Long Night And Night Face

Like any instalment of a future history series, Poul Anderson's "A Tragedy of Errors" refers to information from previous instalments and also introduces new information. Thus, the planets, Lochlann, Kraken, Hermes and Sassania, have already been referred to but Nike is new.

Old small planets lose their atmospheres. However, Nike, although old, is so small that it has only recently outgassed its atmosphere.

Dagny from Kraken was:

"...bred in salt winds and unrestful watery leagues..." (p. 484)

This description might have contributed to my impression that Kraken, like Nyanza, was mainly covered by ocean.

"A Tragedy of Errors" is set during the Long Night and is followed, in Flandry's Legacy, by Anderson's Introduction to The Night Face. This Introduction also refers to the Long Night although, in the text, interstellar order has been restored on a small scale.

The Introduction refers back not only to Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn and Dominic Flandry but also to Chrisopher Holm, not a series character on the same scale as the other three but one of the several view-point characters in The People Of The Wind and, fictitiously, a co-author of The Earth Book Of Stormgate.

Some introductions are fictional, e.g., by Hloch, whereas others are by the real-world author, Anderson. We read a multi-layered sequence of texts with seemingly inexhaustible content.