Diverse Remarks

Today, I:

visited a lifeboat station at the end of a pier;
read about sea damage to a town and lives saved at sea;
walked back along the pier;
heard the sea roar beneath it;
knew the Dread of Lir;
watched a TV interview held inside the station.

A recent post identified St Nicholas, patron saint of sailors, as a possible opponent of Lir, God of the Sea. St Nicholas' Chapel in King's Lynn has a "Robinson Cruso" tombstone but we were told that the dates were wrong for Defoe to have taken the name from there.

Does Poul Anderson have a Robinson Crusoe scenario anywhere among his works - a spaceman who must survive alone for an indefinite period in a hostile environment? James Blish has Welcome To Mars and Rex Gordon has Robinson Crusoe On Mars. (At least, I thought it was called that.)

The 43 installments of Anderson's History of Technic Civilization subdivide into:

16 set during Nicholas van Rijn's lifetime;
15 during Dominic Flandry's lifetime;
12 others.

That is not a bad spread. The 12 "others" subdivide into 3 before, 5 between and 4 after so they are not a single bloc. In fact, David Falkayn at least is still alive at the time of the first intermediate installment.

Van Rijn's lifetime has 3 novels, Flandry's has 7, or 10 if we count the 3 shorter works that were published separately, and the "others" include 2 - depending on exactly what length we think counts as a novel.