Haertel Scholium And Technic History

I will make some remarks about James Blish as a lead-in to making similar remarks about Poul Anderson. You might remember that the recurrent themes on this blog are:

remember Wells

reread Anderson

read Blish too

film Anderson's Technic History

The first time that I read "Beep" by James Blish, I thought, "This story should be novelized." Later, Blish made three changes to "Beep." First, he revised and lengthened the text so that it could be republished as the (very) short novel, The Quincunx of Time. Secondly, he added explicit references to his character, Adolph Haertel, thus more fully incorporating Quincunx into his "Haertel Scholium," a loose network of branching future historical narratives. Thirdly, since "Beep" had already been constructed around a number of Dirac transmitter messages received from different further future periods, Blish added more such messages, including two that linked Quincunx to his works, "A Style in Treason" and Midsummer Century, thus generating a new loose trilogy within the Haertel Scholium. Thus, a work originally complete in itself was incorporated into a vaster framework. (In fact, "Beep" originated as an indirect spin-off from Blish's Okie series but any further elucidation here would be a digression.)

I thought of "Beep" in connection with Anderson's "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" and "Lodestar," not that I necessarily thought that either of these stories merited novelization. After all, "Lodestar" became the prequel to the novel, Mirkheim, both titles referring to a single planet. "Lodestar" is Mirkheim writ small. However, each of these stories conveys so much condensed information about life in the Solar Commonwealth that they are almost novelistic in impact if not in fact. Both are instalments of Anderson's Technic History and both gained in significance when they were incorporated first into The Earth Book of Stormgate, then into The Technic Civilization Saga.