Friday 8 September 2017

The Technic History: Periods And Structure

The Young Flandry Trilogy and its two sequels. (5)
The original Flandry series, comprising a tetralogy and a diptych. (6)
The early Molitor period: one short story and three novels. (4)
A post-Imperial tetralogy. (4)

Thus, in these later periods, a total of nineteen instalments. The discernible structure was not designed but emerged. The earlier History is slightly more complicated:

Beginnings. (3)
The Polesotechnic League period. (16)
Avalon. (2)
The early Terran Empire. (2)
Avalon and the Empire. (1)

A total of twenty four instalments. The Polesotechnic League period has an internal structure:

Van Rijn. (6)
Adzel. (1)
Falkayn. (2)
Van Rijn's trader team of Falkayn, Adzel and Chee Lan. (2)
Van Rijn and the trader team. (3)
Others. (2)

The Technic History was not planned but grew and became vast.

8 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And when we recall how the Technic History was originally two SEPARATE series it gets even more complicated! On an impulse Poul Anderson mentioned "Polesotechnarch" van Rijn in THE PLAGUE OF MASTERS, thus linking up the Dominic Flandry stories with those about Old Nick. And soon discovered he had a "tiger by the tail" when he realized his Technic series had become the history of the rise and fall of mankind's first interstellar civilization. It was not long after this linking up that Anderson "gritted his teeth" and went thru everything he had written till then in these series, to make the detailed notes needed to avoid contradictions and tangle ups. As you said, the Technic Civilization stories were not planned as such "but grew and became vast."

Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

I like the results of that impulsive decision: it gives the Technic history a sort of organic feeling, not as much that of something planned in advance.

Actual history has that feeling too -- I very much doubt anyone in Augustan Rome was expecting a Jewish heresy to take over and transform Classical civilization, for example!

It does have some downsides; the fall of the League era has to be shoehorned into a rather brief span, for example.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Dear Mr. Stirling,

I like how you put it, that Anderson's impulsive decision to link up the van Rijn and Flandry stories gave the whole series an "organic" feeling. Yes, it feels more "real" as a result.

Not sure I agree with your last comment, tho. MIRKHEIM does not exactly show us the FALL of the Polesotechnic League. Rather, the Mirkheim/Babur War was the begining of that fall, the increasingly impotent League seems to have lingered on for about a century. Poul Anderson, unfortunately, did not write any stories set in that century which says much about the League.

Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

My feeling was that everything with the League -seems- to be A-OK up until about that point, but at that point it's revealed that things have actually been getting worse for a long time.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Dear Mr. Stirling,

But the signs of things starting to go wrong could be seen 18 years before MIRKHEIM in the short story "Lodestar." And hints of things not being quite right can be seen even in SATAN'S WORLD, a little before "Lodestar."

Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

As an aside, those covers were among the worst in the lurid history of SF.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Dear Mr. Stirling,

I absolutely agree! I simply LOATHE the titles Baen Books chose for the first three of the volumes collecting the Flandry stories. They make Flandry look like a goon with a taste for cavorting with naked bimbos. And he was so much MORE than a mere sybarite!

Sean

Sean M. Brooks said...

Correction, I meant COVERS, not "titles" in my comment immediately above.

Sean