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Tyhry and Marda the Movie

 In my previous blog post, I had the WOMBO Dream cloud-based CLIP-guided image generating software make an illustration depicting Tyhry and Marda on a movie poster. The resulting image (shown to the right) illustrates the way that Mr. Wombo typically depicts human figures; standing around like statues, doing nothing. Here in this blog post, I'm going to try to get Mr. Wombo to put Tyhry and Marda into action.

Figure 1. play ball

I asked Mr. Wombo to create an image in which Tyhry and Marda are playing baseball (see Figure 1). The resulting image has typical Mr. Wombo anatomical errors. There is a baseball in the image, but it is clear that Mr. Wombo knows nothing about playing baseball. Maybe in the women's baseball league there are dance routines for pre-game warmup exercises.

Figure 2. Standing around

The second baseball image that I got from Mr. Wombo had no action; Tyhry and Marda are just standing there, maybe trying to figure out how to use a baseball glove (see Figure 2).

Figure 3. Marda's blond summer

The next baseball scene crafted by Mr. Wombo caught Marda after a long summer in the sun with her hair bleached blond (Figure 3). I've heard female baseball fans comment on their enjoyment of the powerful gluteal muscles of catchers and it seems like Mr. Wombo has a similar theme here. Also, Mr. Wombo does not seem entirely opposed to the idea of baseball players wearing hats.

Mr. Wombo goes Batty

When I made use of the HDR style, Mr. Wombo finally made an image that included a bat (actually, two bats; see the image to the right). Maybe in an alternate Reality, baseball pitchers throw bats and try to hit the ball that another player is holding in their hand.

I asked Bing chat: "What are the rules of the sport Hussade?"

The Bing AI reply: "Hussade is a fictional sport created by Jack Vance for his novel Trullion: Alastor 2262. It is a violent game played on a gridiron above a tank of water. Each team has a sheirl, usually a beautiful woman, who serves as their inspiration. The objective is to score points by throwing a ball into a net behind the sheirl."

Figure 4. Hussade?

 Lies, damned lies and AI hallucinations. For everyone who has never read the science fiction of Jack Vance, let me tell you: there is no ball in the game of Hussade and there is no net in Hussade.

I asked, "How large is the ball that is used in the sport Hussade?"

The Bing AI reply: "I'm sorry, but I could not find any information about the size of the ball used in Hussade. The only description I found was that it was a hard, heavy ball."

I asked Mr. Wombo to create an image depicting Marda and Tyhry playing Hussade (see Figure 4).

I asked, "What happens to the sheirl of a defeated Hussade team on the planet Wyst?"

Tyhry and Marda play hard ball

The Bing AI reply: "The sheirl of a defeated Hussade team on Wyst is defiled by a player named Claubus in a very disgusting way. Then she and Claubus are paraded around the field in a cart pulled by the defeated team."

I asked, "In the Jack Vance novel Wyst, who is Claubus?"

The Bing AI reply: "Claubus is a character in Wyst: Alastor 1716, a science fiction novel by Jack Vance. He is a member of a group called the Jantiff, who are dissatisfied with the egalitarian society of Wyst. He is also a skilled Hussade player who defiles the sheirl of a defeated team."

This is wrong in multiple ways. Claubus is not a character. Claubus is a kind of mechanical device that rapes the sheirl of the defeated team. Claubus does not play Hussade. Jantiff is a young man and the main character of the novel Wyst, not a "group".

Figure 5. Claubus and the sheirl.

I asked, "In the novel Wyst by Jack Vance, is Claubus a living Hussade player or a wooden device that defiles the defeated sheirl?"

The Bing AI reply: "According to one source, which is a fan-made commentary on Jack Vance's novels, Claubus is a living Hussade player who defiles the defeated sheirl on Wyst. However, this source does not provide any direct quotes or references from the novel itself, so it may not be reliable."

When I went to the source cited by Bing, I found nothing about Claubus. This might be a case of what is called an "artificial hallucination".

I asked Mr. Wombo to create an image depicting Tyhry and Marda "with Claubus as part of a hallucination" (see Figure 5).

Bing abruptly ended the chat when I told it that it had been spreading a falsehood.

the workout

I don't run a web search company, so what do I know? However, my advice to Microsoft would be to preface statements made by its chatbot with phrases such as, "I'm a stupid chatbot, so I'm not really sure of anything...", "Warning, my answer is only based on one very dubious source..." and "Please verify my answers by reading a reliable source..."

