Medea

(I find it impossible to stop posting about Poul Anderson but am trying to slow down so I will add one or maybe two new posts per day for several days and see how that goes.)

Every time I read a Poul Anderson story, I learn something. In this case, "Hunter's Moon" (Space Folk, New York, 1989) turns out to be Anderson's contribution to yet another shared scenario: Medea: Harlan's World, edited by Harlan Ellison. Probably every differently authored story in this anthology has re-appeared in a collection of its author's works.

A very long time ago, I read Larry Niven's Medea story, "Flare Time," in a Niven collection. As I understood it at the time, Niven had incorporated Ellison's planet Medea into the interstellar ramjet trade circuit of his own Leshy Circuit stories. Thus, two series either crossed over or came to be amalgamated?

Again, I have had Space Folk on a shelf for years but had not yet got around to reading either "Horse Trader" or "Hunter's Moon." In a recent post on Anderson's novel, For Love And Glory, I listed the many shared series to which I knew that Anderson had contributed but Medea was not among them.

The opening sentence immediately establishes that the story is set in another planetary system:

"Both suns were now down." (p. 147)

The first two and a half pages, punctuated by three asterisks at beginning and end,***, are narrated from the point of view of a Medean flying intelligence and therefore contain references that the reader does not yet understand. In this respect, these pages are similar to the opening passages of several other works by Anderson. (See The Rebel Worlds and World Without Stars.) We get a human point of view, that of "Hugh Brocket," (p. 149) after the second set of asterisks and a double space in the text.

I have glanced ahead and confirmed that the triple asterisks are used to delineate that same Medean viewpoint later in the story. There are two intelligent Medean species and a dash, -, is used to delineate the viewpoint of a member of the other species.

A human character remarks that "'...most animals...have to take shelter when a sun flares.'" (p. 160) Thus, Anderson's Medean story refers in passing to the subject matter of Niven's. No doubt, between them, the Medea stories cover the major aspects of Medean life.