Help with literary foundation for CT

[Sci-Fi Neophyte]

That is fundamentally more like asking "which episodes of Star Trek were influential" than "which of the Star Trek movies were influential" - these are old scifi novels and by modern standards are incredibly short (barely beyond a novella) - which also establishes the nature of the series. While there was certainly an overarching narrative thread I'd hate to even call it a metaplot, more like a fictive conceit to provide some basic cohesion between essentially unconnected novels with the same character (which is how a lot of old scifi series worked 'back in the day').

Tubb's Dumarest, Norton's Free Traders, Bradley is probably work mentioning but it's hard to pick specific novels because the Darkover series is so omnipresent, Heinlein, Herbert (not just Dune, he wrote other things as well), Dickson's Dorsai books, Le Guin, Cherryh, Anderson, Niven, Pohl,... Honestly, just goodle "classic scifi novels of the XX's" decade and you're going to get a good sense of what to read.

D.

Well, Quint, my concern is also finances. Barring being able to find certain of these for free on places like Gutenberg’s, as being squarely in the public domain, I may be left with e-reader-accessible versions. Taking the Dumarest Saga as an example, each of the 30+ books can be purchased for $3 each on Kindle. That would be about $100 just to get through Tubb’s series in its entirety (not to mention the other excellent works you listed). So, I will have to ponder some more...

Nevertheless, I sincerely appreciate you sharing your thoughts on the subject in this thread.

Cheers!

 

[Sci-Fi Neophyte]

As many of you have suggested S. Appelcline’s book (see above), I did get a copy for free ($0.00) from DTRPG and gave it a read-through. I thought the book was put together well and executed its function, as stated in its intro. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it very helpful for this project (see OP). Most of his book focuses on all (read many) of the literary influences on the Traveller RPG as the game progresses through its various iterations over time.

Therefore, while a tremendous resource with that in mind (covering Traveller RPG spanning close to 50 years’ worth of literary influences), it may not be the best choice for someone like me who has a very narrowly focused interest in just classic sci-fi influences that would have been available up to the printing of the 1977 edition of Classic Traveller (as stated in OP).

Nevertheless, Appendix 2: Inspirational & Educational Reading was helpful, so I want to thank everyone who recommended this work.

 

[Sci-Fi Neophyte]

As I believe this thread and its contributions are winding to a close, I wanted to wrap up with my observations and share where I think I’ll be going moving forward, looking at the literary influences that inspired Classic Traveller in its original form. I offer the following list consolidating what interested me from contributors' suggestions here and elsewhere in no particular order:

Poul Anderson’s Dominic Flandry and Polesotechnic League Series

E.C. Tubb’s Dumarest Series

Jack Vance’s Demon Prince Series

H.B. Piper’s Terro-Human Future Histories (almost completed)

Larry Niven’s Known Space Series

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series

Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles

Andre Norton’s Free Traders and Solar Queen Series

E.R. Burroughs’ Barsoom Series

Jerry Pournelle’s CoDominium Series

Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination

My thanks to all who cared to weigh in. Cheers!

 

[Quint]

Well, Quint, my concern is also finances. Barring being able to find certain of these for free on places like Gutenberg’s, as being squarely in the public domain, I may be left with e-reader-accessible versions. Taking the Dumarest Saga as an example, each of the 30+ books can be purchased for $3 each on Kindle. That would be about $100 just to get through Tubb’s series in its entirety (not to mention the other excellent works you listed). So, I will have to ponder some more...

Well, that certainly is an issue. Some of us just had the luck of being able to read what was on our parents books shelves when we grew up, lol! Just to add to the bill, I also will say that it might be worth reading a Swycaffer's Concordat books despite them being written in the 80s.

D.

 

[whartung]

Taking the Dumarest Saga as an example, each of the 30+ books can be purchased for $3 each on Kindle. That would be about $100 just to get through Tubb’s series in its entirety (not to mention the other excellent works you listed). So, I will have to ponder some more...

I haven't read any of those. But it would not surprise if up 90% of the world building and core tenets were introduced in the first 2 or 3 books.

 

[Quint]

I haven't read any of those. But it would not surprise if up 90% of the world building and core tenets were introduced in the first 2 or 3 books.

Amusingly, the big McGuffin doesn't even appear until the 4th or 5th book and become an actual "thing" for a couple of books after that. Interestingly, up until AOI, I'd have said that it was the perhaps the least Traveller-like portion of the setting. I think it's hard to overstate how much the explosion of scifi post-Star Wars influenced the ongoing development of both Traveller but also how people interpreted the rules and setting overall. The connection of "Library Data" (the inspirational material) to Traveller is much more opaque than Appendix N is to, say, D&D, just due to timing and the cultural context. I mean, you might also want to be reading Forrester's Hornblower, Ceasar's Commentaries on the Gallic War, and Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - the game came out of wargaming company that had lots of history buffs, lol...