"'...their speech appears to have remote affinities with a few that we know, like ancient Anglic.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 709-794 AT p. 715.
"'Sir, the League, the troubles, the Empire, its fall, the Long Night ... every such thing - behind us. In space and time alike.'"
-op. cit., p. 722.
"There had been a fight. The reasons - personal, familial, national, ideological, economic, whatever they were - had dropped into the bottom of the millennia between then and now. (A commentary on the importance of any such reasons.)"
-op. cit., p. 728.
However, we should not judge any work, let alone find it wanting, by the standards of a different kind of work. "Starfog" can be read either as a good individual sf story or as the culminating point of a long future history series. Also, it is rich in scientific information about conditions inside the dangerous but wealth-generating Cloud Universe, a speculative stellar region that goes far beyond the scope of any historical novel.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Also, Poul Anderson argued more than once that the installments in a long "future history" series would themselves add depths, resonances, and nuances to succeeding stories as the series lengthened. That was certainly the case with his Technic series, esp. in the later written stories of the League and Imperial subseries. E.g., I found or noticed plenty of "resonances" to past events in the Technic series in THE REBEL WORLDS. It was precisely that which helps, even now, to prevent the Technic stories from seeming to be tinny or thin to me.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I agree. I was comparing "Starfog" with THE GOLDEN SLAVE - but then arguing that that was an invalid comparison.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Because "Starfog" and THE GOLDEN SLAVE belong to different GENRES, science fiction and historical fiction. The premises underlying successful examples from those genres are necessarily different.
I have read one or two truly terrible examples of historical fiction. One was a novel allegedly about the Eastern Roman Emperor Marcian (r. 450-57). There were so many historically false errors in that book that I soon tossed it. I no longer even remember the author's name!
Thank you, I will take THE GOLDEN SLAVE or ROGUE SWORD any time over badly written, false to known facts trash like the book I mentioned above!
Ad astra! Sean
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