Farms, Planets, Iapetus And Harbor

Before reading the Introduction to Going For Infinity (New York, 2002), I had not known that a period of Poul Anderson's childhood was spent working on a family farm. That gives him something in common with my hero, Clark Kent.

After the general Introduction to the book, comes the shorter introduction to the first short story, "The Saturn Game." This is, of course, the first story in Anderson's Technic Civilization History and also in his non-series collection, Explorations. Nevertheless, I am beginning to understand why stories are collected as they are. Here, there is no mention either of the Technic History or of the earlier Psychotechnic History to which the second story in Going For Infinity, "Gypsy," belongs.

Instead, the introduction, in this volume, to "The Saturn Game" explains Anderson's early and lifelong interest in the planets, starting with Mars but going on to Venus, the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn and even the Saturnian moon, Iapetus, on which "The Saturn Game" is set. So the introduction begins with the young Poul looking at Mars and ends with Poul and Karen in 1980 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Voyager One flyby of Saturn, one question being whether the probe would transmit any data to contradict the story, which at that time had been written but not yet published.

Having reread "The Saturn Game" quite recently for this blog, I will not reread it again now but I ought to read through "Gypsy." I remember this as a satisfying story in which interstellar travelers who cannot find their way back to Earth have become comfortable as farmers on their colony planet of Harbor but prefer to return to the wandering life in their star ship, the Traveler, which thus becomes the first Nomad ship although that term is not used in this story. "Gypsy" is potentially the start of a series within the series.

The story opens with its first person narrator returning to Harbor from a journey within the planetary system, seeing the empty Traveler in orbit, then failing to find it again "...in that thronging wilderness of stars." (p. 67)

So here is a question for Anderson fans: in which two novels does he also use the phrase "...wilderness of stars"?