Noah Arkwright

(I saw Star Trek: Into Darkness. The future historical and time travel aspects of the story line are handled well.)

Now let's get to grips with Noah Arkwright. The Trouble Twisters by Poul Anderson is, or was, three stories about David Falkayn:

"The Three-Cornered Wheel" introduces Falkayn;

in "A Sun Invisible," Falkayn works for Nicholas van Rijn's organization;

in "The Trouble Twisters," van Rijn appoints Falkayn to lead a trader team which embarks on its first expedition.

That third story is the only occasion when we see the trader team on a routine expedition. In all four of the remaining works that feature the team, they are caught up in some extraordinary situation or emergency. Indeed, in the last work, Mirkheim, the team has long since disbanded but van Rijn reconvenes it to deal with the outbreak of a war.

The stories from The Trouble Twisters are, rightly, separated in the Baen Books Technic Civilzation Saga. Thus, the two stories about Falkayn's earlier career are in Volume I whereas the four works about the team before its disbandment are in Volume II and its reconvening by van Rijn is in Volume III.

What has any of this got to do with anyone called Noah Arkwright? - you may well ask. In The Trouble Twisters, if not also in their original magazine appearances, each of the three stories has a fictitious Introduction and fortunately the Introductions are reproduced in Baen Volumes I and II. Each of the Introductions refers in a different way to one Noah Arkwright.

The first of the Introductions is an excerpt from Vance Hall's Commentary on the Philosophy of Noah Arkwright which, however, does not mention Arkwright! Hall reminds his readers that nuclear fission, lasers, artificial gravity and the hyperjump confounded earlier predictions about the impossibility of nuclear power, ray guns, space drives and faster than light travel but nevertheless asserts that Parkinson's Laws, Sturgeon's Revelation, Murphy's Law and the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics are immutable.

We might infer, first, that Arkwright would have agreed and, secondly, that Murphy's Law at least is exemplified in the story being introduced. Otherwise, the Introduction is irrelevant. In order to learn anything further about Arkwright, however, we must study the remaining Introductions which I will do in a subsequent post.