The Technic Civilization Saga

This has been a long time coming. I finally have Baen Books Technic Civilization Saga in its entirety. One volume had to be reprinted before the bookshop could get it. I already had all but one of the collected stories but this series is definitely worth buying. (Referring to another Anderson series, I bought an identical  new copy of The Shield Of Time when my original copy began to crumble into dust through over-use, then patched up the original and continued to use it.)

Hank Davis' Introductions to the Volumes are worth reading, also his entertaining new Introduction to one old story that definitely needed it. The Volumes can be critiqued for their covers, contents and titles. I do not want to be comprehensive right now but here are some main point, not in any order.

Volume I, cover: excellent image of van Rijn;

Vol III, I agree with contents and cover but not title - should be Late League, Early Empire or, better still, just League And Empire;

Vol IV, I agree with contents and title but not cover;

I think the last three Flandry novels should be a Volume called Children Of Empire;

Flandry should be absent from the title, cover and contents of the concluding Volume, which should be Long Night And Dawn, although that is a good image of an older Flandry;

Flandry does not look quite aristocratic enough - the illustrations in the Ace Books edition of The Game Of Empire are truer to the physical descriptions in the texts.

Senlac

From the top floor of the county hospital in February, 1933, when Jack Havig is born, Dr Robert Anderson sees to his right the small upper-midwestern town of Senlac (a fictional name invented by Poul Anderson for his novel based on the deceased Robert's notes, clippings and photographs and on remembered conversations). The town was:

"...clustered along a frozen river, red brick at the middle, frame houses on tree-lined streets, grain elevator and water tank rearing ghostly in the dawnlight near the railway station." (There Will Be Time, New York, 1973, p. 9)

Ahead and to the left are hills, woodlets, fences, farms and Morgan Woods. Like Clark Kent and an earlier "superman," Philip Wylie's Hugo Danner, the time traveler Jack Havig grows up in a small American town, a "small ville." In fact, there is an explicit reference to Clark Kent. On a page that I will find when rereading, Havig remarks that a cubicle in a public toilet is a more discrete place than Clark Kent's telephone booth for a time traveler to disappear in.

I also intend to scour the book for data on Senlac, yet another of Anderson's imaginatively detailed fictitious locations. The Foreword has already told us that Robert's father, a journalist, became editor of the local newspaper in 1910. These Andersons were Episcopalian and Democratic. Looking ahead, I am reminded that there is a Senlac Arms which, by 1969, will have been razed and another hotel built on the site. Most details are forgotten when reading a novel whereas studying the text means retaining many of these details and also enhances appreciation of the author's creativity.

There Will be Time II

HG Wells' "outer narrator," who seems to be identical with Wells, describes the Time Traveler's dinner parties whereas the Time Traveler himself describes his "time traveling," thus leaving open the possibility that the time travel is a fiction within the fiction - although the outer narrator does see the Time Traveler departing at the end.

In There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), Poul Anderson constructs a more elaborate narrative framework. Not Anderson himself but a relative, Dr Robert Anderson, meets the time traveler, Jack Havig, and we are told that one of Havig's fellow (time) travelers gave the time travel idea to

"...a young Englishman in the '90's, starting out as an author, a gifted fellow even if he was kind of a socialist." (p. 73)

Thus, three works of fiction, Anderson's Maurai series, the present novel and the original The Time Machine result indirectly from time travel activities.

Through Havig, Robert Anderson knows of the coming nuclear War of Judgement that is a premise of the Maurai series. He comments:

"Oh, God, the young, the poor young! Poul, my generation and yours have had it outrageously easy. All we ever had to do was be white Americans in reasonable health, and we got our place in the sun." (p. 6)

Well, we cannot exactly choose to be white. By putting that single adjective into the mouth of an older character, Anderson acknowledges a deep division in American society during the period referred to.

