Narrative Perspectives

Writers convey most of the necessary information about their fictional worlds through individual characters' perceptions and reflections, not through lectures delivered directly to the reader by an omniscient narrator. Thus, in Poul Anderson's Technic History, many very dissimilar characters reflect, in almost identical phraseology, that this single volume of explored space at one end of a spiral arm of this galaxy is minute in relation to the entire galaxy, let alone to the "galaxies like grains of sand," to borrow a phrase from a Brian W. Aldiss title. Obviously, we accept that all these reflections are factually accurate. Already knowing that galaxies are big and many, we are now being indirectly informed of the extent of interstellar civilization at this stage of the Technic History.

I had thought that Hauksberg's put-down of the Terran Empire (see Terran Imperialism) was just another of these individual reflections meant to be understood as factually accurate. However, Hauksberg's assessment of the Merseian regime is hopelessly unrealistic so why should his assessment of Terra be any more reliable?

I think that it is fair to say that the author approves of Max Abrams' view:

"'Sure, the Empire is sick. But she's ours. She's all we've got. Son, the height of irresponsibility is to spread your love and loyalty so thin that you haven't got enough left for the few beings and the few institutions which rate it from you.'"
-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-192 AT CHAPTER FIVE, p. 49.