The Play Within The Play

We are still comparing future histories. Two stories in Larry Niven's Tales Of Known Space raise an issue that is also relevant to some of the works in Poul Anderson's Technic History. All that happens in "Intent to Deceive" is that two characters converse. Lucas Garner recounts an anecdote that turns out to be a lie told as a joke! Thus, the events described by Garner did not after all occur even within the fiction. "Safe At Any Speed" is a first person narrative which, we learn, is an advertisement whose narrator was paid to write it. So does he exaggerate or otherwise deviate from the (fictional) truth?

Of the short stories collected in Poul Anderson's The Earth Book Of Stormgate, three had been published as fictionalized accounts in the Avalonian periodical, Morgana, while the longer narrative, The Man Who Counts, was originally published on either Terra or Hermes apparently as a historical novel although this is not quite clear. Elsewhere in the Technic History, "The Star Plunderer" might be historical fiction. If it is, then a different and more accurate account of Manuel Argos could be written. "Sargasso of Lost Starships" might be fantastic fiction or Imperial propaganda. If it is, then the Black Nebula and its mentally powerful inhabitants do not exist.

There is endless scope for further future history episodes that need not be kept consistent because they can be presented as different kinds of narratives, e.g.:

tales of the heroes of Dennitza;

what the Merseians of the Roidhunate want to happen in future;

legends of the ancestors of the Kirkasaneters;

a Cosmenosist's account of a meeting with the Ancients;

etc.