Wednesday 15 May 2013

Collections II

In a recent post, I listed fourteen non-series Poul Anderson collections found on a shelf at home. Needless to say, a few more have since come to light:

Fantasy, but that is a bit different because it is mainly fantasy, not sf;

Winners, but that does have a point - five Hugo winners (two of them also belong in different future history collections);

an Ace Double of The Makeshift Rocket and Un-Man and other novellas.

the Un-Man collection contains:

"Un-Man," which belongs in the Psychotechnic future history;

"Margin of Profit," which belongs in the Technic History;

"The Live Coward," which is in at least one of the fourteen collections already mentioned.

Thus, Un-Man and other novellas has no right to exist as a separate collection!

Another complication is that Conquests, already mentioned, was originally published as Seven Conquests. These are not two collections with similar titles but one collection with different titles. There is a great need for Poul Anderson's short story collections to be uniformly rationalized.

Later: Sorry, Conquests was not already mentioned. Conflict was. You see how confusing it gets. I would have listed those two titles beside each other. They both contain "Kings Who Die" and "Details." Each also has one that belongs in a future history collection. Conquests also contains "Wildcat" that is, rightly, in the time travel collection, Past Times. Thus, Conquest's seven stories could be reduced to three - and I am sure that, of those, "Inside Straight" is in one or even two of the fourteen listed collections.

Still Later: And The Makeshift Rocket is "A Bicycle Built For Brew" which is in one or two of the collections so that entire Ace Double is redundant.

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