By time traveling within the twentieth century, Havig tells the medical practitioner Robert Anderson things that we know:

"They'll find the molecular basis for heredity, approximately ten years from now."
"What?...This you've got to tell me more about!"
"Later...I'll give you as much information on DNA and the rest as I can, though that isn't a whale of a lot..." (p. 47) 

And many of us would not have been able to tell him much either.

There Will Be Time

What have Poul Anderson's Orion Shall Rise and There Will Be Time got in common? Each has a title that is a full sentence in the future tense (one refers to space; the other to time) and the Foreword to There Will Be Time refers to the Maurai, one of the future nationalities in Orion Shall Rise.

In this very strange Foreword, the author, Poul Anderson, directly addresses the reader. He convincingly describes a relative, Dr Robert Anderson, who, we come to realise, must be fictitious. This fictitious Anderson (fictitiously) inspired both the Maurai series and the present novel. Could this fictitious inspiration, Robert Anderson, partly represent a real inspiration, Robert Anson Heinlein? (I don't know.)

Robert addresses the narrator of the Foreword as "Poul" and refers to "Karen" so we are in no doubt that, in this case, narrator and author are identical, but, for the rest of the novel, Robert is the narrator though not the central character. He mediates between Poul and Jack Havig, a time traveller. In fact, there are perhaps five layers here:

you and me reading the novel;
Poul Anderson, the author of the novel;
Poul Anderson, the narrator of the Foreword;
Robert Anderson, the narrator of the rest of the novel;
Jack Havig, the central character of the novel.

Poul Anderson the narrator is a strong link between reality and fiction.

There Will be Time is a very good time travel novel of which there are few. I used to think that Poul Anderson's two volume Time Patrol series, considered as a unit, and Jack Finney's two Time novels, also considered as a unit, were the two culminations of the time travel fiction that had been initiated by The Time Machine and wondered if there could be a third. Later, I accepted that Audrey Niffeneger's The Time Traveler's Wife was a third. However, a few other novels, like The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers and this one by Anderson, are certainly comparable.

Orion Risen

I am quite certain that orbiting astronauts radioing an appeal for international cooperation would not affect terrestrial politics in the slightest, unless, of course, those politics were already moving in that direction, as Anderson tries to show. For one thing, the conflict has killed its own chief architects. Further, nuclear missiles and laser beams fired from the stratosphere are not weapons but instruments of genocide. The War of Judgement had left a deep disquiet at the idea of destruction on such a scale. That destruction has started again precisely because of Maurai attempts to suppress it so now it is easy to argue that Federation policies must change. (This cover makes the (spherical) aerostat resemble an attacking flying saucer but accurately conveys its capacity for destruction.)

Also, in the interests of realism, the character Plik, a sort of auctorial spokesman within the text, reminds his friends and thus us that all will not be sweetness and light despite the popular revulsion against continued hostilities. Anderson, as always, shows us every point of view. A scientist helping to design a spaceship is idealistic about how resources from the Solar System will transform the Earth, poorer countries included, whereas the Intelligence chief protecting the project expects space traveling human beings to continue polluting their environments but wants the military applications of spacecraft for his country in particular.

Designing spacecraft secretly without the benefit of a large scale ground control system, the Norrmen must build from scratch a ship that is more maneuverable than the old NASA capsules. Thus, this ship carries a crew and supplies, can be controlled from within, can orbit Earth indefinitely, fly once round the Moon and land back on Earth to be reused - kind of like an experimental spaceship in an old sf novel!

The behavior of a Gaean teacher confirms my earlier characterization of this future philosophy as "green fascism." When it is suggested that lasering entire territories will damage Gaea, he responds:

"We are Gaea." (Orion Shall Rise, London, 1988, p. 459)

Indiscriminate destruction of life in the name of all life: the reader is relieved when this character is among the fatalities.