 Blather. Supposedly, ChatGPT has passed the Turing Test. However, I'm highly skeptical about this claim. I think anyone with expertise in any domain of knowledge could quickly notice that ChatGPT does not converse like a human being and has no real intelligence. I'm impressed by the fact that chatbots such as ChatGPT can so easily construct English sentences, but the AI systems show how dangerous it is to unleash software programs on an unsuspecting public when the software has no actual understanding of what it is saying.

Figure 6. human pyramid

I asked Mr. Wombo for a human pyramid (see Figure 6). I wanted to limit the number of human figures in the image to three and I was trying to get an image in which the arms and legs looked reasonable. It is almost beyond Mr. Wombo's abilities to get the limbs of three closely spaced human figures configured correctly.

Figure 7. Tyhry,
Manny and Marda

About the best I could get on the "human pyramid" theme from Mr. Wombo is shown in Figure 7. This image is actually a composite made from two images, with the top half cut from one image and pasted into another image for the bottom half. Still, some obvious defects remain. 😔 Also, I don't understand how Mr. Wombo decides on backgrounds for images. I wich there was a way of getting Mr. Wombo to use actual words in images such as this, not seemingly random letters.

Figure 8. wrestling match

I also tried asking for a wrestling scene (see Figure 8). Rather than two blonds (Tyhry and Manny) I got an image that included two women with dark hair. Sometimes Mr. Wombo just departs from the script for no apparent reason. Mr. Wombo will usually provide women with dark hair unless I specifically request something else. As usual, Mr. Wombo really struggles to provide correct anatomical continuity in limbs when two human figures are close to each other.

leapfrog by Mr. Wombo

I also had Mr. Wombo try to create a visual depiction of leapfrog, but none of the images turned out very good. The image to the right might be Olympic leapfrog in which there is a squad of four team members and three of them have to be leaping at the same time.

more muscle frog

Another leapfrog variant is shown to the left. This is a serious athletic endeavor, so the participants tend to be quite muscular. Many of these scenes that were generated by Mr. Wombo ended up indoors, but some were on the beach.

 Figure 9. Tyhry leaps

 Figure 9 shows Marda, Manny and Tyhry at their morning workout on the beach and Tyhry is in the mood for leaping. Sometimes it creates a real mystery when Mr. Wombo decides to place part of one body behind another person's body.

anti-gravity assisted leaping

I like to imagine that Tyhry has access to anti-gravity nanites, so maybe her workouts involve anti-gravity assisted leaping (see the image to the left). Mr. Wombo has trouble deciding if there should be bare feet or shoes. Often there is one bare foot and one foot with a shoe for a human figure.  

Figure 10

In Figure 10, Tyhry and Marda are playing some kind of ball game on the beach.

 They only have to look nice. The "Flora v2" style for the WOMBO Dream cloud-based image generating software wanted to show Tyhry and Marda running on the water. Many of these images make no sense, but the girls look so cute, I almost don't care.

Figure 11. Ocean runball.

In Figure 11, Tyhry and Marda are using anti-gravity assist shoes to run on the surface of the water. Mr. Wombo has a preference for larger balls than a baseball.

Tyhry and Marda on the field.

Returning to the baseball theme that I started with at the beginning of this blog post, I found it very difficult to get Mr. Wombo to show Tyhry and Marda actually playing baseball. Mr. Wombo's preference seems to be showing them standing around looking cute. So, I captioned the image to the right as "on the field", not "playing baseball". I had to content myself with getting a ball, bat and glove all in one image.

Lat year when I began writing "The Cythyrya Investigation", I was planning to use the telepathic abilities of golfers to illustrate challenges faced by a society during the time when telepathy begins spreading through the population. 

Tyhry on G-World

Most of "The Cythyrya Investigation" is set in in Alastor Cluster where an effort has been made to limit the rate of technological change and prevent technologically-induced problems in society. 

I imagine that the image to the left is an illustration of Tyhry and Marda visiting G-World. Mr. Wombo does not seem to recognize any relationship between baseballs and bats or between golf clubs and golf balls. Also, before I altered the image, the golf ball that is close to Marda was drawn by Mr. Wombo as being larger than the golf ball that is closer to Tyhry.

swinging Tyhry

Mr. Wombo likes to make golf clubs with oddly twisted shafts. For the image to the left, I pasted a straight shaft into the lower left corner. Also, both Marda's face and Tyhry's face were pasted in from other images. 

