Details And Connections

I have said this often before but it never fails to impress me that Poul Anderson's Technic History is rich in imaginative details and internal interconnections at every level both when its future historical narrative spans vast volumes of space and many millennia and when it is condensed into compact short stories that can be read and enjoyed without any reference to the rest of the series.

Vast Volumes And Many Millennia
There is interplanetary exploration in the opening installment, "The Saturn Game," which introduces the Jerusalem Catholic Church, significant later, and nebular exploration in the concluding forty third installment, "Starfog," which summarizes much of the intervening history in a few sentences. In that concluding story, the rebellion of The Rebel Worlds is long forgotten but some of its remote consequences are encountered. The planet, Vixen, colonized from Earth, has founded a colony, New Vixen. The human race, long confined to a spatial volume four hundred light-years in diameter, has now spread through several spiral arms of the galaxy although not yet operating on the Galactic scale implied by the introduction to "The Star Plunderer."

Compact Short Stories
The History is enriched by the inclusion of several juvenile short stories written for particular markets and not belonging to either of the two major sub-series. For example, the dinosaur-like Wodenite, Adzel, would have entertained us as an alien student on Earth in "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" even if we knew nothing of his later contributions as a member of the trade pioneer crew founded by Nicholas van Rijn and led by David Falkayn.

I wrote here that The Earth Book Of Stormgate ends with two short stories about the colonization of the planet, Avalon, but this description does not do justice to these stories. Each dramatizes a moral without preaching or lecturing.

The first, "Wingless," set during the period when human beings and Ythrians had colonized the Avalonian islands and were beginning to plan the settlement of the Coronan continent, mentions David Falkayn and features both his son, Nicholas, and his grandson, Nathaniel - "Nat" being the juvenile hero of the story;

the second, "Rescue on Avalon," set during the inter-species division of Corona, introduces the Stormgate Choth and features an ancestor of Daniel and Christopher Holm.

You do not need me to tell you that Christopher Holm will marry a Falkayn and write parts of the Earth Book.

"When an Ythrian did, now and then, have business in Chartertown, it was apt to be with [Nat's] grandfather David, or, presently, his father Nicholas: certainly not with a little boy."
-Poul Anderson, "Wingless" IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), pp. 409-434 AT p.411.

Does this sentence imply that David is dead by now?