Later Technic History Introductions

Fictional introductions are a significant feature of the Polesotechnic League period of Poul Anderson's Technic History. There is a total of eighteen such introductions and one afterword in the three collections that cover that period. By contrast, at the very dawn of the Imperial period, Donvar Ayeghen, President of the Galactic Archaeological Society, introduces the single story about the Founder of the Terran Empire but there is almost nothing else after that:

an extract from a pilot's manual about Starkad at the beginning of Ensign Flandry;

a Didonian recalling human beings at the beginning and end of The Rebel Worlds;

italicized passages praising Gospodar Bodin at the beginning and end of A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows;

italicized passages about a King of England at the beginning and end of "A Tragedy of Errors."

Nothing more. The Technic History was not written to a plan. We would have liked it if Donvar Ayeghen had analysed the Terran Empire in the same detail as Hloch of the Stormgate Choth analyses the Solar Commonwealth and the Polesotechnic League.