Although I wrote earlier that the Pey d'Or tavern becomes a familiar venue in the novel (and it does), closer reading reveals that it appears only three times - and the surviving characters do not rendezvous there again at the end. Nevertheless, Anderson's writing makes the setting familiar to the reader. Iern tells Plik:

"I used to carouse in Kemper, on furloughs while a Cadet, often in this very den..." (p. 45)

- so the place has a history for the characters even though we are, in that passage, seeing it for the first time. As I remarked before, Anderson combines wealth of imagination with economy of writing.

Anderson's vocabulary continues to be broad. I googled "maintruck" (p. 466) only to be informed that there is no definition recorded. Blogging about a novel while rereading it is slower but more meaningful. I retain more of the details and can refresh my memory on the blog.

The Pey d'Or

Not for the first time, I have tried to summarize all that Poul Anderson tells us about a fictitious place and have found that there is a lot more detail than I had realized.

Kemper, spared in the War of Judgement, became the largest town and chief seaport in Brezh and the capital of Ar-Mor. It has a multi-denominational Cathedral of St Corentin and a museum housing ancient relics.

The Pey d'Or, a basement tavern in Kemper, mostly for labourers and sailors, has smoke-blackened beams, low ceiling, clay floor, a dusty clerestory (high window above eye level), four tables with benches and stairs from a door to the street. The balladeer Peyt "Plik" Rensoon, an Angleyman from Free Church-governed Devon in southern Angleylann across the Channel, sings in Angley, plays his lute, drinks from a goblet of wine, smokes a clay pipe, addresses the Francey-speaking barmaid Sesi as "Vineleaf" and, at different times, drinks with sailors, laborers, farmers, psyans (peasants), the Stormrider Iern and visitors from the Northwest Union.

Two members of a new green-uniformed force, the Terran Guard, enter the tavern with an announcement from the new Captain of Skyholm, thus provoking political argument among the sailors from ships in port and other patrons present. The tavern becomes a familiar setting to which the narrative returns and where some of the major characters meet for the first time.  

Orion Rises

 When I wrote that Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson (London, 1988) was "Rooted In The Past," I had not yet reread to pages 306-308 where a hundred women - maidens, wives and grandmothers - meet at standing stones to curse a usurper who:

"...claimed his world-view embraced eons, but...had no real conception of ancientness. He could not admit that a people may have a right to preserve their own nature..." (p. 306)

The curse, in the names of Deu, Zhesu-Crett and all saints, is Christian. A distinction is made between saints "...on high..." and "...in the Afterworld..." "...on high..." must refer to the aristocrats in the aerostat who, we have been told, are commonly regarded as "saints."

This curse takes us right back to the earliest European history and even reminds us of the Nine Witch-Queens in Poul and Karen Anderson's historical fantasy tetralogy, The King Of Ys. The town that was Quimper in the Ys period has become Kemper in the Orion period. Orion Shall Rise encapsulates the past of Europe and a future for the world. The old religion Christianity, represented by a Bishop in Devon, clashes with the new philosophy of Gaeanity, represented by the cursed usurper.

We had known from early in the novel that "Orion" was a top secret prohibited technology project in a country defeated by the conservationist Maurai. On page 311 of 468, we are finally told exactly what it is although perhaps I should not state that here? The Maurai go to war to suppress Orion but are resisted by their adversaries' peculiar "Lodge" system. What seemed to be a population fleeing from invaders turns out to have been a population mobilized to use hidden weapons to destroy the Maurai Marine Corps. Any population outnumbers any invading army so that, if the population is motivated, armed and organized, then invaders beware. Anderson knew the importance of different kinds of social organization.

