Based more on feel than stated fact, the Galaxy inhabited by John Grimes appears to be one in which mankind is busily colonizing the entire thing – from Rim to Center.

It appears to be a galaxy that is sparsely populated by space-faring intelligences, even though it seems that life on Earth-like worlds, including mammalian, humanoid life, is fairly common. Virtually every planet that we are exposed to has something living on it – from intelligent fungi to lithesome, leggy alien dollops of trollops.

Various levels of technological progress are in evidence – from pre-sentient club-wielders to Space-faring bumblebees; planet-bound cultures possessing steamships, lighter-than-air craft, orbital and even interplanetary ships are known to exist.

Besides the more-human-than-humanoid, humanoid, humanoid-but-grotesque, the proto-cliché green-tinted-humanoid and humanoid-but-far-from-human, humanoids, there are saurians, avians and psuedo-saurians, amphibians, lizards and insects.

Of the spacefarers, several are humanoid (even if some of them are made of anti-matter – adding anti-matter-humanoids to our list of humanoidisms), one is insectoid and another avian in general appearance.

This over-abundance of life may be due in part to the fact that regardless of spectral type age, whether it’s a multi-star system or not, virtually every star in the galaxy seems to have planets circling it that are conducive to life.

This huge inventory of habitable worlds makes expansion easy. There is also little cause for conflict between empires. There’s plenty of space for everyone.

The Galaxy itself is broken up into ‘sectors’ for reference purposes. The ‘sectors’ sometimes have misleading names. The known sectors are:

Flammarion’s Cluster
The Cluster Worlds
The Shakespearian Sector
The Rim Worlds
Caribbea-Van Diemen’s Sector
Centaurian System
Eastern Circuit

FACTUAL DATA ON STARS MENTIONED IN THE STORIES

(at a later date this information, including spectral type and distance from Sol, will be tabularized.)

Delta sextantis (delta sextans)

Delta Sextantis is a blue-white B-type main sequence dwarf with an apparent magnitude of +5.19. It is approximately 300 light years from Earth.

Sirius (Alpha Canis Majoris)

is the brightest star in the night-time sky, with a visual apparent magnitude of -1.47. This binary star system consists of a white main sequence dwarf star and a faint white dwarf companion. It is located in the constellation Canis Major. 8.6 ly from Earth

Aldeberan

Aldebaran is a K5 III star, which means it is orangish, large It has a minor companion (a dim M2 dwarf orbiting at several hundred AU). Now primarily fusing helium, the main star has expanded to a diameter of approximately 5.3 × 107 km, or about 38 times the diameter of the Sun. The Hipparcos satellite has measured it as 65.1 light years away, and it shines with 150 times the Sun's luminosity. Taken together this distance and brightness makes it the 14th brightest star, having an apparent magnitude of 0.87. It is slightly variable, of the irregular variable type, by about 0.2 magnitude.

Vega (a Lyr / a Lyrae / Alpha Lyrae)

is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, and the fifth brightest star in the sky. It is the third brightest star in the Northern night sky, after Sirius and Arcturus, and can often be seen near the zenith in the mid-northern latitudes during the Northern Hemisphere summer.
Its spectral class is A0V (Sirius, an A1V, is slightly less powerful) and it is firmly in the main sequence, fusing hydrogen to helium in its core. Since more powerful stars use their fusion fuel more quickly than smaller ones, Vega's life time is only one billion years, a tenth of our Sun's. Vega's current age is between 200 and 500 million years. Vega is twice as massive[1] as our Sun and burns at fifty times the power.
In about AD 14,000, Vega will become the North Star, owing to the precession of the equinoxes. It is a "nearby star" at only 25.3 light years from Earth, and together with Arcturus and Sirius, one of the brightest stars in the Sun's neighbourhood.

Fomalhaut (a PsA / a Piscis Austrini / Alpha Piscis Austrini)

Fomalhaut is the brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus and one of the brightest stars in the nighttime sky. Its name means "mouth of the whale", from the Arabic ?? ????? fum al-?awt. It is a class A star on the main sequence approximately 25 light-years (7.7 parsecs) from Earth.
Until about March 2000, Fomalhaut and Achernar were the two first magnitude stars furthest in angular distance from any other first magnitude star in the celestial sphere. Antares, in the constellation of Scorpius, is now the most isolated first magnitude star.
Fomalhaut is believed to be a young star, only 200 to 300 million years old, with a potential lifespan of only a billion years. The surface temperature of the star is around 8500 kelvin. Compared to the Sun, its mass is about 2.3, its luminosity is about 15, and its diameter is roughly 1.7.
It is surrounded by a disk of dust in a toroidal shape with a very sharp inner edge at a radial distance of 133 AU, inclined 24 degrees from edge-on. The dust is distributed in a belt about 25 AU wide; the geometric centre of the disk is offset by about 15 AU from Fomalhaut. The disk is sometimes referred to as "Fomalhaut's Kuiper belt".

Antares (a Scorpii / Alpha Scorpii)

is the brightest star in the and one of the brightest stars in the nighttime sky. Along with Aldebaran, Spica, and Regulus it is one of the four brightest stars near the ecliptic. The similarly colored Aldebaran lies almost directly opposite Antares in the Zodiac. Antares is a class M supergiant star, with a diameter of approximately 1.33 × 109 km. I.e., if in place of our sun, it would slightly more than encompass the average orbit of Mars. Antares is approximately 600 light years from our solar system. Visually, its luminosity is about 10,000 times that of the Sun but overall, taking into account that the star radiates a considerable part of its energy in the infrared part of the spectrum the luminosity equals roughly 65,000 times that of the Sun. The mass of the star is calculated to be 15 to 18 solar masses. Its large size and relatively small mass give Antares a very low density.