The opening two pages of "Wingless" turn a new page in the Technic History:
human beings and Ythrians have settled on different islands in the Hesperian archipelago on Avalon;
the Falkayns live in Chartertown on First Island whereas the chief Ythrian abode is Trauvay/Wingland;
David, then Nicholas, Falkayn speak Planha to their occasional Ythrian dinner guests;
growing up in such a household, Nat Falkayn becomes strongly motivated to learn Planha at school;
(Nat's body holds scarcely a single Terrestrial atom);
in Nat's twelfth Terrestrial/seventeenth Avalonian year, the island settlements have grown large enough for their leaders to consider beginning the colonization of the Coronan continent;
when Nicholas Falkayn, engineer, joins a bi-species research and development team at Trauvay, his family accompanies him there for several moon cycles;
the Weathermaker Choth invites Nat to stay with them for Freedom Week.
We have now come as far away as we might readily imagine from the Babur War and its aftermath. "Wingless" was written for an original juvenile sf anthology in 1973. Instead of contributing a non-series, one-off story, Anderson took the opportunity to add a juvenile perspective to the Technic History. The successor story, written for Boy's Life, also in 1973, describes a single human-Ythrian interaction in the early days of the Coronan colonization whereas the next installment after that, "The Star Plunderer," published in a pulp sf magazine in 1952, describes Terrestrials rebelling against alien slavers. That story fits into the Technic History because its central character founds the Terran Empire, the successor state of the Solar Commonwealth. My point here is that this single fictional history is woven together from different kinds of narratives published in very different places decades apart.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Considering how much Ythrians use their FEATHERS to express nuances and shades of meaning, I get the strong impression that spoken Planha would seem curt, even gruff or rough to many non-Ythrians. But that was because their use of feathers would have supplemented or added to what was SAID. My guess is that contact with humans might have stimulated the further development of Planha, to make it more verbal, at least on Avalon.
Your mention of "The Star Plunderer" makes me regret Anderson did not think to write another story about Manuel Argos in his later years.
Sean
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