Poul Anderson, INTRODUCTION IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 191-192 AT p. 191.
These are the opening sentences of Poul Anderson's introduction to his novel, The Game of Empire. Like Anderson, I had thought that the Dominic Flandry series comprised five novels and two collections of shorter works. However, these seven shorter works include two shorter novels.
We Claim These Stars/"Hunters of the Sky Cave"
As an Ace paperback: 121 pages of text.
In Agent of the Terran Empire: 103 pages.
In Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra: 151 pages.
"The Plague of Masters"
In Agent of Terra: 106 pages.
In Sir Dominic Flandry..., 144 pages.
(This work also had an Ace paperback edition but I do not have a copy.)
Thus, The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume VI, Sir Dominic Flandry... collects three novels and one short story:
"The Plague of Masters"
"Hunters of the Sky Cave"
"The Warriors from Nowhere" (33 pages)
"The Warriors from Nowhere" (33 pages)
A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows (266 pages here; 213 as a paperback)
It is evident that:
"The Warriors..." is indeed short;
A Knight..., one of the "five novels," is longer than the two that had been included in earlier collections.
Thus, Volume VI, like Volume IV, is an omnibus collection of three novels - plus the one short story that can retroactively be regarded as a prelude to A Knight...
10 comments:
Ordinary SF novels got a -lot- longer during Poul's career. When he started, SF paperbacks were usually no more than 60K words, say 200-250 pages.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And when Anderson began seriously writing, in 1947, short stories seems to have been the best paying way of writing. And collections of short stories.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Yup. R.E. Howard made more money than anyone else in Cross Plains writing short stories in the 30's. Of course, that was a small town in Texas during the Depression, but even so...
One thing most people don't realize about short stories is that per-word rates have consistently increased much more slowly than inflation, if at all. Which means they're something like 1/30th of what they were when I was born in 1953.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And at his peak Howard was making more money than the local banker!
What you said explains why so much of the focus these days, in SF and fantasy, is on writing novels. It pays better than short stories. Which I sometimes regret because I like well done short stories too.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: you get royalties for novels, which depend on sales. You get a lump sum per-word rate for short stuff.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I can see how those royalties would make successful novels better paying than short stories.
IIRC, it was somewhat different with Tolkien and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. Allen Unwin & Co. proposed a different arrangement: instead of royalties JRRT would get half of all profits from sales of LOTR after the costs of printing had been met, which the author agreed to. The publishers were not sure the book wouldn't flop.
As we all know LOTR was astonishingly, amazingly successful. And Tolkien was surprised as well!
Ad astra! Sean
Interesting choice by the cover artist; even interstellar spaceships look like the descendants of a V-2.
Give the Star Trek team credit, they managed to avoid that trope.
Kaor, Jim!
Given antigrav and plenty of energy spaceships won't need to look like V-2 rockets!
Ad astra! Sean
OTOH, the upper stage of Starship also looks like a bullet with two sets of fins.
If you're using rockets (of any sort) and you're transiting atmosphere, that's dictated by the physics.
In a sense, rockets -are- descendants of the V2, or part of the same species.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Anderson often mentioned or left implicit that large spaceships were built never meant to land on planets. Hence they could take any shape desired or needed. People and cargoes would be transported both ways using ships designed to enter atmospheres and land on planets. I assume such shuttles would look like rockets.
Ad astra! Sean
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