More About Aeneas?

Poul Anderson's The Day Of Their Return is set entirely on the colonized planet, Aeneas. I summarized information about Aenean physical conditions in an earlier post entitled "Life On Aeneas" and about Aenean social conditions in an article on the Flandry series.

When rereading The Day Of Their Return, I have usually preferred to focus on the few chapters in which Chunderban Desai is the view point character. Desai is eminently likeable and his chapters are full of concentrated information about Aeneas, its sister planet Dido, their place in the Terran Empire, the Empire's enemies - the imperialistic Merseians and their Chereionite agent provocateur - and other characters in the novel.

However, the novel's main action occurs in the more numerous chapters featuring Desai's adversary, Ivar Frederiksen, who is on the run from Terran justice after leading a failed attack on Imperial marines. Ivar seeks concealment among the wandering "tinerans" and on the river and thus experiences many rich details of the life of diverse Aenean communities. Further, a correspondent informs me that events in these chapters disclose a contradiction between this novel and another installment, written earlier but set later, of Anderson's Technic Civilization History.

When writing a "prequel," the author has to ensure that, in this newly written work, the characters do not acquire or display any knowledge of which they are destined still to be ignorant at the beginning of the already written work. By and large, Anderson did a good job with the Flandry prequels, showing the central character in his teens and twenties acquiring the experience and skills that he employs to good effect later. But it seems that, in The Day Of Their Return, Imperial Intelligence gains information that it should have relayed to its agent Flandry, and that would have made a difference, before the beginning of his original series of short stories.

Whether or not this prima facie contradiction can be ironed out, it seems that The Day Of Their Return deserves to be reread in its entirety, not just for its Desai interludes, but before that I still have to make sense of the complicated situation on another colony planet, Freehold.