See:
Aldiss, Amis, Anderson, Asimov, Lewis
The crew of the Meteor become involved in the war between Pack and Herd on the planet between galaxies.
Nicholas van Rijn becomes involved in the war between Flock and Fleet on Diomedes.
The crew of the USS Benjamin Franklin become involved in the war between Vorlak and Kandemir in the local civilization-cluster.
So, yes, there was something to what Aldiss said. But Anderson's wars are better than many others.
See:
The Second Civilization-Cluster
If we find anything more, then we will add it either here or in a later post but that is a lot already.
Can human beings excel in as many ways as that? Well, as we point out, Anderson also wrote stories in which other intelligent species excelled. And covering every option is one way in which he himself excelled. Others ways were making other planetary environments real and sympathetic treatment of characters that he disagreed with.
Excelsior! (I am not quite sure what that means but it is certainly appropriate.)
Of the million civilization-clusters, several are Uru-speaking.
On Kandemir, fertile plains facilitated a nomad culture which domesticated animals, invented writing, government and technology and conquered cities where helots then worked at immobile tasks such as mining.
A hundred years ago, T'sjuda discovered Kandemir and hired Kandemirians as mercenaries for imperialism on primitive planets, also practiced by Xo and some other planets. Kandemirians became interstellar conquerors still held to their home planet by seasonal rites and even defeated and subordinated T'sjuda but the Vorlakka Draga then headed an opposing coalition.
I have to break off because we are getting ready to go out to The Hunt for Moriarty.
Keep rereading Anderson and Conan Doyle.
Carl Donnan, now Captain of the USS Benjamin Franklin, converses with Hlott Luurs, the Draga of Tolbek on Vorlak and president of the Dragar Council.
"They both spoke in Uru, a modified form of the language used by the first interstellar visitors to this region. Some such lingua franca was necessary throughout a cluster; every spaceman mastered it as part of his training. Uru was flexible, grammatically streamlined, and included standardized units of measurement. Any oxygen breather could pronounce its phonemes, or at least write its alphabet, well enough to be understood. In fact, several other clusters, their own civilizations first seeded by explorers of that ancient race, had adopted the same auxiliary speech." (p. 43)
("Cluster" means "civilization-cluster," not "galactic cluster.")
This admirable summary deserved to be quoted in full. Imagine spacefarers learning a lingua franca as part of their training. This language has been modified and streamlined. In its inter-species use, it has probably departed far from its original form.
The scenario in After Doomsday is indeed unique.
As a matter of fact, World Without Stars and After Doomsday each have a unique setting. In World Without Stars, a spaceship can make an instantaneous jump not only to another planetary system but even to another galaxy but must first accelerate to the relative velocity of its destination system or galaxy. Thus, any space journey does after all take time. However, human beings have unlimited time because, thanks to the antithanatic, they die only by accident or violence, not from disease or old age, and memories must be artificially edited so that a lot of people write journals. How long would they remain recognizably human?
In After Doomsday, a spaceship can cross the galaxy in months although there is no mention of any extra-galactic travel because there is more than enough to occupy a space travelling species not only within this galaxy but even in an immediate vicinity within the galaxy. There are a hundred billion stars, at least half of them with at least one life-bearing planet and many of these bearing intelligent life.
The superlight drive was invented once or many times. Some species explore. Others learn from the explorers. There is usually nothing to fear. There is room for all. Each planet is economically and politically self-sufficient. Most races are primitive or uninterested in space travel. However, among the few that are industrialized and outward looking, superlight tech spreads randomly like dandelion seeds. There is tourism and trade in non-essentials but each planet deals regularly only with others in its own immediate civilization-cluster because anything more than that would be too much. There are a million clusters numbering anything from one to one hundred planets.
A hundred and fifty years ago, a race that had been exploring space for centuries discovered Monwaing. Twenty years ago, the Monwaingi discovered Earth. A language of the first spacefaring race in a cluster is adapted for inter-species communication. Goldberg has studied scientific texts in Tantha and Uru as well as in translation. There is a sudden explosion of knowledge.
