Sunday 29 March 2020

From "The Saturn Game" To Mirkheim

Poul Anderson's Technic History begins with "The Saturn Game," the opening installment in The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume I, The Van Rijn Method, and the trader team sub-series ends with "Lodestar," the closing installment in Volume II, David Falkayn: Star Trader. Volume III, Rise Of The Terran Empire, begins with Mirkheim, the sequel to "Lodestar."

In "The Saturn Game," Jean Almyer adopts Tom Broberg's surname when she marries him although that practice has become:

"'...rather unusual these days...'" (III, p. 30)

She explains her conformity to the traditional custom by referring to her strict, "archaistic" Jerusalem Catholic upbringing.

In "Lodestar," Coya Conyon thinks:

"My grandfather's generation seldom bothered to get married. My father's did. And mine, why, we're reviving patrilineal surnames."
-Poul Anderson, "Lodestar" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 631-680 AT p. 644.

(Coya's grandfather is Nicholas van Rijn.)

In Mirkheim:

"Coya Conyon, who proudly followed a custom growing in her generation and now called herself Coya Falkayn, was tall and slender in a scarlet slack-suit."
-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 1-291 AT Prologue, Y minus 9, p. 14.

"Fashions come and go," as we are told in Anderson's Time Patrol series. See here.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And the custom of women adopting the surnames of their husbands seems to have not lapsed in most of the colonial planets, btw. But then Anderson speculated that emigration from Earth would be motivated in part by a desire to preserve customs and ways of life being undermined on Earth. And not all of those ways of life would be bad!

Ad astra! Sean