Learning About Van Rijn

Nicholas van Rijn appears in ten of the forty three installments of Poul Anderson's main future history series, the History of Technic Civilization. (Dominic Flandry is in thirteen.) Recently, I have reread the first van Rijn installment and part-reread the second in order to start learning about the character of van Rijn. I suspect that, as I continue, I will discover less and less new information because his personality is comprehensively delineated from the beginning. The record will become repetitive. Van Rijn responds to new challenges and grows steadily older but does not mature because he had already done this before we met him.

James Blish once said to me, "Poul likes the flamboyant character but I think that it is about played out," but this must have been very late in the series, not long before Anderson started to write a completely different kind of sf. The Technic History incorporates space opera, speculative planetology and historical theory whereas the Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy and Genesis speculate about human-AI interactions in a universe where life is scarce and faster than light interstellar travel impossible.

I will continue to reread the van Rijn installments for a while longer and see what comes up. For example, it may be that the trademark malapropisms are concentrated more in some works than in others. And other points of interest always emerge along the way.