Past And Future

This blog is entirely about the works of Poul Anderson and, for over two months, I have narrowed the focus to discuss just one series, the Technic Civilization History, despite having posted on this series several times previously. I think that the History warrants this amount of attention and I have by no means exhausted all that there is to be said about it. Nevertheless, I am bound to reach the limit of what one reader can usefully say for the time being - if I have not passed such a limit already. I am not sure at present. But I have definitely demonstrated that many more of the descriptive and narrative details can be properly appreciated by studying the texts, reading slowly and extracting information, rather than just by skimming through them, which is the way that this sort of popular fiction is usually read.

Quite a while back, I focused on all of Anderson's "past" fiction, novels and short stories set in historical or prehistorical periods, and, while I was doing this, I did not want to return to his futuristic sf because the past was a vast space, an entire universe, in its own right. In fact, I suggest that what we might call Anderson's "pre-futuristic" fiction divides into no less than ten entire series and/or groups of works:

BC;
Ys;
Vikings;
Last Viking;
14th century;
Many Times;
Many Timelines;
Time Patrol;
fantasies;
detectives.

By "Many Times," I mean:

The Boat Of A Million Years;
The Corridors Of Time;
Past Times (which I would revise slightly);
a collection, that could be called Many Times, to comprise:

"The Long Remembering";
"The Forest";
"The Peat Bog";
"The Tale of Hauk";
"Son of the Sword."

I have discussed most of these stories in previous posts. However, I remembered that there was a story set in ancient Egypt that I had not yet read and had meant to get back to. I could remember neither its title nor which collection it was in so I had to check through several volumes, including Alight In The Void, whose title to me suggests futuristic sf about interstellar travel, which is a theme of several Anderson collection titles.

In this collection, I found the story that I sought, which turns out to be called "Son of the Sword," and will shortly read it in order to comment on it.