Cluster (Cluster, volume 1) by Piers Anthony

[james_davis_nicoll]

Futuristic caveman Flint stands in the way of Andromeda's plot to steal the Milky Way's energy!

Cluster (Cluster, volume 1) by Piers Anthony

Comments

[rwpikul]

The only mundane way¹ of justifying an arrangement like that I can think of would be in assuming that a given world can only help maintain nearby worlds at a slightly lower tech level. So, unless you have a massive settlement program, worlds will either slip to what their population can support long term or they will drop however many steps below it takes to reach a world that can support itself, (e.g. if it takes three 'steps' to reach a tech level 12 world, you can maintain at least TL9).

This should create a roughly spherical regression pattern, at least until you start getting worlds that fully develop. Of course, you'll also get a quite sharp drop-off into mixed technology levels once you hit the point of not being able to maintain and operate imported starships.


More reasonably, you would likely get something of a fringe of low-tech 'failed' worlds around the edges of interstellar civilizations. Places that someone steeled for some reason but ended up not being able to attract either later settler waves or meaningful trade. It would be a fringe because worlds that get surrounded are at least going to get the trade and access that come from being between X and Y.

1: You can, or course, invoke magic, for instance: "The development and maintenance of scientific and technological capabilities relies on that species's influence on the psychic gestaltic field, something that takes both time and population to develop. It is very easy for a star-faring race to outrace their own influence, resulting in settlements that invariably regress."

[scott_sanford]

This is pretty how I see low-TL worlds happening in Traveller, one at a time and usually for one or more well understood reason. Frex:

Glump's World has a pleasant climate but basically no metals; all industrial products have to be shipped in. Fropp IV is only Jump-2 from the subsector capital but it's desperately poor; nobody builds factories there. Perfect Heavenly Contentment was called Normandy until 60 years ago when the population had a very peculiar religious revival movement; they used to have a lucrative robotics industry and may rebuild it someday, whenever they're ready to talk to the rest of the galaxy again. Ognat III has a population of 204; it may be worth visiting someday.

You know, Traveller stuff.

There will certainly be technological limits set by population - you need a lot of specialized skills to maintain a civilization, and that scales more than linearly as technology gets more complicated. One would expect that to

Flint's people know of agriculture and writing but... don't? (Some of them must know of the abacus and positional notation with zero, but they may have no need of arithmetic.) I vaguely recall, from reading the stories decades ago, some medieval European styled world.

I'm not sure that the magic answer doesn't hold together at least as well, in this setting. So maybe somehow each species has its own 'race mind' that's concentrated on its home world, such that two overlapping spheres don't aid each other? I guess?