Once Again, The Conclusion Of A Novel

War Of The Wing-Men, XXI-XXII.

Van Rijn risks everyone's lives, including his own, when he is deliberately provocative in order to get a particular outcome. He might not have got that outcome but this is a series where the hero triumphs.

He tells Wace that a promotion is not a sinecure and that if he, Wace, wants to insult him, van Rijn, then he should not do it on company time. ("Company time" is an awesome thing. One of James Blish's characters still thinks in those terms after Armageddon!)

Eric Wace realizes that van Rijn will be the father of the next Duke of Hermes and this is borne out in Mirkheim where, however, Sandra has named her son not after his father but after Wace: Eric Tamarin-Asmundsen. The Technic History is generational, then millennial.

Wace is one of many characters whom we do not see again. It cannot be helped - although Hloch's Earth Book introductions were one way that Poul Anderson found to impart more information about, e.g., Jim Ching and Emil Dalmady.

"To those who read, good flight."

-Poul Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1978), p. 13.

(I still think that the Earth Book is the peak of American future historical writing.)