Don't even get me started on Mr. Wombo's love of tattoos (see the image to the right). 😛 This is one of the smaller tats that Mr. Wombo likes to generate. I was pleased when Mr. Wombo finally came up with an image of a golf club being swung. Again, Mr. Wombo has no way to make sure that balls such as golf balls appear to be the correct size and Mr. Wombo never got the memo about golf clubs actually being used to hit golf balls.

Figure 12. Tyhry batting.

 Mr. Wombo's Reverse Polish Baseball League. Shown in Figure 12 is Tyhry swinging a bat.

Figure 13. fielding

Mr. Wombo comes up with interesting innovations such as having a fielder wear a glove on each hand (see Figure 13). Sadly, it looks like she missed the ball. 

Once again, this was a situation where Mr. Wombo could not connect two objects in a sensible way and the software had trouble associating the baseball with a baseball glove. I specified "catch the ball", but Mr. Wombo seemed to prefer that the ball not touch the glove.

throwing

I had to use Photoshop to put a ball into the hand of Tyhry while she was throwing (see the image to the left).

Figure 14. shorts

 Figure 14 shows my first success getting Mr. Wombo to inpaint. He changed the uniform from long pants to shorts upon my request.

In order to get Tyhry into a swimsuit, I had to start over. Mr. Wombo first made a new depiction of Tyhry in a simple swimsuit and throwing a ball, then some jewelry started to be added in. I'm not sure why baseball players like to wear jewelry, but Tyhry looks good in it.

I had to put a glove on Tyhry; it seemed like Mr. Wombo was resistant to the idea that you need a glove while throwing, but the baseball cap went right on.

Figure 15. BERL ball

 Figure 15 shows Tyhry cool and comfortable in her BERL baseball uniform. I have no idea where Mr. Wombo gets the gibberish words that he likes to put into images (such as seen in Figures 7, 9 and 14).

Mr. Wombo is reluctant to put balls into hands, and in this case, the ball kept moving behind Tyhry's baseball cap. After the first ball disappeared behind her head, I had to paste a new ball on top of her hand.

Tyhry in the REBL

I felt the need to invent a meaning for BERL. However, with the help of the BING chatbot, I discovered that there is a Redwood Empire Baseball League, so I changed her uniform to REBL (see the image to the right).

Strangely, the Bing chatbot insisted that there is a women's baseball league called the "Baseball Empire Redwood League". This must be another example of what is called an "artificial hallucination". The Bing chatbot cited an encyclopedia page that said nothing about the "Baseball Empire Redwood League".

Next: crafting science fiction book covers

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Jack Be Nimble

cover art by Jasper Schreurs

I've previously blogged about Trullion by Jack Vance. Much of the plot for this novel involves the sport hussade, which takes the form of ritualized hand-to-hand combat, played before a crowd on grid of runways suspended over a pool of water.

"The ideal hussade player was powerful, intelligent, cunning, nimble and merciless."

Alastor Cluster
Welcome to the planet Trullion, one of 3,000 inhabited worlds of Alastor Cluster. It is a quiet world where most of the residents are something like hippies from the 1970s. The protagonist of Vance's story is Glinnes Hulden, a resident of the Fens. The Huldens are a sporting family and like his father and his older brother before him, Glinnes grew up playing hussade.

Glinnes grows up near the mouth of the Saur River, on Rabendary Island. Click on the map to enlarge.

Baroba Felice, sheirl of the Voulash Gannets

Life on Trullion is mostly quite relaxed and the majority of Trills prefer to enjoy simple lives of ease and pleasure. Vance informs us that an average Trill seldom works very hard and then only to:

"... earn a pulsor for his boat,  a pot for his kitchen,  a length of cloth for his paray: that easy skirt-like garment worn by men and women alike."

Like Glinnes, Vance grew up in a rural river delta. Vance adopted the needed discipline to write a million words a year and earn a living writing stories. Glinnes took on the discipline required of a top hussade player, following the advice of his father:

"Run five miles every day to develop your stamina. Jump the practice pits until you can make sure landings blindfold."

1953

With a taste for adventure, at the age of 17 Glinnes joins the Whelm, Alastor Cluster's space-faring military that tries to protect the cluster's residents against endless and persistent raids by space pirates. While in the Whelm, Glinnes continues to play hussade. He terminates his service in the Whelm and returns home to the Fens when his father suddenly dies.

