Tuesday 23 July 2013

All Humanoids

Poul Anderson's character, Dominic Flandry, visits three kinds of extra-solar planet:

inhabited by humanoids;
inhabited by non-humanoids (much rarer);
colonized by human beings.

It is unlikely that there are either humanoid races or easily colonizeable extra-solar planets. However, unlike many of the extra-solar races in Star Trek, Anderson's humanoids are never interchangeable with human beings and his texts do highlight the difficulties of extra-solar colonization. Every detail of an alien environment, including local food sources, cannot be exactly right.

Sexual intercourse is sometimes possible with other races but never procreation. We see Flandry with a horned alien queen on the attached cover of Agent Of The Terran Empire but the series becomes less implausible when he deals instead with human colonists.

Much later in the series, descendants of human colonists isolated on a distant planet with high radiation levels have become unable to interbreed with mainstream humanity and thus are effectively a new species. Eventually, the human race would become many with no obvious common ancestry like the diverse animal species of Earth but Anderson did not extrapolate the Technic Civilization History to that level of species diversification.

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