The Introductions

In an earlier post, I suggested that, in any uniform edition of Poul Anderson's Technic Civilization History, Introductions by the human author, Poul Anderson, should be preserved but in an Appendix so that they do not interrupt the flow of the narrative which includes Introductions by fictitious characters like Hloch of Stormgate Choth on Avalon and Noah Arkwright.

Having said that, it is good, when reading through Baen Books The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume VII, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), to come across Anderson's Introductions to The Game Of Empire and The Night Face immediately before reading these works.

The Introduction to The Game Of Empire lists the three purposes of the Dominic Flandry series, already quoted here, and also highlights Anderson's textual homage to Kipling. The Introduction to The Night Face informs us that an editor had re-entitled it Let The Spacemen Beware! - just as Anderson's The Man Who Counts had been, equally inappropriately, editorially re-entitled War Of The Wing Men. This Introduction also sets the scene:

"Now the Empire has fallen, the Long Night descended...Like Romano-Britons after the last legion had withdrawn, people out in the former marches of civilization do not even know what is happening at its former heart. They have the physical capability of going there and finding out, but are too busy surviving. They are also, all unawares, generating whole new societies of their own." (pp. 543-544)

This passage has several comforting features:

a social collapse spread across hundreds of light years of interstellar space can be compared to events in Europe, thus on one part of a single planet, in our historical past;

the physical capability of travel has not been lost, just the incentive to use it for the time being;

the passage reminds us of other Anderson works that do feature Romano-Britons and the Fall of the Roman Empire;

new societies are being generated.