Duissane's aunt Nadya (source)

Upon returning to Trullion, Glinnes meets a Trevanyi woman named Duissane Drosset. The Trevanyi are a small minority group on Trullion, something like Earth's gypsies. Glinnes is immediately attracted to the fiery Duissane, but he soon discovers that the Drossets recently killed his older brother.

Fanscherade

Culture Clash

Glinnes schemes to achieve revenge against the Drossets, but he also faces additional challenges. A new social movement has grown on Trullion: Fanscherade. The Fanschers, mostly of the younger generation, now stand in opposition to the gluttonous, amorous and undisciplined ways of their parents.

While Glinnes was away from Trullion, Glay, his twin brother, has become a Fanscher. Glay donated to the Fanscherade organization a large amount of money that he obtained from selling a valuable portion of the Hulden family lands.

Upon returning home, Glinnes is mystified by the Fanscherade movement and he is determined to regain the lost Hulden family property. Akadie the mentor, a long-time friend of Glinnes, tries to explain the Fanscherade movement:

Cover by David Mattingly.

World Inverting
In creating the imagined world Trullion, Vance was able to cleverly invert the social conditions of mid-20th century Earth. Rather than a world with hippies rebelling against their conservative parents, the Fanscherade youth movement of Trullion involves an attempt by the younger generation to create a new age of orderly conduct and achievement. The Fanschers cut their hair short and dress in clean gray uniforms, holding themselves aloof from typical Trill pursuits like hussade.

cover by Gene Szafran
I have a copy of the June
1973 edition of Trullion.

Strangely, the Beatles, who in the 1960s represented the winds of change in the cultural atmosphere of Earth's middle 20th century America, could just as easily serve as icons representing the gray-suited Fanschers of Trullion. Through the nimble artistry of Jack Vance, the pattern of Earth's cultural change has been neatly inverted to create a social backdrop on Trullion for the personal struggles of Glinnes.

Duissane Drosset
By the end of Trullion, the Fanscherade movement has been crushed. Through persistence and good luck, Glinnes has managed to regain ownership of the parcel of family land that Glay previously sold off. Duissane's father and brother (the murderers of Glinnes' older brother) are now dead.

Vance ends the story at this point, and the final scene of the novel suggesting that Glinnes and Duissane might have a future together:

The final two paragraphs of Trullion.

Merlank, the lone continent of Trullion. (source)

In the way that Vance wrote Trullion, Duissane is something of a mystery. Normally, Glinnes would never have had significant contact with a Trevanyi woman. It was only through an odd quirk of fate that the Drosset family was present on Rabendary Island when Glinnes returned home from serving in the Whelm.

During the time when Glinnes was away from Trullion, Glay spent several years wandering around Merlank, the only continent of Trullion. While on his travels, Glay lived for a time with the nomadic Drossets.

Trevanyi camp

The Trevanyi develop odd skills like the art of knife juggling. While usually keeping themselves apart from most ordinary Trill pass-times like hussade, the Trevanyi are willing to mingle with the Trill majority and even participate as entertainer at Trill parties and starwatches.

Owing them favors, Glay must have offered the Drossets a chance to pitch their tents for a while in the forest of Rabendary Island. When Glinnes arrives home after 10 years in the Whelm, the Drosset family is camped near his home and Glinnes meets Duissane on his first day back.

Hussade Sheirl

Underwood-Miller edition

Strangely, Duissane becomes a hussade sheirl, even though nobody can remember another time when a Trevanyi was a member of a hussade team. The other players on a hussade team fight to protect their sheirl against the charges mounted by the opposing team's players.

Vance never explains why it is that Duissane is given permission by her father to join a hussade team and why that permission is granted specifically for the team that Glinnes plays for. I like to imagine that unseen forces were at work, bringing together Glinnes and Duissane for some special purpose. However, I suspect that Vance simply wanted to construct an unlikely romance as part of the literary game he played: Vance wanted to place many challenges in the path to a happy future for Glinnes.

In the Ekcolir Reality

Cauch
Duissane tries to seduce Glinnes by giving him cauch. Cauch is a valuable drug derived from a mold that grows on Trullion. The Trills routinely think of cauch as an aphrodisiac, but it is fun to imagine that the Trevanyi know how to use it for additional purposes. What if cauch can be used to activate the Phari endosymbionts that reside within the inhabitants of Alastor Cluster?