The Pey-d'Or is a tavern introduced early in the novel and a place that becomes familiar as characters meet and return there. They include "the Stormrider" Iern and the balladeer Plik. Anderson endows the latter with a (slightly implausible?) poetic/prophetic ability to mythologize the historical events occurring around him and to predict in general terms how they must go. Although an archaic Nicene Christian, he knows that:

"...the gods are doomed - everybody's gods - and what new ones will come striding through their ashes, we shall not live to understand." (p. 316)

 And:

"The Apollonian Domain and Arthurian Maurai are up against Orphic Gaeanity and the Faustian Northwest...the Norrmen are demons readying to overthrow the gods of sky, sea, and earth - though chthonic gods have always had their own dark side - and the war that is coming will bring an end to the world." (p. 270)

The Norrmen of the Northwest are industrial demons challenging European aerostatic government (sky), the Maurai (sea) and Gaeans (land).

Although in this instance writing sf, Anderson, through Plik, applies the language of mythological fantasy and ensures that the reader does not miss the significance of seemingly small events that will have enormous consequences later in the narrative. By "...an end to the world..." is meant an end to the present world order. A four sided conflict is an improvement on the twosidedness often seen in popular fiction. A Gaean, secretly helped by the Northwest Wolf Lodge, has seized control of the Domain but is provoking civil war.

Rooted In The Past

Poul Anderson's Orion Shall Rise (London, 1988) is set many centuries in our future. We do not know how many centuries because (it seems that) the old style of dating ended with the (nuclear) War of Judgement, almost certainly to be replaced by many different local dating systems but we are not told about those either.

Despite being set so far in the future, the events of the novel are firmly rooted in our common past. In the first place, the devastation of the War had thrown entire continents back into earlier ways of living from which they then advanced in new directions both scientifically and culturally, generating a rich fictitious history as we often observe when commenting on Anderson's works.

Secondly, there are several historical references. Printed texts had been dispersed too widely to allow a loss of knowledge. There are new religions and new forms of Christianity but one character is able to identify himself as a Nicene Christian. There is a Cathedral dedicated to St Corentin who was a character in Poul and Karen Anderson's King Of Ys tetralogy set during an earlier social collapse, the Fall of the Roman Empire (as opposed to the larger scale Fall of the Terran Empire chronicled by Anderson in another series and in an alternative fictitious timeline).

Not only was the Christian Corentin canonised. The atheist Lenin has been deified! Mong gods include "...Oktai, Erlik, Lenin..." (p. 267) That deification of Lenin combines in a single word Anderson's treatment of social evolution, including his concerns about social revolutions, and his interest in the historical development of mythology - two themes addressed fully in his Time Patrol series.

Readers have a privileged relationship to characters. We can compare the Maurai Federation and the Time Patrol although they cannot know about each other. A subsequent volume, There Will be Time, informs us that, unknown to the Maurai and to us when reading about the Maurai, time travellers do move through the history of the Federation but their form of time travel differs from that used by the Patrol. The historical dimension is emphasised further when a man from the twentieth century visits both the Constantinople of his past and the Maurai in his future.

The Heautontimoroumenos

I have said before that reading Poul Anderson requires a dictionary but he surpasses himself on page 258 of Orion Shall Rise (London, 1988):

"The Life Force is also the Heautontimoroumenos, the Self-Tortured."

The Gaean speaker defines the term as soon as she uses it but it is convenient to be able to Google for further elucidation. (An unusual term used in another series, the Time Patrol, was "psychopomp.")

Gaeanity is one of many future philosophies imagined by Anderson. Characteristically, he shows it as neither simply good nor simply bad. Gaean meditation is not trance but merging of being with world, thus opening senses, heightening perceptions and, in one case, hearing approaching strangers who are still afar. (p. 246)

Iern, conversing with the Gaean, comments that ruling classes favor Gaeanity because it encourages submission among restless populations:

"...never mind liberty or traditional rights, just retreat into your head. Or it can be useful in marshaling forces against a rival...as I found out." (p. 258)

The philosophical is also the political. Gaeans address all life on Earth as "Gaea, Great All-Mother..." (p. 102) and regard human beings as "organelles," another word that might need a dictionary. (p. 84)

For me, Gaeanity in and of itself, not just its ideological/political applications, is shown to be a negative force by the following passage. Of someone seeking fissionables, a Gaean directive states:

" - whoever is responsible for this must be found out and annihilated. You are the defensive cells of Gaea. Through you, now, acts the Life Force." (p. 183)

This is green fascism.

