A future history series combines continuity with novelty. A human being, a Wodenite convert to a Terrestrial religion and a second nonhuman being: this description fits two teams in Poul Anderson's Technic History. Further, the second nonhuman being in the second team is a Tigery, a member of a species that has meanwhile become familiar to us. Indeed, he, Targovy, is the son of Dragoika who had appeared in
Ensign Flandry. Reading there about Flandry and Dragoika, we little suspected that his daughter and her son would form a team decades later. Yet there is also much that is genuinely new in
The Game Of Empire: the Patrician System, the Zacharians and the disaffection of the Magnussons which, we now learn, had paralleled earlier events. Poul Anderson designs a convincing future history by skilfully combining continuity with novelty and the series could have been continued indefinitely on this basis.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I've also wondered how old Targovy was in THE GAME OF EMPIRE. Since he was the youngest child of Dragoika, my guest is that he was between 30 and 40 Terran years old.
Ad astra! Sean
The Zacharians basically had a self-esteem problem... far too much of it.
Not an uncommon failing!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ummmm, I offered some wild speculations about Anderson's Zacharians and your Draka in my article "Was the Domination Inspired by Merseia?"
Ad astra! Sean
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