Foundation And Flandry

Despite the title of this post, I do not intend to embark on yet another unfavorable comparison of Isaac Asimov's Robots and Empire Future History, including the Foundation Trilogy, with Poul Anderson's Technic Civilization Future History, including the Dominic Flandry Series. Nevertheless, I found a faint echo of Asimov in the Flandry novel, The Game Of Empire, as I will explain shortly.

One of the skills involved in writing a future history is to establish a body of background information, including places names, that becomes familiar to regular readers. Thus, for example, Trantor in Asimov's Galactic Empire and Archopolis in Anderson's Terran Empire. But can an author invent a place name that seems familiar even when the reader encounters it for the first time? "Archopolis" might have that effect since we are already familiar with "-arch" and "-opolis" and recognize that the composite word means something like "Ruler City."

When James Blish wrote the first ever Star Trek novel, Spock Must Die!, he referred in it to a Klingon base called "Bosklave." I thought that that sounded both appropriate and familiar. Then I reasoned that "Bosklave" is a conflation of "Boskone" and "enclave," which is certainly a resonant combination. I leave it to the alert sf reader to know what Boskone is.

In The Game Of Empire, Helen Kittredge trains for the Terran Space Navy at the Foundry. Why does that sound familiar? I suspect that Anderson does refer to the Foundry elsewhere in the series but, in any case, I think that "the Foundry" sounds familiar because it is a conflation of two key words from Asimov and Anderson respectively. If Anderson had been asked whether he consciously constructed the word "Foundry" in that way, he might not have remembered but that does not prevent the word from having a double resonance in this context.