Wealth Of Imagination And Economy Of Writing

This article was unsuccessfully submitted for publication elsewhere. Since then, several of its themes have been presented separately in posts on this blog. For what it is worth, here is the original article.

Although Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is a long series, forty three fictional works of different lengths, it is economically written. The History divides into several periods each of which could have been treated at greater length. Six works about Master Merchant Nicholas van Rijn of the Polesotechnic League lead to five about one of van Rijn's trader teams, then to five about the aftermath and consequences of the van Rijn period. Thus, these three divisions, comprising sixteen works, are less than half the total.

The trader team of the series is:

the human Hermetian colonial David Falkayn, Master Merchant, Polesotechnic League;
the dinosaur-like male Wodenite Adzel, planetologist;
the squirrel-like female Cynthian Chee Lan, xenobiologist;
the consciousness-level computer, "Muddlehead," in the spaceship, Muddlin' Through.

One story had already introduced Adzel and the League and two had introduced Falkayn so we are now considering nineteen works.

The five about the team are:

"Trader Team"/"The Trouble Twisters"
"Day of Burning"
Satan's World
"Lodestar"
Mirkheim

"Trader Team" was re-entitled "The Trouble Twisters" when it was re-published in a three-story collection called The Trouble Twisters. However, the other two collected stories describe earlier events in Falkayn's career, not later adventures of the team. Thus, "The Trouble Twisters" is not the opening story, Part I, but the culmination, Part III.

The story, published in 1965, provides an illuminating example of how future histories are written. It informs us that the dragon-like Adzel sang Fafnir and paraded at Chinese New Year while a student on Earth. This information is imparted along with some characterization. Adzel affirms his appreciation of other cultures by mentioning his singing of Fafnir, Chee snidely retorts by mentioning the less dignified street parades and Falkayn tells them to stop squabbling. But the information provides the basis for a later written story. "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson," published in 1974, narrated by human student James Ching, who is never seen again in the History, tells us how James', his girlfriend's and Adzel's problems were all solved by Adzel's dragon performances.

In "Trader Team"/"The Trouble Twisters":

van Rijn explains the trader team or "trade pioneer crew" idea to Falkayn;
the team has its first adventure, on the planet Ikrananka;
afterwards, Falkayn defines their new profession:

"...we're a new breed. Not troubleshooters. Trouble twisters. I suspect our whole career is going to be a sequence of ghastly situations that somehow we twist around to our advantage." (1)

The team does not explore new planets beyond the frontiers of known space. Explorers had already bypassed many planetary systems as not of immediate interest. Van Rijn's Solar Spice & Liquors Company sends robot probes to these nearer systems. The team explores any that seem promising. But "The Trouble Twisters" is the only story in which we see them do this. In "Day of Burning," they are on Merseia which had been visited two centuries before during the Grand Survey. Merseia will be devastated by a nearby supernova unless League merchants supply force screens that will both protect Merseian civilization and enable Technic scientists to use Merseia and its moons as bases for study of the supernova. Muddlin' Through happened to be the nearest League ship when the dual problem of how to study the supernova and how to protect Merseia was identified. Divisions between Merseians cause problems obliging the team to "trouble twist." Falkayn tells a Merseian leader that he has seen planets devastated by nuclear wars, the only time in the series when we are told this. Potentially, a story could have been told about one of these.

Satan's World differs again. The team seeks intelligence by consulting a data-processing firm within the Solar System where Falkayn is both lionized and spied on because he is:

"Right-hand man and roving troubletwister for Old Nick." (2) ("Trouble twister" has become a single word.)

