Ideally, Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization would have had a lot more stories like "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" which puts daily life center stage:
James Ching sits in a lounger;
his phone warbles;
he had set it to pass calls from at most a dozen people;
Jim is studying tensor calculus and transformations in hyperspace theory;
the Education Central computer projects material onto his screen;
his preliminary tests for the Academy are due soon;
the entrance exams, if he gets that far, will be a year later;
there are a hundred applications for every regular spaceman's berth;
training as an apprentice to a Master Merchant of the Polesotechnic League would be more practically based but apprenticeships usually go to relatives on the ground that relatives of survivors are more likely to be survivors;
Jim has an air car that he can fly over the ocean;
he has occasionally visited Luna, for example, most recently, as his sixteenth birthday present;
because Jim's surname is Ching, his principal counselor, Freeman Simon Snyder, wants him to represent the San Francisco Chinese community in the upcoming Festival of Man;
"'My people?' says Jim, as the room wobbles.
This story provides a welcome contrast to the extra-planetary adventures of van Rijn, Falkayn and Flandry.
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