Planets And Poetry

The first person narrator of Poul Anderson's "The Master Key" describes Nicholas van Rijn as:

"...the single-handed conqueror of Borthu, Diomedes and t'Kela!"
-Poul Anderson, "The Master Key" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 273-327 AT p. 281.

He refers to the events of:

"Margin of Profit"
The Man Who Counts
"Territory"

- three of the previous five works to feature van Rijn.

Van Rijn himself refers to the planets:

Xanadu
Dunbar
Tametha
Disaster Landing

None of these planets had been mentioned before but the trader team visits Tametha in "Lodestar," published two years later.

The van Rijn collection, Trader To The Stars, did not include the first van Rijn story, "Margin of Profit" but did include an extract from that story as an introduction to "Territory." For those of us who first read of van Rijn in Trader To The Stars, this gave "Margin of Profit" a curious special status: a van Rijn story that was quoted although we had not yet read it. What had been an explanation of the Polesotechnic League by the omniscient narrator became source material for a later work. The other two stories in Trader To The Stars begin by quoting different passages from a single poem by Shelley. In the case of the first story, "Hiding Place," a single line of the poem is quoted by a fictional commentator, "Le Matelot," who then proceeds to explain the era of the League. In fact, this early part of the Technic History is rich in its introductions to the stories.