Preview of Hunter's Moon Summary:

In "Hunter's Moon," Anderson creates a background for how colonies in other solar systems might develop within the bounds of our current scientific understanding of the laws of physics. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light; there are no "warp drives" and "hyperspace" which permit space travelers to circumvent or exceed the limits imposed by the nature of things. Messages sent by laser beams between Earth and Medea take fifty years to reach their destinations, meaning that Medea and the Castor C system are fifty light-years from Earth. Humans travel only from Earth to Medea because of the "time-stranger" consequence of returning to their home planet. The more than fifty year lag in technological development for Medeans would expand to over one hundred years by the time a return journey even made in spaceships approaching the speed of light was completed; such travelers would find themselves...