Sean suggests in the combox to
What To Read that "...the sheer satisfactoriness of the Technic stories was partly due to them being only accidentally connected." I agree. The van Rijn series comprises several very satisfactory stories about a period of mercantile expansion. The Flandry series presents a convincing account of imperial decline. Linking these two series meant that there was now an organic connection as shown, e.g., in
Mirkheim. The expansion had ceased. Society had collapsed. An imperial order had been imposed. That order would not hold forever... Works that had already satisfactorily shown a particular phase of history now additionally showed successive stages of a single, centuries-long process.
By contrast, Asimov's two Robots and Foundation series had simply shown different futures and several extra volumes served no purpose other than to smooth over the inconsistencies, explain why the robots were unknown millennia later, how Earth had become radioactive without a nuclear war etc. Asimov's key characters continually manipulate and control historical processes whereas Anderson's characters more realistically
experience history and
try to cope with it.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I would have said that the life and career of Nicholas van Rijn shows not only simply mercantile expansion, but also EXPLORATION. Eagerness to know or discover what was OUT there in the galaxy was an additional motivation for many of the merchant adventurers.
And after this accidental linking of the van Rijn and Flandry stories, Anderson found he had a tiger by the tail! First, it forced him to work very hard at avoiding contradictions and inconsistencies. Which he did by compiling systematic notes about persons, places, events, planets, fauna, etc. Second, Anderson had to find a THEORY for making sense of these stories. Which he did in the work of John K. Hord. As Anderson wrote in his article "Concerning Future Histories": "...and before long saw that this [Hord's work] was exactly the Leitmotif I had been needing: the interplay of free will and fate, not in any mystical sense but as something concretely describable." And how this interplay free will and fate shaped the rise and fall of Technic Civilization.
Ad astra! Sean
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