For A Search Beyond, I imagine that in the Ekcolir Reality an analogue of Jack Vance not only wrote additional novels set in the Alastor Clustor, but that version of Vance had access to more information about events that occurred in the Asimov Reality.

The Nicotine Mystery

Currently, to study the possibility that cauch was a form of nanotechnology, I'm making use of Yōd and her ability to access information within the Hierion Domain. We are pursuing the possibility that "cognitive amplifiers" such as cauch might have been stored and archived within the Hierion Domain.

A replicoid of Vance and Yōd's replicoid are working together in the Hierion Domain at the library of the Writers Block to further this investigation. So far, we have hints that both nicotine (on Earth) and cauch (on Trullion) may contain the same Phari nanites. From my end, I'm trying to make use of the infites that I obtained from Ivory. Ivory and her clone sisters previously investigated this topic by means of their access to the Sedronic Domain.

Next: Jack Vance and Isaac Asimov in Eternity

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Virtual Reality

original cover art by Edmund Emshwiller

I'm reaching the end of Part 2 of The League of Yrinna. The last scene on Numenes will follow Archivist Joole and Duissane Drosset on their visit to the Museum of Cultural History in the Connatic's Library.

After her cruise on the Pelorix Rhode, Duissane is already familiar with holographic virtual reality simulators. Joole and Dr. Lamre have arranged to measure Duissane's ability to use the Bimanoid Interface by having her play inside a holographic virtual reality simulation of a hussade game.

Working with Dr. Lamre's colleagues inside the Hierion Domain is the replicoid of Danno, Glinnes' grandfather. When Duissane uses the hussade simulation, Danno's replicoid uses the Bimanoid Interface to guide her through the game play.

Virtual reality simulation on Numenes.

While linked to Danno, Duissane has some limited conscious awareness of what is going on in the Hierion Domain. Her consciousness flickers between the simulation taking place in the Library and another mysterious 'place' in the Hierion Domain where the replicoids of Arabella Clarke and Vance are watching Danno.

Duissane believes that it was Glinnes who invaded her consciousness during the simulated hussade game. When she next sees him, at Hemeni Park, she asks Glinnes how he was able to enter into her consciousness. At about the same time that Duissane had her contact with Danno's replicoid, Glinnes was in the research laboratory, allowing Dr. Lamre to measure his ability to use the Bimanoid Interface.

original cover art by Howard Brown

While undergoing the lab tests, Dr. Lamre "reset" Glinnes' memories and he lapsed into a brief period of unconsciousness, so he is uncertain if he had any kind of telepathic contact with Duissane, but he suspects not.

Tour guide 47539 arrives and informs Dr. Lamre that an interplanetary arrest warrant for Glinnes has been issued by the Whelm, charging him with theft of 30,000,000 azols on Trullion and evading arrest by leaving Trullion. Joole and Lamre quickly provide Duissane and Glinnes with false identities and send them back to Blazon spaceport, the first leg of their journey to Yrinna.

Next: The Phari; is meaningful contact possible?

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Pheni of Yrinna

Cursar Pakken: starmenter investigation
aboard Lord Gensifer's yacht.
click image to enlarge

At the start of December, I threw off the usual restraints and allowed myself to begin exploring a fan-fiction sequel to one of my favorite books, Trullion, by Jack Vance.

65% of the way through Trullion, space pirates have just carried out a raid on Welgen, interrupting a hassade game to kidnap 300 members of the wealthy aristocratic families of Jolany Prefecture. At this point in the story, the protagonist has managed to save the two beautiful sheirls, helping them escape from the hussade stadium and avoid being captured by the pirates.

Space Pirates
Vance wrote three novels that are set in Alastor Cluster. Only in the first of these three books (Trullion) do space pirates play an important role in the story.

Cover art by Hans Wessolowski.

As a boy, Vance read a large amount of fiction. During those years, science fiction was just being born as a new literary genre and it was inevitable that some early science fiction stories would be written about "space pirates". Given Vance's interest in the sea, it is no surprise that he included space pirates in some of his own stories (example).

Cover art by Edmund Emshwiller.

