Receding Beginnings

Bad title but good cover illustration. Not an Ythrian but a Diomedean.

Here, I listed three ways to start reading Poul Anderson's Technic History:

Trader To The Stars introduces interstellar trade;

The Earth Book Of Stormgate begins with interstellar exploration;

The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume I, begins with interplanetary exploration.

(To this extent, these three volumes go backwards through the History.)

The opening page of Trader... is "Le Matelot," which does indeed beautifully introduce the Polesotechnic League period of the History. Let us leave that volume where it is for the time being.

The first story collected in the Earth Book is about the Grand Survey. However, the Introduction to this volume presupposes and refers to the events of Anderson's The People Of The Wind, set centuries after the Grand Survey. This need not concern us if we are reading the volumes of the History in chronological order of fictitious events although, if we are doing this, then the Earth Book does not after all serve to introduce the History. The Earth Book is itself a historical work compiled at a particular stage in the Technic History and collecting narratives from earlier periods.

The Saga, collecting everything in chronological order for the first time, begins with:

an Introduction by its Compiler, Hank Davis;
"The Saturn Game," the story about interplanetary exploration;
the Introduction to the Earth Book, here presented as an introduction just to the first story in the Earth Book;
that first story, "Wings of Victory," about the Grand Survey.

Thus, after Davis' non-fictional Introduction, we read, in this order, information about the periods of:

interplanetary exploration;
the compilation of the Earth Book;
interstellar exploration.

The first and third of these are "beginnings" whereas the second has now become a piece of futurity that will not make complete sense to us until we have read The People Of The Wind at the end of Volume III of the Saga. This is not a complaint. I appreciate the History's narrative complexity, comparable to that of real history. When we reread the seven-volume Saga, as it needs to be reread, we know where everything fits and do not object to reading Hloch's words centuries before his Avalonian society, including the Stormgate Choth, is due to exist.

Although Trader... was originally the opening volume of the Technic History, it contained hints of greater complexity. The second of its three stories was introduced by an extract from "Margin of Profit," which turns out to be an earlier Nicholas van Rijn story. Its third story, "The Master Key," refers to van Rijn as:

"...the single-handed conqueror of Borthu, Diomedes and t'Kela!"
-Poul Anderson, "The Master Key" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 273-327 AT p. 281.

These are three planets. Borthu and t'Kela have appeared earlier in Trader... but Diomedes is in The Man Who Counts which had been published in 1958 as War Of The Wing-Men so that was the earliest published Technic History volume.