One of the things that has always attracted me to science fiction is its invented worlds and universes, or perhaps the fact it can invent worlds and universes. Most such worlds are, unfortunately, little more than a thin veneer over the time of writing — men in hats sf, and all that — at least when it comes to the science fiction of last century. But not all. Some writers built universes, sometimes populated by humans and aliens, sometimes just by humans, some only as big as the Solar System, some larger than the Milky Way. The level of invention varied, as did the depth of world-building. Since English-language science fiction was dominated by the US (and the genre is arguably a US invention), most worlds in these invented universes were monocultures and presented only minor variations on contemporary US culture. (The cultures of other nations, on the other hand, often acted as stand-ins for the cultures of alien races.)
I’ve always loved GDW’s Traveller role-playing game because its setting, the Third Imperium, may have been, as it were, paper-thin during the game’s first few years, but it went on to develop an enormous degree of depth and width. Nowadays, we’d say it was crowd-sourced, given that a lot of the background was created over several decades by people other than the game’s original writers. But that was its strength.
One science fiction universe I’ve always suspected was one of the inspirations for Traveller is Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth. It occupies that fuzzy area between space opera and hard sf: vast distances, thousands of worlds, alien races, ancient lost civilisations… but definite clear nods in the direction of the laws of physics, and a generally rational approach to science and technology. It’s a well-populated fuzzy area, and was especially popular in the 1970s.
The Humanx Commonwealth was formed when humanity met the alien thranx, who resemble pony-size ants. The two races hit it off immediately, and formed a powerful political union. The Humanx Commonwealth was also formed when Foster dropped its name into his debut novel, The Tar Aiym-Krang (1972, USA), which is not actually set in the Humanx Commonwealth, but features a human-thranx duo, which gives Foster opportunity for an info-dump…
Flinx is a teenage orphan on Moth, an independent world only a short step away from being a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”. He doesn’t know his origins (it’s eventually explained in a prequel, For Love of Mother-Not (1982, USA)), and he is a gifted thief and con artist. He has a pet “mini-dragon”, Pip, which is not native to Moth, and is actually probably more than just a pet.
One night, Flinx inadvertently witnesses a mugging. Surprisingly, Pip flies in to the rescue, but is too late to save the victim. It dispatches one of the muggers, and Flinx kills the other. No explanation for Pip’s intervention is given.
Later, Flinx is hired as a guide by two adventurers, a human and a thranx, who had been expecting to meet a contact on Moth (like all sf of this type, being on a planet means being in its one and only major city). The two ask Flinx to give them a guided tour of the city, Drallar, and they end up, in a blatantly engineered encounter by the two adventurers, in the tower of a powerful merchant. They recruit the merchant to a mission to recover a fabled artefact built by the long-dead Tar-Aiym: the krang, which could be either a weapon, a musical instrument, or both. Like bagpipes.
But first the two adventurers need the map they were supposed to be given by their contact. Who just happens to be the poor sod Flinx failed to save from being murdered. Fortunately, Flinx took the map from the dead body.
The party, now including the merchant’s pilot, bodyguard and concubine (sadly, not the same person), sets off for the world where the map indicates the krang can be found. A rival merchant attempts to stop them, engineering an encounter with an AAnn cruiser (the alien race the Humanx Commonwealth defeated in a war several decades previously). The party finds the krang, which is inside a huge pyramid in the middle of an ancient city on a deserted world, but have no idea what it is or how to make it work. Then a ship of the rival merchant turns up, and something wakes up the krang…
When I first read The Tar-Aiym Krang back in the early 1980s, it was the first book of a quartet, comprising it and Bloodhype (1973, USA), Orphan Star (1977, USA) and The End of the Matter (1977, USA). In 1983, Foster began extending the Flinx & Pip series, first with For Love of Mother-Not, then Flinx in Flux (1988, USA). Now the series consists of fifteen novels, the last published in 2017. Concurrently, Foster also expanded his universe in a number of standalone novels, beginning with Icerigger (1974, USA).
I’m guessing the somewhat abrupt nature of The Tar-Aiym Krang’s plot is because it was Foster’s debut novel. The party finds a map to the artefact, the party travel to the artefact, the party learn the truth of the artefact. End of story. The krang proves, unsurprisingly, more powerful than any technology known to the Humanx Commonwealth, and gifts Flinx with mind-power — but it feels like the ramifications of this were ignored, because Foster hadn’t expected to need a follow-up. I have no idea if this was the case. Certainly, Foster went on to have a long and successful career, and also wrote the novelisations of a number of well-known genre films. He is still being published today.
But one thing about debut novels in genre fiction, which is far less true today than it was in the 1970s… back then, publishers could afford to drop a new author into the market to see how they performed. These days it’s instant success or nothing. The novel Foster submitted is likely close to the published version of The Tar-Aiym Krang we can read today. And there’s good reason to believe that…
Because the writing is terrible.
It is in fact really bad. Foster appears to be channeling Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy (1957, UK), which itself probably owed much to Kipling’s Kim (1901, UK). But Foster’s strategy for suggesting an historical dimension to his invented worlds, like Moth, is to use a weird cod-Shakespearean English in dialogue. I am, I admit, reaching here, as the dialogue is not recognisably Shakespearean; but neither is it twentieth-century American English.
“Your suggestion is not humorful, mother.”
“He usually keeps it in his blouse, which bulges slightly in consequence.”
“Yes, I’ll assume the conveyance.”
Those are from the first chapter alone, and to be honest I couldn’t be bothered to trawl through the rest of the book for other examples, nor was I foresighted enough to bookmark them when I read the book. But you get the picture. Foster was a newbie author when he wrote The Tar Aiym-Krang, and it’s plain from the prose.
And the plotting.
And, likely, from the character of Flinx too, who ends the novel with mind-powers apparently completely unknown in the Humanx Commonwealth. It seems bizarrely short-sighted to turn your main character into a super-human in the first novel of a series, especially since the whole point about Flinx is that, like Kipling’s Kim, he inhabits the lowest levels of society…
Flinx’s adventures continued in Orphan Star, the third book of the original quartet. The second book, Bloodhype, is actually the eleventh book according to the series internal chronology. I’ll keep on reading the books, of course, because the idea of a fictional universe in which a number of novels are set is one that appeals to me — and by that, I mean a universe in which unrelated novels (or short stories) are set, rather than a trilogy or a series following a single plot or story arc.
A universe, in other words, that stands apart from the stories that take place in it, that is not a simply an emergent phenomenon of a single story.
It’s one of the things about science fiction that I find really appealing.
