Explorations

Explorations (New York, 1981) by Poul Anderson is a collection of six stories:

i "The Saturn Game"
ii "The Bitter Bread"
iii "The Ways of Love"
iv "The Voortrekkers"
v "Epilogue"
vi "Starfog"

Maybe "Epilogue" should have been no vi?

Anderson and editor Jim Baen agreed the contents and theme. Anderson's Introduction is a spirited defense of a manned space program:

"A human being is the only computer that continuously reprograms itself, the only sensor system that records data it is not planned to detect, the only thing that gives a damn." (p. 10)

Yes, and therefore a human being is not a computer! Only conscious beings value anything.

The opening and closing stories of this collection are also the opening and closing stories of Anderson's Technic Civilization Future History and therefore have more recently been republished at the beginning of Volume I and the end of Volume VII of Baen Books' The Technic Civilization Saga. "The Ways of Love," about which I posted recently, is the sequel to Anderson's The Enemy Stars and therefore, I think, should be republished as an epilogue to that novel.

"The Voortrekkers" is in Anderson's later collection All One Universe. I am fairly certain that "Epilogue" is in another collection on a shelf upstairs but will confirm this tomorrow rather than at this time of night. So far, mentally eliminating duplicable stories from Anderson collections has had these results -

Alight In The Void: 5-2=3;
Conquests/Seven Conquests: 7-2=5;
Explorations: 6-5=1.

Thus, perhaps one collection of nine stories could be derived from these three? I am left with two stories, (iv) and (v), to reread and one, (ii), to read for the first time.