See The Hudson Orbits Troas and its linked posts.
Dominic Flandry and Djana enter orbit around the planet Wayland and observe mysterious phenomena, worthy of investigation, on the planetary surface and in the atmosphere. So far, they could be characters in any of thousands of different sf stories or series. It happens that this novel is an installment of Poul Anderson's Technic Civilization future history series so the characters fit into that scenario. Flandry serves the Terran Empire and Djana, unwittingly so far, serves the Merseian Roidhunate but characters inhabiting many different scenarios could have discovered a planet exactly like Wayland. To this extent, such stories are interchangeable. In fact, Larry Niven adapted one of his own Known Space future history stories as a Star Trek animated TV episode. Flandry's and Djana's adventures on Wayland were originally a discrete short story which was then incorporated into this second volume of the Young Flandry Trilogy. We recognize the fictional template but nevertheless continue to enjoy individual stories provided that they are well-written with original ideas. The template occurs several times during the Technic History.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Exactly, it doesn't really matte if a "template" was used many different times by different writers as long as the stories were done well.
Ad astra! Sean
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