Trullion was published 10 years after The Star King. In the backstory for the Demon Princes novels, Kirth Gersen's home and family were destroyed by marauding space pirates. Gersen devotes his life to hunting down and murdering the five pirate captains who carried out the raid on Mt. Pleasant, Gersen's childhood home.

In Trullion, Vance introduces us to a constellation of space pirates (known in Alastor Cluster as "starmenters"): Sagmondo Bandolio, Alanzo Dirrig (known as "Dirrig the Skull-maker") and Bela Gazzardo. As was the case for Gersen, space pirates shape the entire structure of Glinnes Hulden's life. As the protagonist of Trullion, Glinnes is both cursed and blessed by the starmenter raids that plague the planet Trullion. By the end of Trullion, Glinnes has taken possession of 30 million ozols worth of ransom money, originally intended for Bandolio.

Cover by David Mattingly.

Hussade Sheirls
For Trullion, Vance invented the sport of hussade. Glinnes Hulden grows up as an avid player of hussade. We learn that he was born into a family that is known for producing hussade players. Hussade is popular on many planets of Alastor Cluster and each world has its own local rules for the game. On Trullion, hussade players are men, but each team fights to protect the honor of a woman, the sheirl, who stands on the field during the game.

In Trullion, Duissane Drosset becomes sheirl for Glinnes' hussade team. At the end of Trullion, Vance depicts Duissane and Glinnes as walking off together along a beach. Both Duissane and Glinnes return in the sequel.

The League of Yrinna
For my fan-fiction sequel to Trullion, I wanted to explore what might happen to Glinnes after the end of Vance's story. Of course, I simply had to include space pirates and hussade in the sequel.

human breeding projects

"The League of Yrinna" has two meanings in the sequel. First, there is a professional Hussade League on the planet of Yrinna. Glinnes becomes involved in a Whelm investigation of starmenters that leads him to Yrinna. To provide cover for his investigation, Glinnes ends up playing hussade on Yrinna.

"The League of Yrinna" is also an organization of starmenters. Glinnes works to reveal the secrets of The League of Yrinna and in so doing, he learns some of the dark, secret history of his own family.

The rules for playing hussade are significantly different on Yrinna compared to Trullion. The professional Hussade League of Yrinna had its "major league" and a "minor league". In the minor league, both men and women can be position players on the teams. Each team has a sheirl, who can be male or female, but usually the sheirl is a woman. On Yrinna, the sheirl does not simply stand on the field awaiting capture, but rather dresses in the team uniform and is excluded from the team's "citadel". In fact, the game ends in defeat if the sheirl is forced to retreat to the citadel.

interior illustration by Paul Orban

In the major league, each hussade team fields three female players: the sheirl and two "guards". They must be great athletes since they are required to participate in the game play and move about on the hussade field. Another important difference in the game is that there is no water under the runways of the playing field. Instead, any player who is knocked off of the runways will free fall down into one of the two "air traps" below the field where blowing air first slows the player's fall then automatically moves the fallen player back up to the team's citadel, thus allowing for a delayed return to play.

If the sheirl falls, she controls her own fate by selecting which team's citadel she is returned to. Returning to her own team's citadel is surrender: her team automatically loses the round. If she chooses to fight on, then a fallen sheirl returns to the field by way of the opposing team's citadel, which is dangerous, but it can occasionally result in victory.

Flight

Pheni of Yrinna

In The League of Yrinna, Duissane also ends up on a hussade team, playing according to the rules of planet Yrinna. The special features of hussade on Yrinna can be traced back to the Pharazen, an extinct indigenous species of Alastor Cluster. Long ago, the Pharazen created an artificial life form known as the Phari. On Yrinna, the Phari became endosymbionts for a species of flying animals, who by the time when humans arrive, have evolved into what the human colonizers call the Pheni.

in the Ekcolir Reality
Original cover art by Milton Rosenblatt

Falling under the influence of the Phari and the Pheni, the first humans on Yrinna (who were space pirates) became involved in a human breeding project. The goal of that project was to create a type of human that could telepathically communicate with the Pheni. Through his investigations on Yrinna and with the help of Duissane (who has some natural ability to use the Bimanoid Interface), Glinnes makes contact with the Pheni and he learns the secrets of his own past.

Related Reading

Original cover by Miller

In 1954 Pohl Anderson published a short story called "The Chapter Ends". Set about 60,000 years in our future, humans have colonized the Galactic Core and genetically engineered themselves to have modified brains that give them the power of flight.

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