(One of the best covers of a Poul Anderson book.)
(I have just driven Aileen and Yossi, daughter and granddaughter, all the way to their holiday cottage with a view of Lake Bassenthwaite and have returned to Lancaster.)
Poul Anderson's
The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979):
collected twelve previously uncollected installments of Anderson's major future history series, the History of Technic Civilization, also known as the Technic History;
thus, excluded the three Nicholas van Rijn stories previously collected as
Trader To The Stars and the three David Falkayn stories previously collected as
The Trouble Twisters;
added new introductions and an afterword written by the Ythrian Hloch who:
lives on Avalon shortly after the events of
The People Of The Wind;
refers, in one story, "Lodestar," to the events of
Satan's World, and, in the afterword to that story, to the events of
Mirkheim.
Thus, these six volumes covered the entire history of the Polesotechnic League and part of the history of the early Terran Empire.
Baen Books'
The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume I (of VII),
The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), collects the first eleven installments of the Technic History and thus includes:
one later-written story about early interplanetary exploration;
seven of the twelve works in
The Earth Book, together with Hloch's introductions;
two of the three stories in
The Trouble Twisters;
one of the three stories in
Trader To The Stars.
This creates a paradox. Although the stories in this volume conduct the reader to a point in time when Falkayn has started to work for van Rijn's Solar Spice & Liquors Company but has not as yet either met van Rijn or been invited by him to lead a trader team, Hloch's introductions assume his readers' knowledge of subsequent events not only in the lives of these characters but even in considerably later history:
there was a Terran War on Avalon;
there are "Imperial planets" and an "Empire" (p. 76), in fact a "Terran Empire" (p. 104);
David Falkayn did something important on Avalon;
Falkayn's biographies relate that he became a protege of van Rijn;
children of one of van Rijn's successful employees came to Avalon with Falkayn.
By the end of the eleventh installment in this volume, all of these events remain in the future. This is good. The reader already knows that he must read six more volumes to get the whole story but has now received advance glimpses of some later parts of the story. Since the remaining five installments of
The Earth Book are collected in Volumes II and III and since Volume III ends with
The People Of The Wind,
which provides the background for Hloch's narrations, Volumes I-III are like an expanded
Earth Book.
