Thursday, 25 January 2018

Collections And Introductions

Poul Anderson's "Hiding Place," starring Nicholas van Rijn, was first published in Analog, March 1961, and has since been collected twice:

it is the first of three van Rijn stories to be collected as Trader To The Stars;

it is the last of eleven installments of Anderson's History of Technic Civilization to be collected as The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume I (of VII), The Van Rijn Method.

Van Rijn is the title character of both these collections.

In my copy of Trader To The Stars (Frogmore, St Albans, Herts, 1975) (see image):

"Hiding Place" begins on p. 9;
p. 8 is blank;
p. 7 is a fictional quotation from "Le Matelot," beginning with an authentic quotation from Shelley -

"The world's great age begins anew..." (see here)

Thus, Le Matelot seems to introduce the volume. However, I have reason to believe that Le Matelot specifically introduces only "Hiding Place" and therefore possibly appeared with it in Analog. (Later: Le Matelot was not in Analog. See the Acknowledgments in The Van Rijn Method, pp. vi-vii.)

In my copy of Trader To The Stars, "Hiding Place" is immediately followed by an extended quotation from Anderson's first van Rijn story, "Margin of Profit" (1956):

"Hiding Place" ends near the bottom of p. 47;
the quotation from "Margin of Profit" begins at the bottom of p. 47 and continues to the top of p. 49;
p. 50 is blank;
the second story in this collection, "Territory," begins on p. 51.

However, despite this misleading layout and pagination, the quotation from "Margin of Profit" is intended as an introduction to "Territory," not as a postscript to "Hiding Place." The compiler of The Technic Civilization Saga, Hank Davis, reproduces Le Matelot as introducing "Hiding Place" and the "Margin of Profit" quotation, now entitled "A Historical Reflection," as introducing "Territory," which is the first of seven works collected in Volume II, David Falkayn: Star Trader.

Finally, in Trader To The Stars:

"Territory" ends on p. 103;
p. 104 is blank;
p. 105 quotes a further stanza from Shelley's "Hellas" (see the above link);
p. 106 is blank;
the third story, "The Master Key," begins on p. 107.

Thus, the stanza beginning, "A loftier Argo cleaves the main...," clearly introduces "The Master Key" and is reproduced as such when this story is republished as the fourth installment in David Falkayn: Star Trader.

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