Stories And Series

Apart from their original magazine publications, Poul Anderson's "The Saturn Game" and "Starfog" can be appreciated either as separate stories at the beginning and end of his collection, Explorations, or as opening and closing instalments at the beginning and end of the seven-volume The Technic Civilization Saga. That is pretty amazing. Any future history instalment should be equally readable as a one-off story although that dual status can be fully achieved only to a greater or lesser extent. As the opening story, "The Saturn Game" refers back to the passive entertainment of the mid-twentieth-century and might anticipate some later instalments of the series although it cannot in the nature of the case refer to any earlier instalments whereas "Starfog" does refer to:

"'...the League, the troubles, the Empire, its fall, the Long Night...'"

-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 709-794 AT p. 722 -

- which is like an attempt to summarize the entire history. Earlier episodes cover all of these periods except the "fall."

A reader of "Starfog" as a one-off story might be puzzled by this list. On the other hand, he will not be puzzled to read that the Kirkasanters are descendants of exiles from Technic civilization although any reader of earlier instalments does understand this reference. 

The Technic History hangs together both as a long coherent series and as forty-three individual works.