Untold Tales

Although Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is long and substantial, it leaves us with the feeling that there could always have been more. (This is true even of Anderson's complete works: there never was a sequel to The Broken Sword.)

"'I looked into the abyss once, and saw nothing, and haven't looked since. You keep looking. Which of us is the braver?'"
-Poul Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), p. 48.

This speaker has just heard another man's story but does not divulge his own experience with "...the abyss."

"Once upon a time there was a king who set himself above the foreign merchants. What he did is of no account now; it was long ago and on another planet, and besides, the wench is dead. Harry Stenvik and I hung him by the seat of his trousers from his tallest minaret, in sight of all the people, and the name of the Polesotechnic League was great in the land."
-Poul Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (New York, 2010), p. 275.

These opening sentences of a novella establish that the first person narrator has a friend called Harry and that they live in the timeline, even the period, of the Polesotechnic League, but we do not learn any more about the minareted king who set himself above the foreign merchants.

"...Aycharaych died when the Dennitzans bombarded his planet. At least, he vanished; you could never be altogether sure about anything with the Chereionite."
-Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 267.

We can never be sure and, even if Aycharaych is dead, there is the greater mystery of what happened to the Chereionites.

Flandry offers to back his daughter and her friend as traders, explorers, scientists, artists or spies but we would need another book to tell us which of these professions they will choose. Flandry will also arrange funding for Fr Axor's research into the Ancients (Chereionites). Axor has already found promising clues but where will they lead?

No stories are set in the period when Coya had joined the trader team. There could be series about Roan Tom and Daven Laure. Need I go on?