So a lot more has occurred than merely the two adventures of which we have been informed. Van Rijn and his team must now address not "trouble" on one planet, another Ikrananka or Merseia, but a threat to Technic civilization. Van Rijn splits the team, keeping Adzel with him but sending the others elsewhere. The two teams re-join on a hostile planet from which they might not escape. This third episode potentially ends the trader team sub-series. First the team is split, then it might not survive and indeed its entire civilization is endangered. Although an immediate end is averted, the external threat from the Shenna has served as a warning that Technic civilization is not as secure as it seems. Satan's World was potentially a turning point and we will see that the remaining two works are indeed turning points. Further, civilization is threatened not only by external enemies but also by its internal contradictions.

At the very end of Satan's World, as Muddlin' Through accelerates outwards, Falkayn remarks:

"I don't know why we're starting out again when we're rich for life." (3)

Chee replies:

"I know why you are...Any more of the kind of existence you've been leading, and you'd implode...And me, I grew bored. It'll be good to get out under fresh skies again." (3)

Adzel, the Buddhist convert, adds:

"And find new enlightenments..." (3)

Falkayn concedes:

"Yes, of course...I was joking. It sounded too pretentious, though, to declaim that the frontier is where we belong." (3)

And Muddlehead resumes the poker game. With the crisis averted, they leave the Solar System and return to "troubletwisting." However, again, we do not see them doing it. The next time we see the team, at the beginning of "Lodestar," they have taken a few days off at the League outpost on the planet Tametha - where, however, they do encounter some unexpected trouble, a native uprising against exploitation by League companies. Here, not "troubletwisting" but mere combat skills and Muddlehead's ability to take off fast are essential.

"Lodestar" is equally a trader team story and a van Rijn story. When the team has escaped from Tametha, the scene shifts to van Rijn ten years later. We are informed both that nearly a decade has passed since the Satan episode and that:

"...pioneers like the Muddlin' Through team...kept finding him profitable new lands." (4)

But we do not see them doing it. Van Rijn takes to space again. (In his own series, he had been in space in four works and had received employees' reports in two.) Here, he seeks a source of industrially valuable supermetals and learns that his team had discovered such a source ten years earlier on "Eka-World" but had given it to the poorer planets, not to him. Falkayn had sought a supermetal source on his own initiative, not in response to data from a SS&L robot probe. And he has broken his oath of fealty to van Rijn. This potential conflict is the turning point of the series. Exploitation on Tametha had made Falkayn reflect on problems in the League and he has tried to address some of the problems by helping races that are being left behind by Technic civilization.

There are anticipations of the future. Hirharouk, the Ythrian captain of the ship in which van Rijn had traveled sees the shadow of God the Hunter (we might say the shadow of death) on van Rijn's way of life and advises:

"Let the new come to birth in peace." (5)

When Falkayn started to reflect on the problems, Chee had asked him whether he would prefer the Terran Empire - which does not yet exist, Chee is merely speculating - to free enterprise. On a personal level, van Rijn had been accompanied by his granddaughter, Coya Conyon, who, we realize, is attached to Falkayn. En route to their climactic confrontation with Falkayn, Coya had reflected that League self-regulation was breaking down and that competition was becoming more cutthroat.

"The Pax Mercatorica was drawing to an end and, while she had never wholly approved of it, she sometimes dreaded the future." (6)

The story shows the passage of time for the characters. Falkayn feels old, though he is not yet, and Coya sees that van Rijn is. The Ythrian spaceship crew links this story back to two earlier stories that had introduced this species so we are now considering twenty one works, just under half of the forty three in the Technic History.

Finally, Mirkheim is a definitive conclusion to the trader team sub-series, therefore a turning point for the Technic History. In fact, it begins with the team's days already over and informs us of events that we have missed between "Lodestar" and Mirkheim:

Falkayn married Coya;
Coya joined the team for five years;
the Falkayns retired when their daughter was born;
they have lived in the Solar System for three years;
Chee joined another trade pioneer crew;
Adzel has been a lay brother in a Buddhist monastery in the Andes for three years;
Coya is pregnant again;
van Rijn re-assembles the team minus Coya to investigate the planet Babur, introduced in a van Rijn story, which has suddenly claimed the right to take possession of the supermetal source, now called Mirkheim, thus precipitating an interstellar crisis.

