First Impressions

The first Dominic Flandry story that I read was "The Game of Glory," in a British reprint Venture Science Fiction magazine with a plain yellow cover - no cover illustration. However, I was already familiar with Poul Anderson so I do not remember which of his works I had read first.

The first work by Robert Heinlein that I read was Starman Jones. However, I read it in a large hardback omnibus volume of juvenile novels by different authors and did not notice any of the authors' names. I was somewhere between seven and eleven.

The first Heinlein work that I knowingly read was Orphans Of The Sky and I was very impressed with its unusual environment. I fondly imagined that this guy, Heinlein, would have written very few works, all short, unusual and equally good.

I had yet to learn that:

Orphans Of The Sky was part of the Future History;

Anderson had modeled a future history, his first, on the Future History;

Anderson's first future history also included a generation ship story;

there was a Dominic Flandry series;

that series was one section of Anderson's second future history;

Trader To The Stars, which I read not too long afterwards, was another part of that second Andersonian future history.

For a review of Clifford Simak's generation ship story, see here.