This novel is right about the size of the galaxy but optimistic about superlight and the number of intelligent species.
Another long way is taken by Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, from the exploration of the Saturnian system in the twenty first century to the exploration of the Cloud Universe cluster in another spiral arm of the galaxy several millennia in the future. Technic civilization has risen, fallen and been replaced between these two end-points. I reread the Technic History - and Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy - the way some people reread The Lord Of The Rings.
A spaceship or even a space fleet of fugitives from the Solar System can make a subjectively instantaneous but objectively light-speed jump across any distance, let us imagine twenty thousand light-years. Thus, they effectively put themselves beyond any further contact. First, they will almost certainly have ensured that no one else knows which way or how far they have gone. Secondly, even if it were known, a pursuit fleet sent to take any kind of action against them would not be able to return to the Solar System for another twenty thousand years. I suppose that a fanatical suicide mission is just about imaginable - but then no one back home would know whether that mission had succeeded. And the fugitives, if they survive, cannot retaliate for another twenty thousand years.
In Poul Anderson's After Doomsday, there was a superlight drive and a million civilization-clusters in the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds with very little inter-cluster contact simply because they were too many. The Long Way Home invites us to imagine an unknown number of colony planets and civilizations at different distances with no contact because of the light-speed limitation. Solar civilization does have contact, whether direct or indirect, with only about a dozen now independent human states within about two hundred light-years. Is that a diameter or a radius? Either way, it seems vast in the circumstances.
The text is very condensed. Three years pass between two chapters. In that time, human beings have led their allies to victory in the war against Kandemir. Grateful freed beings have let Donnan make his base on their planet. There has been time for the "The Battle of Brandobar" ballad to be composed and to be sung in another civilization-cluster where it is heard by the women of Terran Traders.
Several TV series could be set in those three years (a "three year mission"):
Chapter 8 is an interesting change, about the European women running Terran Traders, Inc., in an expanding free enterprise civilization-cluster but two of the eight pages are a fight scene. By innovating with profit sharing, systems analysis and motivational research, the women hope to become rich enough quickly enough to hire enough spaceships to search the galaxy for other human survivors. Meanwhile, Donnan hopes, by participating in the Kandemir-Vorlak war, to become notorious enough to attract the attention of any other human beings. Are there other human crews with similar schemes? It seems that some of them will succeed in overcoming the obstacles to the perpetuation of their species. In any case, in this particular fictional scenario, the million civilization-clusters in the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds would continue as before even if the human race were exterminated to its last member.
Within the local civilization-cluster, Kandemir and Vorlak, two planets orbiting different stars, are at war. The Kandemirians are:
"'Imperialists. They've already overrun a dozen worlds.'" (4, p. 37)
Maybe that bestows some spurious credibility on the wording of a secret treaty between Vorlak and the Soviet Union:
"-common cause of the peace-loving peoples against imperialist aggressors...unity in the great patriotic struggle-'" (5, p. 46)
The Vorlakka show this as evidence that it was not they that had destroyed Earth. Carl Donnan rightly:
"...didn't think that any nonhuman could have done the phrasing that exactly." (ibid.)
Poul Anderson, however, does a good job of reproducing Russian propaganda! That "...peace-loving..." is an empty phrase is shown by the terms of the treaty:
"'The Soviet Union was to produce for [the Vorlakka] a large amount of arms in certain categories, at a favorable price; and numerous of their military personnel were to serve [the Vorlakka] as auxiliaries, thereby gaining experience in modern warfare.'" (ibid.)
Donnan judges that the purpose was that:
"...the Soviets could quietly get ahead of every other country in the development of a really up-to-date war machine." (ibid.)
Add to all this that the treaty was signed not with representatives of any social class corresponding to a Vorlakkan proletariat but with "...Vorlak's warlords." (p. 42)
Peace-loving? War waging.
Donnan reflects that:
"The Communists never had given up their ambitions, even when the fluid situation after the Monwaingi arrived forced them to pull in their horns while they reassessed matters." (p. 46)
Here "The Communists..." clearly refers to the group ruling the Soviet Union at the time of the Monwaingi arrival. Has this word ever referred to another group of people with other aims? It has. Do we want to revive old arguments? I think not. But the issues are always with us and Poul Anderson's works cover the issues.