So the old team sets out again but not as before.

"And so we fare forth again, we three and our ship, like our young days come back," Adzel sighed, "except that this time our mission is not into the hopeful yonder." (7)

Anderson simultaneously writes both a trader team novel and a post-trader team novel! The Baburites occupy not only Mirkheim but also Falkayn's home world, Hermes, in the process killing Admiral Michael Falkayn of the Hermetian Space Navy. Thus, the younger brother, David Falkayn, is drawn into these epochal events not only as van Rijn's employee but also as the new president of the Falkayn domain according to the constitution of the Grand Duchy of Hermes. The characters' lives have changed and will change again.

Muddlin' Through, returning from missions to Babur and Mirkheim, is commandeered under emergency powers by the government of the Solar Commonwealth so that the trader team must use a Hermetian naval vessel to smuggle Falkayn home. Again, the team has to be divided. When Falkayn returns to Earth with the intelligence that some League companies have secretly armed Babur, there is literally civil war in the League, a mortal wound for the institution, even though the conspirators are defeated, their lightly defended properties easily attacked by Hermetians and by independent merchants.

The malcontents within Technic civilization, who provide a mercenary army for the invasion of Hermes, include some Merseians, members of that species which will be the main opponent of the Terran Empire, the League's successor, later in the History. Falkayn and Chee in combat on Hermes for me evoked the human and non-human members of the Green Lantern Corps, a comic book sf superhero team, recently filmed. For anyone who knows both series, the comparison is unavoidable. There was even a squirrel-like GL, just like Chee, and, like the GL's, Chee flew, in her case with a gravity harness, on Merseia. But there is a more general point here. The Technic History is comparable to several better known sf series: Star Trek, Star Wars, Foundation and Dune. Like them, it presents a fictitious history of interstellar wars and empires but Anderson's series is more imaginative and substantial. It is more firmly grounded in knowledge of both the physical and the social sciences. It is also comparable to the original Future History of Robert Heinlein but performs the same task, presentation of a pyramidal structure with earlier stories providing the basis for later stories, on a vaster spatiotemporal scale.

After the Babur War:

Hermes gains the stewardship of Mirkheim and the protectorate of Babur;
Hermetian aristocratic society will continue to be democratized (everything changes and the History as a whole is about social change);
the Falkayns will look for somewhere to begin afresh;
Adzel and Chee will return to their home planets but will continue to confer about the futures of their respective races in the times ahead;
van Rijn in Muddlin' Through might lead an expedition outside known space...

The characters sum everything up -

Adzel (shortly before Chee and he return to their respective home planets): "...those were good years...I will miss my partners." (8)

Chee: "We can't go home to what we left when we were young; it may still be, but we aren't, nor is the rest of the cosmos...We enjoyed the trader game as long as that lasted." (9)

Van Rijn: "You take the Long Trail with me!...A universe where all roads lead to roaming. Life never fails us. We fail it, unless we reach out." (10)

The novel ends: "Above the cliffs, a few eastern clouds turned red." (11)

This is mixed symbolism. Red is the color of sunsets. Something is ending. But these are eastern clouds. This is a morning. Something is beginning. We will see what when we turn to the next work in the History.

The next five works are:

"Wingless"
"Rescue on Avalon"
"The Star Plunderer"
"Sargasso of Lost Starships"
The People of the Wind

Nicholas van Rijn was the personal link between the van Rijn series and the trader team series. Nicholas Falkayn, great-grandson of Nicholas van Rijn and son of David Falkayn, is born near the end of Mirkheim and addresses his own young son in "Wingless." Thus, this second Nicholas is the personal link between the trader team series and what comes next and we now learn where the Falkayns began afresh. The opening paragraph of "Wingless" informs us that Avalon was the first planet jointly colonized by two species. The second paragraph informs us that the two species are human beings and Ythrians. In an earlier story, members of both these species had explored an as yet unnamed planet which The Earth Book of Stormgate informs us was Avalon.

At least three generations, David, Nicholas and Nat, live in the Hesperian Islands on Avalon although Nicholas, an engineer, is among those who plan the colonization of the Coronan continent. Ivar Holm works in an Andromeda Mountains Rescue Station when the two Avalonian authorities, the Parliament of Man and the Great Khruath of the Ythrians, divide the continent between the species. Christopher Holm and Tabitha Falkayn marry in a later period when the Terran Empire, founded in "The Star Plunderer" and expanding in "Sargasso of Lost Starships," has lost its war to annex Avalon so that the colony remains independent as its Founder, David Falkayn, would have wanted.

When Avalon resists Terra, the Great Khruath is addressed electronically from "...the olden site, First Island in the Hesperian Sea..." before the house of David Falkayn. (12) But we have not seen the Falkayns living in this house. That would have happened off-stage during "Wingless." This "olden site" is new to us, although we have read of the Hesperian Islands.

Anderson, whose descriptive passages always vividly evoke several of the senses, directs our attention to the sky at the end of The People of the Wind, as he had done at the end of Mirkheim:

"The sun stood up in a shout of light.
"High is heaven and holy." (13)

Falkayn informed Coya and thus us that he had been dealing with nonhumans for over thirty years and that Adzel, Chee and he were an efficient unit. Entire additional series could theoretically have been written about:

the early days of the trader team;
James Ching's adventures in the League;
the team's further adventures between the Satan and "Lodestar" incidents;
the five years when Coya joined the team;
the other trade pioneer crew that Chee joined;
the Falkayns' early days on Avalon;
van Rijn's expedition outside known space;
the colonization of the Hesperian Islands and Corona.

The later History also contains several potential series. We read most of the career of Dominic Flandry, who defended the Empire, but only the beginning of the career of his daughter, Diana Crowfeather. We read only one episode in the life of Roan Tom, star rover during the post-Imperial Long Night, and one in the life of Daven Laure, "Ranger" in a much later and larger interstellar civilization. We are not told what became of the Merseians, Wodenites, Cynthians or Ythrians or whether Flandry's opponent Aycharaych survived Flandry's destruction of his home planet, Chereion. Before that, we had learned that Aycharaych was the last living Chereionite but not how the rest of his species had died. Further potential series are:

Diana Crowfeather and her crew who are similar to Falkayn's, including a Wodenite;
Roan Tom and the Long Night;
other species after the Fall of the Terran Empire;
Aycharaych and the Chereionites;
Daven Laure and his organization, the Commonalty;
the Allied Planets period between the Long Night and the Commonalty (two works are set in this intermediate period).

But no one could have written all that and also written all the other works that Anderson did write. Thus, the works mentioned cover several incidents in depth but also skim the surface of longer periods which unfortunately must remain unchronicled.

(1) Poul Anderson, The Trouble Twisters, New York, 1966, p. 188.
(2) Poul Anderson, Satan's World, New York, 1977, p. 3.
(3) ibid., p. 220.
(4) Poul Anderson, "Lodestar" IN The Earth Book of Stormgate, New York, 1979, pp. 370-408 AT p. 375.
(5) ibid., p. 407.
(6) ibid., p. 385.
(7) Poul Anderson, Mirkheim, London, 1978, p. 34.
(8) ibid., p. 216.
(9) ibid., pp. 217-218.
(10) ibid., p. 215.
(11) ibid., p. 218.
(12) Poul Anderson, The People of the Wind, London, 1977, p. 107.
(13) ibid., p. 191.