an incident en route when the option of turning back must be considered;

the third story describes an incident when the fleet is in orbit around the new planet, Rustum;

thus, the colonists are settled on the surface and starting to reproduce there only in the concluding story.

The reader is pleased to learn that there are sequels, including a story in which Rustum must cope with a second wave of colonists from Earth and another story set on a colony in a different planetary system. As in other series, Anderson gradually broadens his narrative perspective.

The opening pages of the first story quickly establish a detailed sociopolitical background of high tech but overpopulated urban decay, with Atomic Wars in the past. Some terminology is familiar from other works but each future society envisaged by Anderson is unique. The (unelected) Guardian Commission of the Federation meets in teleconference:

Premier Selim, before a window opening on palm trees;
Svoboda, Commissioner for Psychologics, in his departmental tower surrounded by airborne filth in a city on an Atlantic coast;
Security Chief Chandra in India at sunrise;
Rathjen, Commissioner for Astronautics;
Novikov of Mines;
Larkin of Pelagiculture;
Dilolo of Agriculture.

That Astronautics is decaying, with a Venerian colony discontinued, is a sure sign that this Federation will not have the author's approval. The Commission discusses Constitutionalism, a philosophy founded by a man called Anker who advocated basing thought patterns on the constitution of (empirical) reality, not on mysticism, although, in North America, despite recent Oriental immigration, the term "Constitution" retains for the English-speaking half of the population another meaning that had even instigated an anti-Federation Rebellion twenty years previously.

Constitutionalism may inspire middle class professionals on whom the Guardians depend to seek political power for their class so Svoboda proposes to close Constitutionalist schools by reviving free compulsory education, though not for the illiterate eighty per cent of the population of course. Thus, in the nine pages of section 1, Anderson sketches an entire society and sets the scene for persecuted Constitutionalists emigrating to Rustum.

Andersonian Paragraphing II by Sean M Brooks

I think it would be a good idea to continue my discussion of how skillfully Poul Anderson crafted opening paragraphs for his stories and novels. I also want to comment a bit on his literary style.

From Part One of ORBIT UNLIMITED (Gregg Press, 1978), page 7:

"Svoboda was about sixty years old. He did not know his exact age. The Lowlevel seldom counted such, and his earliest memory was of weeping in an alley while rain fell past an overhead beltway that roared. Afterward his mother died and someone who claimed to be his father but probably wasn't sold him to Inky the thiefmaster."

Even from an author who composed many striking opening paragraphs, this one has stayed in my mind. An effective paragraph arouses many thoughts and questions. Why did living in the "Lowlevel" make an accurate counting of age and other forms of record keeping unlikely? What exactly was this "Lowlevel"?

How did the child Svoboda end up weeping in an alley and then being sold as a slave after his mother died? What kind of society was this?

The next example I'll quote from and comment on is from A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS. More accurately I'll quote the opening paragraphs of the preface and the first chapter.

From the preface of A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS:

"How shall we tell it, brothers, the tale of Bodin's raid? Whence can we draw the words of wrath and sorrow, the words of valor and vengeance? Who today is a poet such as Andrei Simich, singer of heroes?"

As was so often the case this paragraph was designed to elicit questions from readers. Who was Bodin and what was his raid? Where and against whom was this raid? I also note how the unnamed narrator compared himself unfavorably to a poet named Andrei Simich.

The first paragraph of Chapter I of A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS (Gregg Press, 1979) is an example of a short two sentences paragraph which goes:

"Every planet in the story is cold--even Terra, though Flandry came home on a warm evening of northern summer. There the chill was in the spirit."

Brief though it was this paragraph stimulates both questions and evokes a mood. Where are these "cold" planets? Why does coming home on a pleasant summer evening brings a chill to the spirit? It makes the reader feel an ominous sense of foreboding and anxiety. In other words, evocative!

A few questions also come to mind about how Anderson writes. That is, what is his natural voice or style of writing? A few comments from other writers or editors suggests some answers.

For example, this is what Tom Easton wrote for the preface in Volume 3 of THE COLLECTED SHORT WORKS OF POUL ANDERSON: THE SATURN GAME (NESFA Press, 2010):

"His style, though it could wax poetic in "The Saturn Game" (1981), was always easy, conversational, and accessible; and it dealt with topics dear to the heart of every science fiction fan. In fact, he introduced us to some of those topics."

Broadly speaking, what kind of stories did Poul Anderson write? In the prefatory essay he contributed to ADMIRALTY (NESFA Press, 2011), David G. Hartwell made some very telling remarks on page 10. He wrote:

"His heroes are heroic and strong in the slightly tragic vein of 19th century Romanticism--often they have suffered some earlier emotional wound--but blended in is a practical streak, an allegiance to reason and to knowledge that is a hallmark of hard science fiction characters, that Heinlein and Campbell tradition referred to above. You know a fair amount about what they are feeling, but what really matters is what they do, regardless of how they feel."

What Hartwell said about Anderson's heroes having "...a practical streak, an allegiance to reason and to knowledge" applies at least as strongly to his fantasies as to his hard SF. One example of this being THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS, whose hero is a 20th century engineer who more than once used his scientific knowledge to solve problems in an alternate universe where the Carolingian legends were literally true.