CS Lewis's novel, That Hideous Strength, shows some of his characters inwardly deceiving themselves in subtle ways. In Poul Anderson's Technic History, the first story in The Earth Book Of Stormgate and the last story in The Technic Civilization Saga both present clear examples of arrogance.
In "Wings of Victory," Webner arrogantly denies that the large winged organisms on Ythri can be intelligent. Turekian realizes not only how the larger flyers can be intelligent but also that they are about to attack and must mutiny against Webner to make his point.
In "Starfog," Vandange arrogantly denies that the Kirkasanters can have come from a "universe" such as they describe, where space is a bright fog. By going there, Laure discovers that the "Cloud Universe" is a globular cluster whose orbit takes it into the inner galaxy where it periodically collects new stars and stellar matter.
Complacency is splendidly displayed by Lord Hauksberg who, when Flandry has revealed that the Merseians had gone to great lengths to conceal the imminent destruction of the star, Saxo, and of the Terran Fleet with it, by a rogue planet, has the gall to say:
It seems that there was already some evidence for extra-solar planets when this book was first published in 1963.
"'Our intelligence reports, interrogation of prisoners, evaluation of explorers' observations, and so on, all indicate that three or four different species in this region possess the hyperdrive. The Adderkops themselves aren't certain about all of them. Space is so damned huge.'" (p. 567)
OK. We get it that space is big. But three or four species with hyperdrive? On "'...the very fringe of human civilization...'"? (p. 564) Then how many in the galaxy? Why do they not overlap and interact like the civilization-clusters in Poul Anderson's After Doomsday?
The Aenean rebels exiled by Dominic Flandry flee into another spiral arm. Do they enter another civilization-cluster? Why do exiles or explorers not arrive in known space from further away? Why not some very occasional intergalactic travel?
Intergalactic travel occurs:
In the Earth Book, the editor, Hloch, having recounted the history of the Polesotechnic League as far as van Rijn's arrival at Mirkheim, has reminded his readers of the eventual Babur War and then concluded with two Avalonian tales both told from youthful hover-points even though the first was written in her high old age by Judith Dalmady/Lundgren who was then drawing on the fresh memories of the protagonist, David Falkayn's grandson. Youth and age and beginnings and endings interact throughout the History. Hloch comments that The Earth Book Of Stormgate is ended, wishes his readers fair winds forever and flies above Mount Anrovil in the Weathermother. He has completed the story of the beginning of the colonization of Avalon.
In the concluding installment of the Technic History:
human civilizations have spread through several spiral arms of the galaxy;
a planetary population descended from the Aenean rebels who were expelled by Dominic Flandry rejoins interstellar civilization even though meanwhile its members have ceased to be human;
a new source of immense wealth, the "Cloud Universe" globular cluster, is about to be opened up to human prospectors and miners.
After seventeen volumes, a new beginning...
For oxygen-breathers, could there be a number of overlapping known spaces such that the Terrans know the Merseians who know X etc? In Anderson's After Doomsday, the galaxy is full of civilization-clusters. For convenience, interstellar travelers usually do business within their local cluster although they are free to visit others and even to explore the Magellanic Clouds but that is possible only because their superlight drive is many times faster than the Technic History hyperdrive. In Anderson's World Without Stars, space travel is faster again with instantaneous jumps even between galaxies in addition to which human lifespans have been extended indefinitely.
The Technic History is bound by a set of assumptions that limit both the speed of its characters' interstellar journeys and the lengths of their lives. However, within those limits, a massive history unfolds.
"Time Patrol," the opening story of the Time Patrol series;
the King Of Ys Tetralogy, historical fiction with an element of fantasy, co-written by Karen Anderson;
"The Nest," a time travel short story;
The People Of The Wind, one volume of the History of Technic Civilization;
After Doomsday, an sf novel.
In The People Of The Wind:
