A Midsummer Tempest XVI

I have said before that Poul Anderson readers need a dictionary. Sometimes, there are a few unfamiliar words together. In A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975):

"It was a tartane, sharp-snouted and bowspritted, rigged with a jib and lateen mainsail. That made it less handy than the Dutch jachts Rupert knew..."(p. 179)

Sometimes a word is familiar, like "astrolabe" further down the page, but I would need to google how an astrolabe works.

When asked about the Dutch, Rupert replies:

" 'They're tolerant of religion, if not of whatever might stand in the way of their merchant's profits...On that account, I fear the machines will overwhelm their land within a few years." (pp.179-180)

"...merchant's profits..." evokes Anderson's Dutch-Indonesian space merchant Nicholas van Rijn. Indeed, the surname van Rijn appears almost immediately on page 180 and van Rijn himself is seen in the Old Phoenix in one of the short stories.

"...machines...overwhelm..." foreshadows Anderson's later sf novel, Genesis (New York, 2000), where artificial intelligence has superseded organic intelligence and human personalities uploaded into AI are said to have gone "...up in the machines..." (p. 245)

Fantasy and sf are all one in Anderson's imagination.