To again quote Hartwell (page 10 of ADMIRALTY): Anderson "...most often wrote about strong men and women pitted against the challenge of survival in the face of the natural universe. Some of them die. But Anderson was optimist enough to see beyond the dark times into both a landscape, sometimes a starscape, and a future of wonders--for the survivors. Anderson's future is not for the lazy or the stay-at-homes. He was fairly gloomy about current social trends, big government, repression of the individual, so he catapulted his characters into a future of new frontiers, making them face love and death in vividly imagined and depicted environments far from home."

Hartwell cited as examples stories like "Kyrie" and novels such as THE MAN WHO COUNTS. Many, many others could be listed.

So much more could be said and quoted about Anderson's skill in writing opening paragraphs and as a literary stylist. I have, however, written enough for the purposes of this essay.

"The Vacant Interstellar Spaces"

Poul Anderson's Brain Wave is noteworthy for its galactic connection and its change to human nature. (See posts earlier this month.) What it did not need was the interstellar travel that became a major feature of Anderson's later science fiction. Human beings express their freedom and maintain their dynamism simply by traversing interstellar distances.

In Brain Wave, the reasoning is:

the premise of the novel is a sudden significant increase in global intelligence levels;
it follows that many people will learn about science for the first time and that many already working in the sciences will make new theoretical and technological discoveries very quickly;
these will include the very rapid building and launching of a fleet of faster than light spacecraft (powered by a psi field, which ties in with the increase in mental abilities).

People of enhanced intelligence fly these starships through atmosphere and galaxy and land them anywhere on the ground more readily than you or I drive and park a car. In a matter of months, they have observed fourteen inhabited extra-solar planets, discovering, e.g., tailed barbarians, centaurs with local interplanetary flight and three species of hydrogen breathers on a single giant planet, and even measuring their intelligence levels. Before long, all the enhanced human beings bequeath Earth to former morons and imbeciles, whose intelligence has now risen to the former norm, and go off to become a guiding presence for lesser intelligences throughout the universe, while now linguistically able dogs and chimpanzees cooperate with the former morons on Earth. An improbable scenario, especially since a more important topic for a novel would have been the intellectual control of instinct that, we are told, results from the increase in intelligence. (One character makes a good critique of the cultural specificity of IQ tests.)

The later Anderson would have acknowledged that, even if intelligence were increased, the laws of physics might not grant us the freedom of the universe as easily as that. And I would expect the enhanced intelligences to retain different interests and purposes, some of them remaining on or near Earth.

In Anderson's later novels, Orbit Unlimited, The Boat Of A Million Years and Harvest Of Stars, groups that are thwarted or stifled at home assert their freedom by departing at sub-light speeds to colonise extrasolar planets. If, in our future, such voyages become both possible and necessary, then they are to be encouraged but, meanwhile, freedom is to be found on Earth and in the Solar System. I do agree that, for long term racial survival, we need to get off Earth:

first, an asteroid defence system;
then, solar-powered, self-sustaining habitats;
next, exploration of the outer planets and the Oort Cloud.

To survive there, we will need to take our environment with us and therefore will not be dependent on finding any (improbable) uninhabited but habitable planets further away.  

STL and Social Change

In Poul Anderson's Orbit Unlimited, Tau Zero, Harvest Of Stars, Starfarers and The Boat Of A Million Years, human beings cross interstellar distances at slower than light (STL) speeds and colonize other planets. In Starfarers, Boat and "The Queen Of Air And Darkness," which is set in the same future history as Orbit Unlimited although in a different planetary system, they also contact extrasolar intelligences.

The idea of STL interstellar travel raises several questions.

(i) How do crew members remain sane and interact with each other during long voyages?
(ii) What do they find in extrasolar systems: life; intelligence; habitable planets?
(iii) If they return home, how much will their home have changed in their absence? (Will they meet or be "aliens" on their return?)

Potentially, a long novel or an entire series could follow the career of a ramjet captain as he completes say two complete circuits between Earth and several extrasolar colonies: beginning and ending on Earth and also visiting Earth at the midpoint? Each return to a particular planet would be an arrival in a later historical period or even in a new civilization. Larry Niven's Leshy Circuit series was a first step in this direction.

The hero of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War returns from interstellar war to a changed Earth, then re-enlists in the war because he cannot adjust to life on the changed Earth.

Anderson shows us how male and female crew members interact with each other although they can also resort to interactive virtual reality or even, in some futures, to interactions inside conscious computer systems. In Starfarers, alternating chapters show us:

life inside a spaceship on a ten thousand year round trip;
life meanwhile in the Solar System and on some extrasolar planets;
thus, a single volume future history in which:

the starfarers of the title evolve into the "Kith" interstellar traders of earlier short stories;
armed nation states persist and expand into space so that there are wars, e.g., for possession of valuable asteroids;
there is also a succession of undemocratic regimes and new religions.

I remember that the spaceship encountered non-humanoid aliens and returned to a radically changed Earth. However, my time with Anderson is now divided between rereading and blogging. Since, currently, I have reread only to page 90 of 495 in Starfarers, there will now be an intermission...